Read the excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Why does King use this allusion?

King refers to St. Thomas Aquinas’s ideas about eternal and natural law to explain how people can judge whether a human law is just. This allusion frames his argument as a question of ethics and moral principles, rather than simply a disagreement about obeying laws. The best choice is “to encourage a consideration of ethics.”

AI-written and checked against the verified answer.