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?
Answer
A
to appeal to his critics’ sense of duty
B
to describe an historical precedent
C
to commemorate a famous leader
D
to encourage a consideration of ethics
Explanation
King refers to St. Thomas Aquinas’s ideas about eternal and natural law to explain how people can judge whether a law is just. The allusion frames the issue as an ethical question: laws are just when they uphold human dignity, and unjust when they do not. Therefore, he uses it to encourage consideration of ethics.
AI-written and checked against the verified answer.