Honestly I think we all get this idea well enough, and still there's a point when the legal interpretation of morality does not draw the sorts of distinctions that speak to which punishable actions we favor or should favor, relative to other habitual line stepping. So when we decline to make moral distinctions beyond the letter of the law, we're losing sight of the whole reason that civil disobedience has the power that it sometimes has. If our point of view is one of the enforcer, like a cop, and we're not a cop...that's not having moral gumption, or it's at least disengaged from moral gumption.
Without going full treatise here, I'll just note that one example (Confederate statues of what I assume we could agree are the problematic type vs. NYC painting BLM on the street) should easily produce, in a morally-acute mind, the realization that is going to give the power to civil disobedience when civil disobedience happens. The future awe that will be given to the powerful civil disobedience is preconditioned on the moral goodness, in that disobedient moment, of the people who commit it. And tomorrow's history books will be in awe of the removal of those statues. Will they be in awe of the douche who tarred the BLM mural? Of course not, it won't even be a foot-fart.
And I'm pleased to be able to draw a real distinction on this right now, clarity being one of the few good things to come from the contrasting nature of today's culture-moment. But I'm not pleased to see how many people are failing this moral test.
