We should conceive of illegal covert animal rescue as acts of “subrevolution” rather than as civil disobedience. Subrevolutions are revolutions that aim to overthrow some part of the government rather than the entire government. This framework better captures the relevant values than the opposing suggestion that we treat illegal covert animal rescue as civil disobedience. If animals have rights like the right not to be unjustly imprisoned and mistreated, then it does not make sense that an instance of animal rescue (...) will be justifiable only if it meets criteria for justified civil disobedience, e.g., the requirement that the civil disobedient not rescue more animals than would be necessary to communicate their message. Thus, the framework of subrevolution is a more apt way to analyze animal rescue. (shrink)

Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument for civil disobedience to defend some acts of uncivil disobedience. Focusing on uncivil environmental activism—such as ecotage (sabotage with the aim of protecting the environment)—we (...) argue that some acts of uncivil disobedience can be morally superior to their civil counterparts, when and because such acts target people who are responsible for environmental threats. Indeed, insofar as some acts of uncivil disobedience can more accurately target responsible people, they can better satisfy the demands of fairness compared to their civil counterparts. In some circumstances, our argument may require activists to engage in uncivil disobedienceeven whencivil disobedience is available. (shrink)

Civil disobedience is a conscientious, unlawful, and broadly nonviolent form of protest, which most political philosophers and many non-philosophers are inclined to treat as potentially defensible in democratic societies. In recent years, philosophers have become more receptive to long-standing complaints from activists that civil disobedience is an unduly restrictive framework for considering the ethics of dissent. Candice Delmas and Jason Brennan have written important books that illustrate and strengthen this trend, both defending forms of “uncivil” resistance that go beyond the (...) narrow confines of civil disobedience. Their books offer contrasting but complementary philosophical defences of incivility as a tactic of resistance, but it is nonetheless a mistake to conclude that the rich tradition associated with civil disobedience no longer has any relevance for resistance in national, transnational, and global contexts. (shrink)

An impressive body of recent literature posits that traditional notions of civil disobedience prevent us from properly considering potentially legitimate types of ‘uncivil’ political lawbreaking. When might uncivil (covert, legally evasive, morally offensive and potentially violent) lawbreaking prove normatively acceptable? If justifiable, what conditions should its practitioners be reasonably expected to meet? Despite some important insights, defenders of uncivil disobedience rely on a narrow and sometimes misleading view of civil disobedience, as previously practiced and theorized. Notwithstanding legitimate skepticism about Rawlsian (...) notions of civil disobedience, they reproduce its troublesome binary or ‘all-or-nothing’ view of political lawbreaking. Uncivil disobedience’s proponents tend to group a vast array of distinctive types of lawbreaking under one amorphous categorical rubric, impeding the suitably complex, nuanced analysis we need. A superior approach would pay careful attention to uncivil disobedience’s ambivalent historical record, a record suggesting that UD is more likely to reproduce authoritarian populism’s disturbing political logic than counteract it. (shrink)

The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. Non-violence has traditionally been associated with civil disobedience. If ci...

In public discourse, activists are often criticized for directing their acts of political resistance against this or that specific target. Underlying these criticisms appears to be a strongly held, though underarticulated, intuitive moral judgment that some targets are legitimate whereas others are not. Little philosophical attention has been paid to this issue. My primary aim is to address this neglect. I specify a central part of this intuitive judgment – centering on persons and activities – and argue that there is (...) a principled way to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate targets. This specification relies on a novel conception of political resistance, which focuses on its defensive rather than communicative aspect. I then extend the idea of forfeiture to argue that acts of political resistance are correctly directed when they are aimed at those activities of liable persons that cause injustice. My discussion contributes to vindicating our intuitive judgments about several controversial cases of political resistance. (shrink)

It is an orthodoxy of modern political thought that violence is morally incompatible with politics, with the important exception of the permissible violence carried out by the state. The “commonsense argument” for permissible political violence denies this by extending the principles of defensive ethics to the context of state-subject interaction. This article has two aims: First, I critically investigate the commonsense argument and its limits. I argue that the scope of permissions it licenses is significantly more limited than its proponents (...) allow. Second, I develop an alternative (and supplementary) framework for thinking about permissible political violence. I argue that under certain circumstances, subjects may violently protest their treatment, where protest is understood as an expression of rejection of those circumstances. On my view, protest, including violent protest, is permissible when it is the fitting response to those circumstances. This alternative framework accounts for an important class of cases of intuitively permissible political violence, including cases in which such violence does not serve strategic political ends or is even counterproductive towards those ends. (shrink)

The following essay argues that Transnational Civil Disobedience may be justified when it is applied to questions relating to global climate change. Civil Disobedience as a politically motivated form of lawbreaking posits questions regarding political obligation and citizenship and such questions are amplified when applied to the transnational level.Furthermore, this essay focuses on the influential account of Civil Disobedience as it has been formulated by John Rawls. The writer argues that there are potential issues with this formulation when it is (...) applied outside of the greater scope of Rawls’s work. Instead, the essay argues for a formulation of Civil Disobedience that includes a politicizing feature, and to view it as an extra institutional form of political discourse that is detached from notions of state belonging.Finally, it is argued that the All Affected Principle may be used as a necessary condition for justifying acts of Transnational Civil Disobedience. The nature of Global Climate change as an event that affects the human race as a whole, gives rise to the potential for non-citizens to claim a level of political agency in matters that affect them despite lacking formal representation. (shrink)