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               From Self-Defense to Violent Protest
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                          ABSTRACT

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.