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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.
