FUTILE RESISTANCE AS PROTEST

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FUTILE RESISTANCE AS PROTEST
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Edmund Tweedy Flanigan
2023

NOTE: [This paper will appear in MIND. Please cite the published
version.]

ABSTRACT: Acts of futile resistance---harms against an aggressor
which could not reasonably hope to avert the threat the aggressor
poses---give rise to a puzzle: on the one hand, many such acts are
intuitively permissible, yet on the other, these acts fail to meet
the justificatory standards of defensive action. The most widely
accepted solution to this puzzle is that victims in such cases
permissibly defend against a secondary threat to their honor,
dignity, or moral standing. I argue that this solution fails,
because futile resistance is not plausibly regarded as defensive
in the relevant sense. I propose instead that futile resistance is
justified as a form of protest, where protest is analyzed as an
expression of rejection of victims' wrongs. Such protest is just-
ified, I argue, when and because it is the fitting response to the
circumstances of futility.

## Introduction

Here is a classic puzzle in defensive ethics: You (the victim) are
being threatened with wrongful harm by me (the attacker). Because
of my overwhelming strength, you could not hope to avert my
threatened harm with a defensive act of your own. Resistance is
futile. Nevertheless, you could (say) punch me in the gut or
scratch my face as I carry out my attack. You could, that is,
engage in futile resistance. May you?

On the one hand, there is a strong intuition that some acts
of futile resistance are morally permitted. This intuition
is strongest when we think of certain important cases.
Interpersonally, think of rape and other serious assaults.
Collectively, think of invasions of small countries by powerful
aggressors, slave revolts, or ghetto uprisings. In many such cases,
victims could not hope to successfully defend themselves. Yet
surely victims in such cases may harm their attackers, even when
these harms would be futile. On the other hand, according to widely
accepted principles of defensive ethics, these acts fail to meet
the justificatory standards of defensive action. According to
the effectiveness condition (also called the success condition)
on permissible defense, a defensive act must effectively (or
successfully) avert a threatened or ongoing wrongful harm in order
to be permissible. And according to the necessity condition, only
those defensive acts which are necessary to avert a threatened or
ongoing wrongful harm are permissible.[1] But if an act is futile,
it could not be effective, or succeed. And if an act could not
succeed, it could not be necessary. If it could not be necessary,
it must be gratuitous. And how could gratuitous harm be justified?

This is the puzzle of intuitively permissible yet apparently
gratuitous harm---in brief, the puzzle of futile resistance. Since
both sides of the puzzle represent, in their own ways, foundational
commitments, we should hesitate to choose between them. But if we
do not choose, we must find a way to resolve the conflict instead.

Some simple solutions have been proposed. Among these are the ideas
that futile resistance might be wrong but blameless, that it might
be justified as a deterrent, or that it might be justified because
the harm it imposes is deserved. These simple solutions, however,
are widely thought to fail.[2] We might instead revise the
effectiveness and necessity principles so as to make an exception
for futile harms. But this solution will not do either: such
revised principles would be ad hoc; they would do nothing to
explain why futile resistance is not gratuitous. A deeper solution,
it seems, is called for.

The most influential solution offered thus far was first set out by
Daniel Statman (2008), who proposes that victims in these cases
permissibly defend their honor against their attackers. This
solution finds support among a number of leading theorists in the
defensive ethics literature. For instance, it has been endorsed by
Jeff McMahan (2016) (who prefers talk of defense of dignity), and
it has been developed and defended by Helen Frowe (2014, 2016) (who
prefers talk of defense of moral standing). We can refer to this
solution collectively as the status defense view.

While I think this solution points in the right direction, I do not
think it succeeds. After describing the view, I'll offer several
novel objections to it. These objections undermine the appeal of
the view as a solution to the puzzle of futile resistance---and
also thereby make space for alternatives. My own view, which I'll
then set out, is that acts of futile resistance are best understood
as a form of protest, where protest is understood as an expression
of rejection of wrongdoing; and that such protest is justified when
and because it is fitting. Forceful acts of resistance, including
violence, may be fitting when lesser, non-violent acts would not
be. This solution is attractive because it better captures our
considered reflections about what we do when we engage in acts
futile resistance, and because it provides a better account of the
regulative principles of futile resistance.

## Defending Your Honor

I should first describe the status defense view. According to
Statman (2008, 668), when you are threatened by a wrongful
attacker, you 'face two kinds of threat': not only are you
threatened in the straightforward and primary sense that you may
suffer a wrongful harm, you are also threatened in the further
secondary sense that your attacker fails to give you your due as a
member of the moral community. Victims become, in their attackers'
eyes, 'just items to be used, mere objects', even 'literally
debase[d]'---a way of being treated that Statman characterizes as
an attack upon victims' honor. This secondary assault, he suggests,
itself permits a defensive response. That is, even when a victim
could not hope to defend herself against a primary attack, she may
take defensive action against this secondary threat to her honor.
Acts of futile resistance thereby become acts of effective defense
against this other kind of attack. As acts of effective defense,
they meet the effectiveness (or success) condition on defensive
action, and they also thereby avoid the charge of gratuitousness.

This is the core of the view. Beyond this, important nuances arise
depending on whether one takes honor to be the object of defense or
something else, such as dignity or moral standing; whether the
threat to that thing is its loss or some other sense of affront or
undermining; whether the merited response is that thing's defense
or (as Statman and others also sometimes say) its (re)affirmation,
assertion, or vindication; as well as the proper relation of
this response to the principles governing permissible defense:
necessity, liability, and proportionality.

Despite the view's wide acceptance, relatively little effort has
been put into developing these details. Among proponents, Frowe's
work has gone the furthest in this direction. In the criticisms
that follow, therefore, I'll principally challenge Statman's and
Frowe's stated views---as one where they agree, and individually
where they differ. Because the view is underdeveloped, it may be
possible to develop it in ways that meet the various challenges I
describe. However, I doubt that this can be done consistently or in
a way that makes the resulting view attractive. Most importantly,
the challenges I raise point to deeper problems with the basic idea
that acts of futile resistance are acts of defense at all.[3]

## Against Defense

### Defense of what?

The view that acts of futile resistance are acts of successful
defense immediately demands an answer to the question, 'Defense of
what?', since what makes such cases futile is that they do not
successfully defend life, limb, or property, the paradigmatic
objects of defense.[4] The status defense view says that it is one
of those things---honor, dignity, or standing---that is defended.
But since honor, dignity, and standing are things very unlike
life, limb, and property, justification of the extension of the
principles of defensive ethics to those objects is needed.

I should acknowledge that we do often sensibly speak of defending a
person's honor or dignity (if less so moral standing). But that we
can sensibly speak of defense of these things does not show that we
may act to defend them in the relevant sense. Consider: defendants
defend themselves, or are defended, in courts of law; players of
various games and sports defend their goals, championships, pieces,
and so on; indeed, I am presently defending a series of claims. Yet
in none of these cases may one engage in defensive action in the
same way that one may defend oneself against a threat of physical
harm. This is because when we ask whether one may violently defend
some putative object of defense, we are not asking whether
a permissible act of violence could be sensibly described as
a defense of that thing; we are asking, rather, whether the
principles of defensive ethics license such an act, or whether the
object in question is a proper object of those principles. Since
those principles have been developed mainly through consideration
of cases of defense of life and limb, they are presumptively
limited to those objects and those substantially similar to them
(such as property). The more different in kind a putative object of
defense is from those things, the less readily we should apply the
principles of defensive ethics to it. We cannot assume that simply
because the language of defense applies that the principles of
defense do as well. This is particularly true for honor, dignity,
and standing, since these things are very unlike life, limb, and
property.[5]

Now, the familiar problem with Statman's proposal---that honor is
what is defended---is that honor does not seem like the kind
of value (if it is a value) whose protection clearly merits
defense, nor especially violent defense. A common claim, indeed, is
that honor is not a moral value at all.[6] Moreover, many of
the practices that honor and its defense have been central
to---dueling, honor killing, retribution---are widely regarded as
morally unjustifiable. Additionally, since one's honor can be
lost, a perverse consequence is that those whose honor has been
antecedently lost (those who are 'without honor') may not be
permitted to engage in futile resistance, as they will have nothing
to defend; and likewise, acts of futile resistance which undermine
rather than defend one's honor (pathetic resistance, perhaps) will
not be permitted, as they will fail to contribute to this defensive
aim. These are difficult consequences to bear.[7]

For perhaps these reasons, McMahan prefers to talk of defense
of dignity, and Frowe prefers to talk of defense of moral
standing. As Statman anticipates, however, this move carries with
it difficulties of its own (2008, 669). Dignity, and still more so
moral standing, are thought to be things one cannot lose, even if
they can be affronted, undermined, and so on. But how could one
have permission to violently defend something one cannot lose? If
defense is not loss preventive, then it must have other aims:
(re)affirmation, assertion, vindication, and so on. But again, it
is not clear that the principles of defensive ethics pertain to
achievement of such aims. We do not ordinarily think, after all,
that I am permitted to harm others in order to affirm, assert, or
vindicate my beliefs. Why answer differently in the case of status
values?

Similar remarks apply to the question of which acts merit a
defensive response. Even if it is granted that honor, dignity, and
standing are proper objects of defense, we need to know what kinds
of attacks on them may be properly defended against. It is
not clear---and again demands argument---that having one's honor
threatened with affront, undermining, and so on, is the kind of
threat whose prevention is governed by the principles of defensive
ethics.[8]

Proponents of the status defense view owe a compelling argument
that the principles of defensive ethics apply to the objects
and modes of defense they propose characterize acts of futile
resistance. Absent one, these challenges count as a strike against
the view.

### Proportionality and additivity

The concern about whether honor, dignity, and standing are proper
objects of defense is compounded by implausible implications
entailed if we so regard them, particularly with respect to matters
of proportionality in defense.

The proportionality principle in defensive ethics requires that
defensive acts be proportionate in seriousness to that of the harm
being defended against. A defensive act is disproportionate if (and
because) it is excessive with respect to the attack it averts.[9]
On Statman's view, what is being defended is one's honor, so the
proportionality principle straightforwardly requires that acts
which defend one's honor be comparable in seriousness to that of
the threat to one's honor against which they defend. This poses a
problem because, on the one hand, threats to honor (or dignity or
standing) are in many contexts not thought to be serious enough
to license violent harms in response: think of grave insults,
humiliating acts, and so on; yet on the other hand, rape and other
serious assaults intuitively license quite seriously harmful acts
of resistance. The status defense view thus faces a dilemma. Either
such attacks on honor are much more serious than we might have
thought, and so allow for much more serious responses, or else acts
of futile resistance must be much less serious than we intuitively
want, in many cases, to permit.

Statman takes the view that threats to honor are comparatively
minor, and so his concern is with the implication that defense of
one's honor may not justify the quite serious harms that are
intuitively permitted in cases of futile resistance. His solution
to this difficulty is to suggest that while secondary threats to
honor in the cases we are concerned with are not themselves
seriously harmful, they are 'parasitical' upon their quite serious
primary threats, such that the standard for proportionate defense
of honor is actually the seriousness of the primary threat---though
only in cases in which the primary threat cannot be defended
against. That is, whether an act of defense is proportionate to a
threat to honor is determined, in futile resistance cases only, not
by the seriousness of that threat but by the seriousness of the
primary threat it accompanies---even though the threat it responds
to is the threat to honor. This is, as Statman (2008, 677-80)
admits, an 'oddity' that is unmotivated, but he takes the theory to
require such a move in order to match our intuitions about relevant
cases. While this may be a compelling move if we are convinced that
the status defense view is the right one, it is a strike against it
if we are not.

Frowe instead argues that threats to (as she prefers to say) moral
standing may simply be quite serious, so that proportionate defense
against them may too be quite serious. For Frowe (2016, 166),
secondary threats to standing scale in seriousness with the primary
threats with which they are associated, and they add to those
threats. This offers a plausible explanation for why threats to
standing are insufficient to merit violent defense in most ordinary
circumstances, yet why they are sufficient to do so in these
serious cases. It also preserves the proportionality dependency
between defensive acts and the threats to which they respond.

However, Frowe's solution carries difficulties of its own. An
implication of Frowe's solution is that primary and secondary
threats are additive, in the sense that the overall seriousness of
a threat is an additive function of the seriousness of each of the
primary and secondary threats. Thus, what is proportionate in
response to an assault will almost always be more serious than the
(primary) assault itself, since such assaults will typically be
attended by an additional assault upon the victim's standing. For
instance, when I threaten to punch you, or kill you, I (often)
really threaten to punch-plus-dishonor you, or kill-plus-dishonor
you, and the proportionality of your permitted response depends
upon the seriousness of that compound attack. This deserves more
careful consideration, since we normally think that the seriousness
of a permissible defensive act depends upon only the seriousness of
the primary threat to which it responds.[10]

Now, as Frowe points out, if a defender successfully averts an
attack, then she may also be thought to successfully avert the
attendant threat to her standing, since that secondary threat
(plausibly) depends on the presence of the primary threat.[11] In
cases in which a defender cannot avert the primary threat, the
defensive harm she is able to muster will ex hypothesi be less than
what would be proportionate to the primary threat. We might
therefore think that in all actual cases, defensive harms are
subject to a practical maximum, commensurate in seriousness to that
of the primary threat, which renders the additivity challenge moot.

But this is not so; we can imagine cases in which this practical
maximum is exceeded. Suppose an attacker wrongly threatens a victim
with some quite serious assault A, which is accompanied by a
corresponding quite serious threat to the victim's honor h. Imagine
that the compound seriousness of these threats is comparable to the
seriousness of death (S_(A + h) ~ S_(death)), though S_(A) and
S_(h) individually are not. Now imagine that the victim's only
options are to do nothing or to kill her attacker. In such a case,
on Frowe's view, to kill me would be a proportionate and, all else
equal, permitted defense against my mere assault.[12]

Note, importantly, that this result is not attributable merely to
the constrained choice you face. If it were, we should expect a
moral remainder with respect to the gap between the seriousness of
my assault and the seriousness of your defensive act. But this
cannot be, since your defensive act is proportionate to my compound
attack; it is justified, on Frowe's view, by the principles of
defense.

This amounts to a serious revisionism about proportionality
in defense quite generally. Most ordinary assaults are also
accompanied by an attendant attack upon victims' standing---cases
of futile resistance are not importantly different from ordinary
defense cases in this respect. Frowe's view implies that we have
been systematically underestimating the seriousness of what are in
fact compound attacks in all of these ordinary cases.[13] Yet this
does not seem to be so: a proportionate defense against (say) the
threat of a broken arm is thought to be, roughly, equivalent to a
broken arm in return---not a broken arm and then some in proportion
to the attendant threat to one's standing.[14]

Now, this might not be troubling if the seriousness of status
assaults were relatively minor, so that the difference between the
seriousness of such an assault and death were not so significant.
But this too cannot be, since the point of the status defense view
is to justify quite serious harms against attackers. (Frowe
herself suggests that a broken limb, for instance, is plausibly
proportionate to the status assault involved in rape.) Put in terms
of the case presented above, there must be significant space
between S_(A) and S_(A + h).

Frowe's revisionism might ultimately reflect the truth of the
matter. Perhaps we should revise our proportionality judgments when
we consider the many attacks on victims' honor, dignity, or
standing that attend assaults on ordinary defense and futile
resistance cases alike. But without independent grounds for
thinking this is so, we should hesitate to accept this implication
of her view. The status defense view thus leaves Statman and Frowe
stuck on alternative horns of an uncomfortable dilemma---between
accepting Frowe's revisionist conclusion or Statman's ad hoc one.
Put another way, we must choose between taking status threats to be
quite serious, in which case we must accept Frowe's proportionality
revisionism, or we must allow that status threats are not quite so
serious, in which case they will not license harm in cases of
futile resistance. Neither option is a good one.

Much of the status defense view's appeal lies, I believe, in
its being the best solution we have to the puzzle of futile
resistance.[15] This is compelling, because we need a solution
to this puzzle. But if this is so, the view's appeal would
be importantly undermined by the availability of a suitable
alternative. In the remainder of this paper, I shall outline such
an alternative.

## Protest

The alternative view I wish to propose is this: Those engaged in
acts of futile resistance are not engaged in defense at all;
instead, they are protesting their treatment at the hands of their
attackers by expressing rejection of the wrong done to them. Futile
resistance is a way of saying 'no'---which in some circumstances
may be only adequately said with an act: a kick, a scratch, a
punch, and so on.

The idea that acts of futile resistance carry an important
expressive dimension is not a wholly novel one. What is new in my
proposal is the claim that these expressions of protest are
justified and regulated by considerations of fit, and that it is
these acts' fit that explains why the harms they involve are
permissible. Acts of futile resistance are justified, I claim, when
and because they are fitting expressions of rejection of a
threatened wrong.

Before discussing the features of the protest view (as I'll
call it), however, it is worth pausing to motivate it as
an independently attractive solution to the puzzle of futile
resistance.

### Expression

When victims resist superior attackers, what are they doing?
Are they defending themselves, or are they engaging in futile
resistance? No doubt in many real-life cases, the answer is not
clear. What begins as an act of attempted defense may become an act
of futile resistance, for it may only later become clear that one
is hopelessly outmatched. Even when this fact seems clear from the
start, one may feel nonetheless that one ought to try, because one
might just succeed. David, after all, slew Goliath. Moreover, some
acts may be both defensive and futile: one may successfully defend
against a particular act (this assault) while futilely resisting a
wider condition of which that act is partly constituent (slavery).

Yet while real-life resistance may rarely be clearly futile or
defensive, we can imagine clear cases of futile resistance in the
abstract. We can also imagine not knowing whether one's resistance
will be successful or futile while committing oneself to it
anyway---not because one might just succeed, but assuming one will
not. As an instance of the latter kind, consider Frederick
Douglass's famous recollection of his confrontation with the 'slave
breaker' Covey. Douglass reports that

... the cowardly tyrant asked if I 'meant to persist in my
resistance'. I told him 'I did mean to resist, come what might';
that I had been by him treated like a brute, during the last six
months; and that I should stand it no longer. (Douglass 1855,
244, emphasis in the original)

Implied in Covey's question is the threat of reprisal should
Douglass persist in his resistance, as well as the certitude that,
eventually, Covey would win---Douglass was after all a slave in an
entrenched and brutal system of chattel slavery. Nevertheless,
Douglass fought back. As a matter of fact, Covey's threat was
empty, and Douglass successfully defended himself: Covey failed to
beat Douglass on this occasion, and he never harmed him again. But
this might not have been the case, as Douglass acknowledges. Covey
might have punished, persecuted, or even killed him. Yet Douglass
planned to resist 'come what might'---in defense or futility---and
his justification for this was that he had been gravely wronged and
that he would permit such wrongs 'no longer'.

Douglass's declaration to Covey is, beneath all else, a refusal. By
promising to fight back, and then by doing so, Douglass said 'no'
to Covey's treatment of him. This expression of rejection, in words
and deed, was called for regardless of the success of Douglass's
resistance to Covey.

In moments of circumspection, Statman and Frowe make gestural
remarks that approach this view. Both, that is, characterize acts
of futile resistance as expressive acts which express refusal to an
attacker. Here is Statman:

Concrete acts of resistance are needed in order to communicate to
the aggressor, to ourselves, and to an actual or potential
audience that we are not just passive objects to be trodden upon.
(Statman 2008, 669)

And Frowe:

When we think about what it is that such [futile] harms try to
convey---a refusal to be passive, a refusal to be complicit,
a means of asserting oneself as a person worthy of better
treatment---it seems that ... to manifest such an attitude ... is
what constitutes the defense of one's moral standing. (Frowe
2016, 167)

Both recognize, that is, the important expressive function of
futile resistance, and both draw a connection between that and the
purpose they take it to serve: insistence upon one's honor,
dignity, or standing.[16]

Crucially, however, these considerations bear no philosophical
weight in the accounts Frowe and Statman offer about what
justifies acts of futile resistance. For them, it is the right to
self-defense, rather than the importance of any expression of one's
humanity, that permits harms against one's attacker.[17]

Although it has gone unremarked upon in the defensive ethics
literature, this idea echoes a long tradition of writing about
protest as a form of resistance to the overwhelming edifice of
racial oppression, particularly under circumstances in which it
cannot be defeated. Here are some signal examples: W. E. B Du Bois
(1904, 523) writes that 'whenever we submit to humiliation and
oppression it is because of superior brute force; and even when
bending to the inevitable we bend with unabated protest'. Bernard
Boxill (1976, 62) writes that 'people do protest their wrongs, even
when it is clear that this will bring no respite and, instead,
cause them further injury' and that such protest is not only
justifiable but required. For Thomas Hill (1979, 97), 'what makes
symbolic protest commendable'---that is, protest when there is 'no
reasonable hope' of averting an injustice, or indeed of bringing
about any beneficial consequences---'is not intended results but
the underlying values expressed'. And Tommie Shelby (2018, 272-73)
writes that 'symbolic impure dissent can be a valuable public act
of protest ... But its value is easily missed if we fail
to recognize that the political morality of dissent includes
noninstrumental elements that are purely expressive'.

What unites these remarks is the idea that protest is the
appropriate response to wrongs that can be neither accepted nor
defeated. We should take these remarks seriously when we think
about the puzzle of futile resistance. My suggestion is that when
people engage in futile resistance, they protest their wrongs. To
protest one's wrongs is to express rejection of one's treatment at
the hands of another---to say 'no', that one should 'stand it no
longer'. This is not defense. It is, rather, what one does when
defense seems sure to fail.

### Fitting expression

If an expressive act of protest is not justified as a form of
defense, then by what is it justified? Other discussions of this
idea have adopted the strategy of identifying a value that symbolic
protest realizes, then arguing that the importance of that value,
or the duty to realize it, is what justifies any harm involved.[18]
These strategies, however, are vulnerable to counter-productivity
objections as well as to the concern that they could not capture
enough instances of intuitively permissible futile resistance.

By contrast, I do not claim that protest is justified in virtue
of the value it realizes or a duty it satisfies. Instead, I
propose that protest, understood as an expression of rejection,
is justified when and because it is the fitting response to
circumstances of futility. In other words, it is what is correct,
appropriate, proper, apt, and called for when facing a threat of
wrongdoing one cannot overcome.

I take the fitting to be a basic normative category[19]---one which
is, in virtue of this fact, not amenable to deeper explanation or
analysis. However, like other basic pieces of normative machinery,
it can be helpfully described in other terms. Much as the reason
relation is commonly described, though not analyzed, as the
relation of counting in favor between a fact and an action, we can
describe the fit relation as one of matching or suiting between two
objects. More precisely, fit (of the variety that is of interest
here) is the relation that stands between an object and a response
to that object when, as Howard (2018; following Brandt 1946 and
others) puts it, 'the object merits---or is worthy of---that
response'. As I use the term, whenever we say that something is the
'fitting' response, we can equivalently say that it is 'correct',
'appropriate', and other synonyms. For example, gratitude is the
correct response to kindness, and blame is the appropriate response
to what is blameworthy.

Fitting responses are, normatively speaking, called for or
demanded, and so yield a pro tanto reason in favor of so
responding. But they also appear to bear a distinctive normative
status. This status is distinctive at least inasmuch as it seems to
be stronger than mere permission (one is not merely permitted to
respond to a kindness with gratitude) but also clearly weaker than
requirement, duty, or obligation (one is not required to blame the
blameworthy). The fitting, in other words, is not merely a form of
value, nor is it a form of duty.[20]

The question of what range of things can be fitting
responses---(emotions? attitudes? acts?)---has been given many
answers, and it remains controversial how fitting responses relate
to moral judgment and to reasons for action.[21] These are deep
waters which, however, can be largely avoided here. For in many
contexts, particularly within the domain of interpersonal morality,
expression is itself understood to be directly subject to standards
of appropriateness, or fit.[22] In response to a kindness, for
example, not merely the attitude of gratitude but its expression is
what is called for. It is appropriate to give thanks, usually by
saying 'thank you'. To put the point another way, even if one feels
grateful---that is, possesses the emotion gratitude---to fail to
express one's thanks is a way of failing to meet the normative
standard to which gratitude is subject. This is the kind of claim I
make when I claim that protest is the fitting response to
the circumstances of futility. Protest is expressive. Such an
expression is itself called for, I believe, over and above any
further claims we might make about the fitting attitudes or
emotions that may underly or be reflected in it.

Importantly, such expression is not limited to expression in the
form of speech. Just as we can do things with words, we can say
things with acts. Indeed, engaging in expressive acts can be an
important way of adequately expressing oneself. In response to some
deep acts of kindness, for example, acts of thanks may be needed in
order to adequately express the depth of one's gratitude---a
thoughtful gift or a deep bow, say---because merely saying 'thank
you' may not be enough. In this way, certain expressive acts may be
called for as a matter of adequacy, which is to say as a dimension
of fit.

My claim is that justified acts of futile resistance are like this.
They are expressive acts that are fitting and adequate to the
circumstances they respond to; and because they are fitting, they
are, normatively speaking, called for. When Douglass stands up
to Covey's tyranny, saying---with his words but also with his
fists---that he has been 'by him treated like a brute' and that he
will 'stand it no longer', he correctly responds to Covey's
treatment of him. This response is what is adequate to and called
for in the circumstances. This is, I claim, what justifies
Douglass's decision to fight back, 'come what might'.

This idea is, I think, plausible enough on its own. In what remains
here, however, I shall attempt to substantiate it, first by
describing and discussing some of the necessary conditions for
fitting protest, then by making some remarks about what may make
acts of futile resistance fitting in these cases.

### Necessary conditions

To see what is distinctive about the protest view, it will help to
compare it with the status defense view.

As I have said, my claim is that permissible acts of futile
resistance, understood as expressive acts of protest, are justified
when and because they are fitting. By contrast, the principles
of defensive ethics require that defensive acts be necessary,
proportionate, and correctly directed (i.e. meeting constraints of
liability). While these standards are different, there is less
difference here than these formulations might initially suggest.

For one thing, an act of protest can likewise be fitting only if it
is proportionate to what is protested.[23] It would not fit, for
example, to protest some social slight with disproportionate
reprisal. For another, an act of protest can be fitting only if it
is correctly directed. It would not fit to protest one's wrongs
against one who is not liable for them.[24] In this way, the
protest view includes corresponding principles of proportionality
and liability as necessary conditions for fit.

Indeed, I take expressive acts of protest to be fitting only when
they are directed by the person who protests at the person, or
collective, who is responsible for what is protested against.
Shouting into the void is not fitting protest, even if it may be
other things (such as cathartic or poetic).[25] Protesting against
wrongs committed by S (the police) by directing one's protest at P
(one's fellow citizens) is appropriate only when the latter bear
some liability for the wrongs committed by the former.[26]

The matter of necessity is more complex. Recall that according
to the necessity condition on defensive action, only those
acts which are necessary to avert a threatened or ongoing
wrongful harm---those which represent the least harmful effective
means---are permissible. There are, as I have suggested previously,
really two issues of independent concern here. The first has to do
with the successful avoidance or mitigation of a wrongful threat or
attack. This is simply about the achievement of the goal towards
which defensive action is basically oriented. An act which cannot
achieve S cannot be necessary to achieve S. The second issue has to
do with ensuring that the least harmful means of defense is chosen
from among available effective alternatives; in other words, it has
to do with the avoidance of gratuitous harm. If two acts could
achieve S, then necessity licenses only the act which is least
harmful.

Notice that if this same standard were applied directly to acts of
protest, very little would be permitted. This is because very
little is needed to successfully express rejection of a wrong. To
utter 'no', for instance, will often suffice. Even raising one's
voice, and a fortiori most expressive acts, would therefore be
gratuitous.

But this train of thought misunderstands necessity as applied to
protest, because it misunderstands the basic aim of expression.
The basic aim of fitting expression is not the achievement of
successful expression. Rather, it is the achievement of adequate
expression. As Anderson writes,

The basic form of an expressive norm is: act so as to adequately
express attitude B toward Z. (Anderson 1995, 33)

When we say that it is fitting to express one's gratitude, not just
any words of thanks will do; we mean that adequate thanks are
demanded. Likewise, when we say that an apology is called for, we
mean that an adequate expression of regret is called for. In this
way, for an act of protest to be fitting, more than what is
strictly necessary to express rejection will often be demanded. An
act of protest can be fitting only if it adequately expresses
rejection of the wrong in question.

This is because adequacy is in many contexts a central dimension
of fit. Here are some further examples of what I have in
mind. Sympathetic members of dominant groups are often said to
inadequately protest the treatment of subjugated groups. The meek
are sometimes said to fail to adequately protest their own
downtroddenness. And again, in other contexts, we may fail to
adequately express our thanks, our regret, our love, and many other
things besides. In all of these cases, the charge of a failure of
adequacy is that one has not done enough to express oneself, or
otherwise not done so properly, where 'enough' and 'properly' can
be analyzed here only in terms of fit between the expression and
its object (between an act of protest and the thing protested).

In this way, the requirement of adequacy places a lower bound
on fitting action, whereas necessity places an upper bound on
defensive action. Adequacy too, then, is a necessary condition on
fittingness.

Now, if adequacy sets a lower bound on fitting acts of protest,
are acts of protest which do less than this (those which are
inadequate) impermissible? This may seem perverse in many of the
cases that motivate the puzzle of futile resistance. Surely rape
victims are not required to protest their wrongs by engaging
in futile resistance, and surely the politically oppressed are
permitted to opt for the restrained but strategically optimal
course.

While the protest view does imply that in such circumstances,
adequate protest is called for, this falls short of the further
implication that milder forms of protest are impermissible.

For one thing, this is because (as mentioned already) there is not
a straightforward relationship between the deontic categories of
the permitted and the required and the normative category of the
fitting. Fitting acts are more than merely permitted, but they are
less than required. (It is called for, and of course permitted, but
not required that one praise the praiseworthy.)

For another thing, victims in the circumstances of futility may
have a prerogative to do less than would adequately protest their
wrongs. It is often only victims themselves (if anyone) who would
be wronged by such a failure, so they may plausibly waive any
complaint against themselves for not doing more.[27] This answer
also squares with the intuition that when protesting on another's
behalf, one really can fail to do enough, since the duty in such
cases is other-directed.

Furthermore, if the adequacy condition does partly ground a duty
to resist, it is surely one that interacts with and may be
overridden by other moral and prudential considerations. Since
futile resistance often carries with it risk of further wrongs,
victims may permissibly choose not to protest their wrongs in order
to avoid compounding them.

A related concern is that even if it is admitted that violent
protest is a fitting response to wrongs one cannot overcome, it
mightn't be the only fitting response. King's Selma-to-Montgomery
marches, for example, like Gandhi's earlier Salt March, were
powerful non-violent expressions of protest against conditions of
severe oppression. To use violence in such circumstances, according
to this objection, remains gratuitous.[28]

It is worth emphasizing that acts of non-violent resistance are
often extremely costly to those who participate in them, as the
histories of Indian independence and the American civil rights
movement demonstrate. Many were severely beaten or died in service
of these ends (see Miller 1937; Eckelmann 2008). But the costs are
not only physical. As Gandhi writes, non-violence is 'an intensely
active, ... inward force' that is 'rooted in internal strength' and
'must be consciously exercised' (Gandhi 1942, Volume I:68); 'it
means the pitting of one's whole soul against the will of the
tyrant' (Gandhi [1920] 1999, 135).[29] In other words, the internal
strength involved in non-violent protest is another kind of
substantial cost, over and above the costs imposed by the attacker.
In this way, non-violence is often more costly or difficult than
violent resistance to the same wrong. Victims are not morally
required to bear these costs in order to prevent harm to their
attackers.

In some cases, however, non-violent resistance might be no more or
less costly to victims than violent resistance, yet it may be
thought to do just as well as an apt expression of protest. In such
cases, why is violence not gratuitous?

The answer, I believe, involves complex issues concerning the
fittingness of non-violent protest which I can only partly enter
into here. My suggestion, in brief, is that non-violence is
actually not a fitting response in such cases. As I explain in
detail in the next section, I take the fittingness of protest to be
grounded in the way that it correctly responds to the moral
attitudes conveyed by a wrongdoer, along lines first suggested by
Strawson (1962). The justification of violent resistance lies,
I claim, in its being the merited reaction in such cases.
Non-violent resistance, by contrast, is most often characterized as
a way of directing a gracious attitude of love towards one's
attacker[30]---an attitude that, strictly speaking, they do not
merit. Indeed, part of the power of non-violence may be in the
way that it 'turns the other cheek' rather than does what is
fitting.[31] If this is right, then the availability of a gracious
response, like the availability of self-sacrificing responses, does
not render the fitting resort to violent resistance gratuitous.[32]

To say that an act of protest is fitting is, on my view, to say
that it is proportionate, correctly directed, and adequate to the
wrong protested. This explains why victims engaged in futile
resistance may do more than say 'no' or 'stop' to their aggressors.
Sometimes, when a wrong is severe enough, words may not be enough,
and only an act---and a forceful one at that---will do to
adequately protest it. This also helps explain why some feel they
must resist even when doing so may make them worse off. On the
protest view we can also claim, with Statman and Frowe as with
Boxill and Hill, that by engaging in futile resistance victims
affirm their dignity, while not also claiming that these are acts
which defend one's dignity in Statman's and Frowe's sense. This is
because, as Boxill (1976, 61) writes, 'when a person protests his
wrongs, he expresses a righteous and self-respecting concern for
himself'. One can, that is, affirm one's dignity by protesting
one's wrongs---without thereby engaging in self-defense.

### Fit-making

Since my claim is that justified acts of futile resistance are
fitting acts of protest, a further question is what makes these
acts fitting. I'll explore one answer to this question now.

The question of what makes the fitting fit turns not only on this
question's most general form (a question about the metaphysics of
fit) but also substantially on questions about the nature of
fit's objects. Just as we can learn about what makes thanks or
blame fitting by attending to the nature of gratitude and moral
appraisal, we can attend to basic features of the interaction
between attacker and victim in cases of futile resistance in order
to discover what may make acts of futile resistance fitting in
those cases.

This strategy is supported by the observation that fit and the idea
of fitting response appear closely linked to a central aspect of
interpersonal morality. To see what I have in mind in saying this,
it will help to consider the view presented in Strawson's 'Freedom
and Resentment' (1962).

Strawson's central notion there is, famously, that of a 'reactive
attitude', an attitude of moral appraisal---'resentment, gratitude,
forgiveness' and so on (194)---that we take towards someone in
response to the attitudes their behavior manifests towards us. They
are reactions which we judge by whether they are appropriate or
inappropriate to the circumstances---or in other words by standards
of fit.[33] Strawson claims, for example, that resentment is the
appropriate response to 'contempt, indifference, or malevolence',
gratitude the appropriate response to 'goodwill, affection, or
esteem', and forgiveness the appropriate response to contrition
(191).

These attitudes are also united in that they 'belong to involvement
or participation with others in interpersonal human relationships'
(194) and centrally 'involve, or express, a certain sort of demand
for interpersonal regard' (201). It is our participation in
interpersonal relationships that makes the normative standard of
appropriateness and inappropriateness apply. This is, if you like,
Strawson's claim about what makes the reactive attitudes fitting.

The counterpart to the 'participant attitude' is what Strawson
calls the 'objective attitude,' the attitude we take towards
towards someone or something that is not morally appraisable.
Strawson primarily discusses occasions on which we might rightly
take the objective attitude towards someone: when they are, due to
age or mental incapacity, not 'fully responsible agents' (193). But
if there are occasions on which one may rightly regard another with
the objective attitude, there must also be occasions on which one
might wrongly doing so.

The cases of futile resistance we have been discussing are
plausibly of this kind. That is, they may be particularly serious
cases of wrongly taking the objective attitude towards someone who,
on the contrary, merits interpersonal regard. The harms involved in
rape, slavery, and other severe wrongs are bad enough. But to
act in such cases so as to leave one's victim with only one
prudentially rational option---submit---all while ignoring the
clear and urgent claims she has that you treat her differently, is
to commit an additional, very deep wrong. It is to refuse, through
one's actions, to regard her as a member of the moral community
owed interpersonal regard.

This expressed attitude has a fitting response, as perhaps all
directed attitudes do. It is, I believe, rejection of the
attacker's refusal of regard. When someone says (including through
their acts), 'you are not owed interpersonal regard' or 'you are
not a co-member of the moral community', the fitting response is to
insist on the truth that you are. There may, in various cases, be
various ways of expressing this truth.[34] As I have argued,
however, in the most severe cases, to adequately reject one's
subjection to the circumstances of futility may require forceful
expression. Indeed, one's words may simply be inadequate, and an
expressive act, including perhaps a violent act, may be demanded
instead.

These reflections offer a further clue about the difference between
the status defense view and the protest view that is worth
highlighting.

Strawson includes among the class of circumstances in which the
objective attitude is rightly adopted towards another those in
which someone is to be taken 'precautionary account of' (194), or
in which 'reasons of policy or self-protection' (197) centrally
bear. The suggestion, I take it, is that we might understand cases
of self-defense as cases in which a victim permissibly adopts the
objective attitude towards an attacker. I think this suggestion is
correct; if it is, I also think it points to something important
about what distinguishes defense from protest.

To adopt the objective attitude towards people is, Strawson says,
to treat them as something 'to be managed or ... avoided' (194) or
'as creatures to be handled' (197). Importantly, this is compatible
with their being seen as objects of moral concern and indeed as
holders of rights, as the archetypal examples of children and the
mentally infirm demonstrate. To engage with someone from the
standpoint of this attitude is, however, to engage with them
instrumentally: they become, through our acts, instruments of 'our
own interest, or our side's, or society's---or even theirs'
(ibid.).

Put differently,

If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though
you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you
may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with
him. (195)

In this way, for example, throwing a grenade to forestall an
attacker is not fundamentally different from throwing a grenade to
derail a runaway railcar. Though there are moral constraints
governing injury to humans that do not apply to damage to
railcars, the attitude---objective versus participant---adopted by
the defender towards the attacker and the railcar is the same:
their (or its) destruction is not a form of engagement, it is a
means to the prevention of harm.

By contrast, protest, like expressions of blame and gratitude, is a
way of interpersonally engaging---talking, quarreling---with the
person to whom the protest is directed, a way of making an
interpersonal moral claim. This contrast is telling, even granting
proponents of the status defense view their position. If harming
someone is a way to defend one's dignity or standing, then these
harms should be instruments to that end, and their ability to serve
this end should be what justifies them. But if this is so, then it
cannot be claimed, as Statman claims, that acts of resistance 'are
needed in order to communicate to the aggressor ... that we are not
just passive objects to be trodden upon'; nor, as Frowe claims,
that to 'convey' refusal and dignity through futile harms 'is what
constitutes the defense of one's moral standing'. For expressing
these things through one's acts of resistance is a way of
expressing reactive attitudes towards one's attacker, or in other
words of taking up the participant attitude toward them. This is at
odds with the attitude we take towards attackers as means to
defensive ends. If defense involves taking the objective attitude
towards one's attacker, then these forms of expression cannot be
more than incidentally related to the defensive justification of
acts of resistance.[35]

Statman and Frowe might reply that engaging interpersonally with
one's attacker by communicating one's dignity to them is how one
defends one's honor, or standing, and that the distinction between
the objective and reactive attitudes does not apply here. If
fitting expression is defense, however, and defense is affirming
one's dignity, then one wonders whether defense as such is doing
any real justificatory work at all, or why we should appeal to it.
We can instead appeal to the appropriateness of this kind of
expression directly.

## Conclusion

I have argued that victims engaged in acts of futile resistance are
engaged in a form of protest, including when their protest takes
the form of violent acts. I have also argued that such protest is
justified when (and because) it is the fitting response to the
circumstances of futility and the wrongs involved therein. If I am
right, then the solution to the puzzle of futile resistance lies
not in the ethics of defense but in the ethics of protest.

I have argued this point narrowly---by claiming that the puzzle of
futile resistance demands a solution, that extant solutions are
inadequate, and that the protest view succeeds where others
fail---but it points the way toward larger conclusions. The view
suggests that protest generally, including therefore political
protest, is regulated by considerations of fit. When we judge acts
of protest, then, it may often be wrong to focus on the ends
achieved (or achievable). It may also be wrong to think, as many
do, that violence is always to be condemned. Rather, it may be the
only response adequate to the circumstances.[36]

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[1] To be 'necessary' in this context is to be (roughly) the
least harmful effective means of defense rather than, as it
might otherwise seem, causally necessary. See Oberman (2020) and
Lazar (2012) on defensive necessity generally. Necessity and
effectiveness are usually taken to apply prospectively: an agent's
defensive act is justified if she reasonably believes the act to be
necessary and effective (see Uniacke 2014). My discussion in
what follows is agnostic between so-called 'internalism' and
'externalism' about liability and necessity (see McMahan 2016;
Firth and Quong 2012; Frowe 2014, ch. 4; Oberman 2020, sec. 7).

[2] Statman (2008), 666-667; Frowe (2016), 159-161; though see
Ferzan (2018) for a partial defense of a desert-based view.
Overland (2011) proposes a forfeiture-based account of the
permissibility of futile resistance. I'll not rehearse objections
to forfeiture views here except to note that the claim 'S lacks a
right against my PHI-ing' is not the same as the claim that my
PHI-ing is morally justified. My view is that imposing harm
requires moral justification even when someone lacks a right
against suffering it, and that not just any 'minor subjective
benefit' (247) enjoyed by the one imposing the harm will do. See
Benbaji and Statman (2021) for detailed criticism of Overland's
view. See also Oberman (2020, 456; citing Draper 2015, 67) and
Quong (2020, 6; citing Fabre 2009), for a similar point about
justification. See Renzo (2017) on forfeiture views generally.

[3] Additional sustained challenges for the status defense view,
and for Frowe in particular, are raised by Bowen (2016) and Ferzan
(2018). Bowen pursues two principal lines of objection: (1) that
Frowe cannot avoid licensing ex-post ('deferred') harms in defense
of a victim's status, and (2) that her view has (to his mind; I
am less sure) intuitively unacceptable implications regarding
permitted counter-defense. Ferzan likewise believes Frowe has not
successfully ruled out deferred harming, and argues that necessary
refinements to Frowe's view---regarding the mechanics and moral
nature of status attacks---point to the conclusion that acts of
futile resistance are actually expressive rather than defensive---a
point Bowen also notes, and a point with which I of course agree.
The two objections I raise below for Statman and Frowe are distinct
from those raised by Bowen and Ferzan, and my elaboration of a view
that takes expression to be central to the justification of acts of
futile resistance goes substantially beyond the suggestions offered
by those authors.

[4] Discussions of the ethics of defense often explicitly limit
their objects to these things. See Coons and Weber (2016) and the
authors in that collection.

[5] All this is pace Steinhoff (2015), who appeals to ordinary
language to justify a broad notion of defense as anything amounting
to resistance. He does not, however, consider counterexamples such
as those mentioned here.

[6] Appiah (2010) says that honor is not 'part of morality' but is
'allied' with it. Kumar and Campbell (2016) analyze it as a 'moral
attitude' having to do with respect that can 'hinder or aid moral
progress'. Krause (2002) treats it as a political concept that sits
uneasily astride liberal values and likewise can be used in service
of moral or non-moral ends.

[7] Oberman (2020) raises an aligned concern for Statman's view: In
many more cases than Statman allows, 'there is no reason to assume
that a victim's honor needs defense' (451) since anyone with an
'ordinary sense of self' can be 'sufficiently secure in her own
standing that [an] Attacker cannot threaten it' (n. 16).

[8] Bowen (2016, 90-91) makes a different burden-shifting argument
against the status defense view. Ferzan (2018, 691-92) also wonders
whether 'attacks on honor' are 'just culpability by another name'
and offers some considerations in favor of that conclusion.

[9] For more on proportionality, see Uniacke (2011). Note that the
proportionality principle is concerned only with excessiveness
which arises in virtue of the comparison between the seriousness of
the defensive act and the attack it averts. A defensive act can
also be excessive in virtue of being unnecessary to the achievement
of a defensive end. This is of course the concern of the necessity
principle.

[10] Must Frowe take these threats to be additive? After all, they
threaten quite different objects. But ordinary (physical) threats
do combine, and I can see no reason for denying that these threats,
as proper objects of defensive action, combine as well. The
challenge may be posed as a dilemma: either these threats combine,
in which case Frowe faces the proportionality objection I raise in
this section, or the threats do not combine in virtue of their
different objects, in which case the need for Frowe to explain why
these objects are both proper objects of defensive action is even
more acute. I thank a referee for pressing this point.

[11] Frowe (2016, 167) writes, 'If ... the moral standing-based
justification for harming supervenes upon the existence of the
primary threat, this entails that once the primary, physical threat
is over, the threat to moral standing (notice: not the harm to
moral standing) is also over'. Of course, this dependency claim
might be doubted with respect to all relevant cases, for it seems
plausible that one's honor, dignity, or moral standing could
continue to be threatened even when a corresponding primary threat
fails or is defeated. (See Bowen 2016, 86-87, for criticism of
Frowe's supervenience argument in this vein; and see Ferzan 2018,
692-93, for a similar objection.) I shall argue that Frowe's view
faces serious objections whether or not we grant this dependency
claim.

[12] Intuitions about proportionality vary widely, and assigning
precise proportionality weights to imagined cases can sometimes
seem ridiculous. To help see the force of the objection, however,
imagine the following case:

An attacker, motivated by feelings of hatred, violently beats a
helpless victim---a physical attack commensurate in seriousness
to injury requiring long-term use of a wheelchair. The manner of
this attack also represents an attack on the victim's status
that is very serious---40% as bad as the physical assault
itself---commensurate in seriousness to significant long-term
pain.

Let's stipulate that neither attack alone is proportionate to
death, but that taken together they are. Frowe is committed
to the view that while neither attack alone is sufficient to
license deadly defense, together they are---such that were killing
possible, it would be permitted. It is difficult to understand
this commitment other than as a serious revision to ordinary
proportionality judgments.

[13] Alternatively, Frowe might argue that it is not our overall
judgments about proportionate force that must be revised but our
view of those judgments' components. We have not noticed, she might
say, that in many ordinary cases, proportionality depends on a
compound of what would be proportionate in response to both primary
and secondary (status) threats. But if this were so, we should
notice clear intuitive differences in what would be a proportionate
response to otherwise similar attacks with differing status
components---being beaten by someone who rains down slurs and yells
'you are a cockroach!' versus someone who beats you simply in
order to take your money, for example. But such differences are
not intuitively apparent (to me, anyway). Moreover, rather than
being a significant revision to proportionality judgments, this
would instead be a significant discovery about the nature of
proportionality. This too would demand greater justification than
Frowe provides. My thanks to a referee for encouraging me to
clarify this point.

[14] To be clear, few think that proportionality requires anything
like simple equivalence between the seriousness of a defensive harm
and the attack it responds to, and that is not my suggestion here.
However, the thought that it requires, in light of various relevant
deontic considerations, a rough commensurability between the two is
common. (See e.g. Rodin (2011, 80); McMahan (2017, 131).)

Others hold the view that a proportionate defense may be much more
serious than the threat it responds to. For instance, Quong
suggests at one point that a defensive harm four times as serious
as the threat it averts could be proportionate. His view is that
proportionality is determined by the 'stringency' of the right a
threat would violate, i.e. what it would take to justify imposing
equivalent harm on an innocent bystander (Quong 2020, 109).
However, if status threats themselves violate defensible rights,
then a version of the objection I have made here will still arise.
(Frowe's own view of what proportionality substantively permits is
far less permissive than Quong's (see Frowe 2016, 166-67).)

[15] Frowe (2016, 162) says as much: 'The moral standing-based
justification for harming is appealing because it captures our
sense that victims need not be passive in the face of attacks that
they cannot avert'.

[16] Ferzan (2018, 693-94), reflecting on Frowe, makes the
suggestion explicit: 'perhaps defending honor is more expressive
than defensive ... 'fighting back' has intrinsic expressive value'.
Similarly, Bowen (2016, 90), reflecting on Statman, writes that 'I
think ... there is expressive value realised when victims defend
themselves, even when they know that this defence is not going to
avert the physical threat they face'. Neither, however, develops
the proposal substantially beyond this suggestion. (Nor, in my
view, do we need to appeal to the murky idea of intrinsic
expressive value.)

[17] Although it may seem tempting, the two thoughts cannot be
simply combined into the view that expression of status values is
defense and that therefore the right to self-defense covers such
expression. If defense of one's status just is ('constitutes')
manifestation of an attitude of refusal, then no 'concrete acts of
resistance' would be necessary to accomplish this defense: merely
saying 'no' would be enough. Moreover, if we appeal to the
morality of expression in order to explain why expressive acts are
permitted, we gain nothing by adding that these acts 'constitute[]
the defense of one's moral standing'; we should instead appeal
directly to the norms governing expression, as I suggest we do. My
thanks to a referee for encouraging me to address this point.

[18] For instance, Boxill argues that protest serves evidentiary
value, to oneself, of one's own self-respect, and Hill argues that
protesting injustice satisfies a duty to dissociate from evil.

[19] See Berker (2022); Howard (2019). It is worth emphasizing,
however, that my argument here does not depend on any particular
view about the relationship between the category of the fitting and
other basic normative categories or concepts.

[20] For more on this topic, see again Berker (2022, especially
sec. 4).

[21] D'Arms and Jacobson (2000) and Shoemaker (2017) make important
recent contributions regarding this question. On the question of
whether acts can be directly fitting, Howard (2018, n. 2) offers
some brief remarks and historical references.

[22] Elizabeth Anderson is an important standard-bearer of the
tradition that recognizes fit applies directly to expression, even
if this is taken to be ultimately in virtue of the way expression
outwardly manifests fitting attitudes (see Anderson 1995; Anderson
and Pildes 2000, 1506-8).

[23] That proportionality is a necessary condition for fit is also
noted by (among others) D'Arms & Jacobson (2000, 74) and Srinivasan
(2018, 130).

Is the protest view is vulnerable to the same additivity objection
leveled at the status defense view in sec. 3.2? For when one could
successfully defend oneself (by doing PHI), might one not also
permissibly protest one's wrongs (by doing PSI), thereby doing
additional permitted harm to one's aggressor (PHI + PSI)? But
because defense and protest are different kinds of response to
wrongdoing, regulated by different principles, defensive acts
and acts of protest do not straightforwardly combine. (On the
non-additive nature of fitingness facts, see also Maguire (2018).)

[24] For example, it was important that the actions taken in
Detroit's Uprising of 1967 targeted shops and buildings in Detroit
rather than just across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

[25] If fitting protest is (as I have suggested) normally
directed at a wrongdoer, what if the wrongdoer refuses to listen,
or communication otherwise fails? Directed expression can be
appropriate, I believe, even when 'robust' communication is not
achieved. To say something to someone does not require that they
listen, and if they do not listen, it is not the same as having
said something to no one, or as having said nothing. Indeed, it may
be that what matters is just that the target of one's expression
could listen. Think here of expressive theories of punishment: if
an offender refuses to hear their punishment's insistence that they
have done wrong, it seems no less worth saying. But if the offender
could not hear the message, then what would be the point? (I set
aside, of course, views on which the expressive aim is to say
something to the victim or to society.)

[26] One might also worry that the protest view cannot account for
the apparent permissibility, in some cases, of killing in protest.
If fitting protest must be directed, how could one express anything
to someone whom one kills? But the protest view does not (normally)
license killing. When one has the ability to kill, one also has the
ability to defend oneself. Protest is, I have suggested, the
fitting response to wrongs one can neither permit nor overcome.
When threatened wrongs can be overcome, expressive acts no longer
seem clearly demanded.

Not all cases are like this, however. Suppose one is under the heel
of an oppressive machine that one cannot topple, but that one could
dismantle some small part of the machine in protest, perhaps by
killing one of its agents. Surely even lethal resistance may be
called for in some such cases? The answer depends on whether one
can express something to someone whom one kills, or else (say) to a
collective agent of which they are a part. It also depends, in the
latter case, on complex questions of individual liability for
collective wrongs. If these conditions are met, then the protest
view might indeed license killing. If not, then killing could not
be fitting---but this strikes me as a natural limit to the protest
view. I thank a referee for pressing this point.

[27] In some cases, victims may owe it to themselves to do more and
may be open to criticism for failing to do so. Think of charges
like 'I really should have stood up for myself'.

[28] I thank a referee for pressing this objection.

[29] King (1958, 90) makes similar claims, e.g.: '[Nonviolence] is
ultimately the way of the strong man. ... The method is passive
physically, but strongly active spiritually'. See also King (1963).

[30] See e.g. King (1958, ch. 6). King there recasts Gandhi's
metaphysical notion of satyagraha using the Christian language of
love, but the ideas are much the same.

[31] If non-violence is not a fitting response to certain
wrongs---wrongs which, on my view, call for forceful expressions
of protest---is it (even pro tanto) wrong to respond with
non-violence? This too may seem deeply counterintuitive. My view is
that on the contrary, in such cases it is permissible to choose
non-violence for the same sort of reason that it's permissible not
to blame even when blame is called for, or to let go of one's anger
even when anger is appropriate. These are, as it were, permissible
acts of grace, and a general account of the moral dynamics of grace
will explain their permissibility in these cases. (See e.g.
Pettigrove (2012).)

[32] One might also opt, all things considered, for non-violence
for strategic reasons (Sharp 1973), for religious reasons (e.g.
Gandhi 1951), or as a method of moral repair (Zheng 2021). But
these are independent considerations which do not bear on the
gratuitousness of violence as a fitting form of protest.

[33] Strawson's view is a locus classicus of modern work on
fittingness in the moral domain. Scanlon (1986, 2008), Smith (2012,
2015), and Darwall (2006), among others, all develop Strawson in
this direction. Shoemaker (2017) explicitly presents a fittingness
interpretation.

[34] It might be thought that, even if rejection of this attitude
is the fitting response to it, an inner attitude of rejection might
suffice. As argued earlier, however, in many paradigm cases
of interpersonal response, a merely fitting attitude would be
inadequate. When one owes thanks or apology, it is not enough to
feel thankful or apologetic, one must express one's feeling to the
person towards whom it is felt. To fail to say thank you, or sorry,
is in an important way to fail to give thanks, or apologize, at
all. Very serious wrongs are no different in this respect. When we
say that it is fitting to insist on the truth that you are owed
interpersonal regard, this also means that it is fitting to say so
to the person who would deny you it. My thanks to a referee for
pressing this point.

[35] One might take the objective attitude towards an attacker
while also trying to appeal to them on moral grounds, or take a
not-fully-objective attitude towards them (as we do with children).
But the possibility of mixed cases does not undermine the general
point that the basic orientation of defense is (as we might say)
'objective' whereas protest is 'participant oriented'.

[36] Many people have helped me with the ideas presented in this
paper. I am especially grateful to Selim Berker, James Brandt, and
two referees at MIND for their helpful and detailed comments. For
thoughtful discussion, I am also grateful to friends, colleagues,
teachers, and audiences at Harvard University, LMU Munich, the
Central European University, to Holly Dykstra, and to Lavender
McKittrick-Sweitzer and her social and political philosophy seminar
at Butler University.