Uncivil Disobedience: Beyond the Orthodox View of Resistance and Counter-Resistance

Abstract

What I call the Orthodox View of resistance and counter-resistance holds that at least in reasonably just societies a) political resistance is sometimes justified and b) the state and other citizens are justified in taking it seriously and treating it as relevantly different from other illegal acts but only when the resistance in question involves observing the requirements of so-called civil disobedience. In this dissertation, I argue that we should reject the Orthodox View in favour of a view that is both more inclusive with regard to the ethics of resistance and more nuanced with regard to the ethics of counter-resistance. Most importantly, in the first part of the dissertation, I argue that we should reject what I call the Orthodox Resistance Thesis, which holds that political resistance is sometimes justified in reasonably just societies but only when it involves civil disobedience. I argue that we should embrace the more inclusive view that uncivil disobedience - illegal resistance that falls short of the relevant standards of civility - is also at least sometimes justified in reasonably just societies. I present four arguments for this key claim. First, I argue that, just as the purported grounds of our political obligations are often taken to support civil disobedience (as opposed to obedience) in special circumstances, so too the purported grounds of our political obligations sometimes support uncivil disobedience (as opposed to civil disobedience) in other special circumstances. Second, I argue that one important and undertheorized kind of uncivil disobedience - political vandalism - is justified when and because it amounts to a form of appropriate counter-hate speech. Third, I argue that responding appropriately to the demands of fairness sometimes permits (and even requires) uncivil disobedience as opposed to civil disobedience since the targeted costs imposed by uncivil disobedience on responsible parties are sometimes more consistent with the demands of fairness than the indiscriminate costs imposed by civil disobedience on the general public. Fourth, I argue that impermissible counter-resistance on the part of the state can create situations where civil disobedience would be futile, or that the counter-resistance in question itself constitutes severe injustice; and either possibilities can make uncivil disobedience both necessary and proportionate and, hence, justified. In the second part of the dissertation, I argue that we should also reject what I call the Orthodox Counter-Resistance Thesis, which holds that the state and other citizens are justified in taking political resistance seriously and treating it as relevantly different from other illegal acts when, but only when, the resistance in question involves civil disobedience. I argue that we should embrace a more nuanced view of the ethics of counter-resistance according to which the state and other citizens are at least sometimes justified in taking uncivil disobedience seriously. Moreover, I suggest that the intuitively attractive idea that the state should refrain from punishing justified acts of civil disobedience has a number of paradoxical and problematic implications.