Sit-ins, blockades, and lock-ons are common protest tactics. They work partly because continuing the operation or attempting quickly to remove activists risks injuring or killing them. Injuring or killing the activists is morally wrong, so the targets of the protest must (temporarily) yield to the activists. This appears to be a case of moral blackmail: The blackmailer makes it so that the blackmailed must either do what the blackmailer wants or do something morally wrong. Here, protestors appear to exploit the targets’ tendency to be moral. Can such tactics be justified? I contend that they can insofar as such activists merely add further reason to what their targets already have decisive reason to do. The problem of moral blackmail, however, complicates the morality of primarily communicative civil disobedience.

An accepted draft can be found here.

While much has been said about what ought to be done about the statues and monuments of racist, colonial, and oppressive figures, a significantly undertheorised aspect of the debate is the aesthetics of commemorations. I believe that this philosophical oversight is rather unfortunate. I contend that taking the aesthetic value of commemorations seriously can help us a) better understand how and the extent to which objectionable commemorations are objectionable, b) properly formulate responses to aesthetic defences of objectionable commemorations, and c) help us explore aesthetic solutions—for example, artistic interventions as counterspeech—to objectionable commemorations. Here, I propose that the aesthetic value of objectionable commemorations can amplify the force of the objectionable messages conveyed, and the moral disvalue of objectionable commemorations can hinder our appreciation of their aesthetic value. These two considerations shall help us answer the practical question of what to do about objectionable commemorations of apparently good aesthetic value. Both, I shall argue, give us further reason to remove, replace, recontextualise, or even vandalise objectionable commemorations. Sometimes we need to save the art from its own immorality to best respect its aesthetic value.

The paper is open access here.

The term, "objectionable commemorations”, refers to a broad category of public artefacts – such as, and especially, memorials, monuments and statues – that are regarded as morally problematic in virtue of what or whom they honour. In this regard, they are a special class of public artefacts that are subject to public contestation. In this paper, we survey the general ethical and political issues on this topic. First, we categorise the arguments on offer in the literature, concerning the objectionable nature of such commemorations. Second, we review common political responses to objectionable commemorations. Finally, we identify fruitful areas for further philosophical inquiry on this topic. 

This should be open access soon. But for now here's the accepted version.

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 disobedience even when civil disobedience is available.

Final draft here.

Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past.

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience— potentially permissible.

Open access.

Lachlan Umbers (Res Publica. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9395-4, 2018a) defends democracy against Jason’s Brennan’s (Philos Q 61:700–724, 2011) competence objection, by showing that voting even incompetently does not violate the rights of others, as the risk imposed is negligible, and furthermore lower than other permissible actions, e.g. driving. I show there are costs in taking this line of argument. Accepting it would make arguing for the duty to vote more difficult in two ways: since voting incompetently is permissible, and not voting imposes less risk than not voting, then not voting is permissible; in terms of fairness, voting incompetently is worse than not voting, if voting incompetently is permissible, then there cannot be a fairness-based duty to vote.

A pre-print is here.

Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let them speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior.

The final draft is here. If you don't have access to the final version, you may email me here.

A prominent way of justifying civil disobedience is to postulate a pro tanto duty to obey the law and to argue that the considerations that ground this duty sometimes justify forms of civil disobedience. However, this view entails that certain kinds of uncivil disobedience are also justified. Thus, either a) civil disobedience is never justified or b) uncivil disobedience is sometimes justified. Since a) is implausible, we should accept b). I respond to the objection that this ignores the fact that civil disobedience enjoys a special normative status on account of instantiating certain special features: nonviolence, publicity, the acceptance of legal consequences, and conscientiousness. I then show that my view is superior to two rivals: the view that we should expand the notion of civility and that civil disobedience, expansively construed, is uniquely appropriate; and the view that uncivil disobedience is justifiable in but only in unfavorable conditions.

A pre-print is here.

In all, Delmas successfully guides us to reconsider the traditional “wisdom” of civil disobedience. She also makes a strong case for expanding the notion of political obligation, which has been narrowly construed as mere obedience, to encompass a duty to resist. Principled disobedience, either civil or uncivil, includes a wide range of tools to tackle different forms of injustice, such as education campaigns, peaceful protests, graffiti street art, whistleblowing, vigilante self-defense, and political riots. We may question to what extent the violent disobedience can be justified, as it is always good to be careful about violence that risks harming the innocent, but other forms of civil or uncivil disobedience may rightly be demanded in realistic circumstances. As I see it, these, along with the general warning to not unwittingly serve the status quo by dismissing social movements merely because of “incivility” and the proposal of the civic virtues of vigilance and open-mindedness, are significant contributions to the literature and could also benefit a politically interested general audience greatly.

A pre-print is here.

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 iii 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.

One Syllable Summary of My Dissertation:

When things, like the law, are bad, it's fine to fight back in mean ways.