Ezio Di Nucci

November 6, 2024. Theday after. Have youseen Elon Musk’s new Cybertruck? If you wanna understand what happened last night—and I’m not sure many of you have the guts, to be honest. But anyway, if you want to try, check out the cybertruck. Because that’s what the end of history looks like. The end of history is, for one thing, male. And secondly it clearly isn’t—how could we ever even have dared think that, eh Fukuyama—the end of our problems; it’s much more obviously just the beginning. If Musk had read Hobbes, I’m pretty confident the ad campaign for the cybertruck at the next Super Bowl would have a state-of-nature backdrop. Trust human animals to mix up ends with beginnings, every time.

“Why were our only heroes nonviolent?,” asks Ta-Nehisi Coates when writing aboutBlack History MonthinBetween the World and Me. There is a tempting way of making themainargumentof thisbooklook disappointingly obvious, by comparing it with the reassuringly oppressive nature of religion. And by further including the oppressiveness of non-violence within the broader and more established idea that religious belief is an oppressive device that the few have been using to keep down the many for thousands of years. Which it is, make no mistake.

13 April 2024: Last night, IranattackedIsrael. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, they did so directly, no intermediaries. Reportedly, more than 300 between missiles and drones, but nobody died (NYT, April 14). Call itperformativeviolence? (Butler,1991). Butis it even violence, if nobody dies? Surely violence does not require for anybody to actually die; not even genociderequires any actual death, so imagine good old violence. This chapter applies the ‘demoralizing violence’framework to Iran’s attack on Israel in April 2024, which happened to result in zero fatalities. We learn the concept of ‘measured’ violence and speculate that: violence is never about violence.

Conclusions are lazy: if you have read this book, you don’t already need a summary do you, because if you had had Alzheimer’s, you wouldn’t have made it this far, I don’t think. And if you have not read this book, then go read it, for fuckssake; or don’t, but then you sure won’t find no shortcuts here. Therefore, I will use this space, which academic monographs traditionally waste on summaries, to try out a new idea (or, at least, another way of looking at the arguments in this book).In a world ruled by productivity, is it, upon reflection, such a surprise that non-violent ethicshas become the dominant norm? Could it be that we are being sold as moral progress what is, actually, just another efficiency? Violenceis problematic because it is not a mode of production: counter-productive, even—because, at best, violenceonly generates further violence; at worst, just destruction. Either way, no product in sight, nothing to buy. Then again, could it be that climate change will not only bring destruction but also a new way of understanding production? Or just:destruction as a new mode of production?Here the hypothesis would not necessarily be that violenceis not wrong or non-violencenot preferable, but rather that our societies’ interest, in settling on one norm (non-violence) over the other (violence), has all the time been economic rather than moral. Have we chosen the productive norm, pretending it was the ethical one (or at least pretending we chose itbecauseit was the moral norm)? This kind of analysis (economics masked as ethics) would bring us back full circle to the Marxism of the early chapters, leaving only the question: why still bother with the fancy dress, this late into the twenty-first century? If this were the medical field, we would now have to run an RCT to extrapolate between the economic argument for non-violenceand the moral argument for non-violence. But it’s way too late for that; book’s finished folks. Time to finally get up from that armchair.

Thischapter provides important background to the understanding of Claim 1 and Claim 2, which is a differenttask than defending Claim 1 and Claim 2, for which you will have to wait a wee bit longer. Here you will mostly learn how to understand Claim 1 and Claim 2, so basically their meaning. Once we have established the meaning of Claim 1 and Claim 2—and in particular what these claims do not refer to, for example, pacifismand killing—we can begin the hard work of finding out whether these claims are also true, rather than just meaningful.

This book—youwillhavebecometired ofhearingit, by now—argues that non-violence is oppressive and that it allows the privileged to tolerate structural injustice. And those things are bad. But this chapter argues that non-violence might be even worse than the above: namely, as anticipated in earlier chapters elucidating different possible versions of this book’s claims, there is a difference between claiming that (i) non-violence is oppressive; claiming that (ii) violent resistanceis legitimate in the face of structural injustice; and claiming that, when living under conditions of structuralinjustice, (iii) non-violent political action is impermissible, because we are obliged by injustice to at least consider dropping our commitment to non-violence.

I have beendreadingwritingthis chapter—formorethan twenty years, in fact. Let me tell you a story: Ted Honderich was one of my early enemies in philosophy. Died recently, actually—which is probably what brought that old story back.In the early 2000s, when online philosophywas basically just Philos-L and, would you believe it, paper submissions were sent by post (and acceptances came by post as well, wouldn’t you give it all away, LinkedIn and the rest of the bloody self-promotion circus, just to get a, say,Analysisacceptance letter in your pigeonhole? You probably don’t even know what a pigeonhole is, now that I think about it). Anyway, back in the early 2000s I exposed Honderich on Philos-L as a holocaust denier, mini-shitstorm ensued (but then again, the Internet was tiny back then, right? philosophystill is, so mini-shitstorm was actually pretty big, relative to our community, and I was a 23-year-old grad student). Why am I telling you this? Mostly not to fall asleep, actually—but there is also a philosophical point coming, which is that Honderich at the time was well-known—and on tour, that’s how I met him and heard him deny the Holocaust to my face—for a book providing a philosophical defense of terrorism.And I guess I am afraid that, twenty-odd-years later, this chapter might also end up providing a philosophical defense of terrorism, and what upsets me is less the prospect of authoring a philosophical defense of terrorism and more the chance that, for some reason, bored white men who start relativizing violence seem, in the past, to have literally lost their mind. For that purpose, and in case you arrived at this chapter without having read the previous eighteen chapters, do me a favor and check out, at least, the one on genocide, because my kids are German, after all.

Is non-violence oppressive? This book argues that non-violent ethics keeps minoritized peoples down and helps the bourgeoisie tolerate structural injustice. Like sex, violence needs de-moralizing, in order to fulfil its emancipatory potential. Social injustice and global inequality will not deprive the privileged of their sleep, if radical measures are morally ruled out from the start. And the ethics of non-violence robs the working classes of one of the few mechanisms they have left to help them cope with our increasingly digitalized bureaucracies, developed around the needs of highly educated urban classes. There is not just the normative obvious point that it is not fair to deprive the oppressed of one of the only resources they have left; it is also that it isn’t surprising that the bourgeoisie would settle on a non-violent ethics, since that happens to prop up their privileged position – while at the same time soothing their precious conscience: capital with a soul. The book defends three overall claims: first, non-violence is oppressive, in the traditional feminist sense of keeping people down; second, non-violence helps the bourgeoisie tolerate structural injustice; and thirdly, that access to violent means is not distributed fairly across gender or race, for example.

In the public healthcare system, personal autonomy has rightly become a key element of health politics. Nevertheless, conflicts can arise when the interests of a caring welfare state collide with the decisions of those in its care. In such cases, the concept of autonomy as a fundamental ethical principle can cause harm, if solely interpreted as freedom from interference by the public sector, devoid of demands on personal responsibility. Based on the example of vaccine hesitancy during COVID-19, we propose that resolving these conflicts should integrate two divergent basic tenets of autonomy, as developed over time, and recently applied disjunctively to the pandemic by ethicists, so that the principle can be consistently operationalised as a function of an open but also binding argument within society. This may have implications far beyond SARS-CoV-2. We touch on philosophical grounds where the assertion of axiomatic moral rights is replaced by an epistemological framing of the deliberation process as a ubiquitous and not merely representative argumentative act, while validity claims are individually redeemed in a dialogical balancing of reasons and objections. Recognising this as the humanistic core of healthcare calls for an expansion of the state’s communicative obligations but also implies proportionate paternalism.

This paper argues against the claim that “expertise requires trust.” It does so by distinguishing between two versions of this claim, one according to which expertise requires trustworthiness and one according to which expertise requires actual trust. The paper then argues that the former version of the claim is obvious and therefore philosophically uninteresting, while the latter version of the claim is, actually, false. Five cases are deployed to defend these arguments, so that along the way we find out more about the nature of expertise, trust and also, incidentally, corruption and even ChatGPT.

Bio-heteronormative conceptions of the family have long reinforced a nuclear ideal of the family as a heterosexual marriage, with children who are the genetic progeny of that union. This ideal, however, has also long been resisted in light of recent social developments, exhibited through the increased incidence and acceptance of step-families, donor-conceived families, and so forth. Although to this end some might claim that the bio-heteronormative ideal is not necessary for a social unit to count as a family, a more systematic conceptualization of the family—the kind of family that matters morally—is relatively underexplored in the philosophical literature. This paper makes a start at developing and defending an account of the family that is normatively attractive and in line with the growing prevalence of non-conventional families and methods of family-formation. Our account, which we call a constitutive-affirmative model of the family, takes the family to be constituted by an ongoing process of relevant affective and affirmative relations between the putative family members.