Henry Krahn

Sometimes people break the law to try to change a law or policy that they see as unjust. For example, during the American Civil Rights Movement, Black activists sat at “whites-only” lunch counters to protest racial segregation. During the 1980s and 1990s, members of the group ACT UP staged ‘die-ins’ where they lay as if dead in public spaces to protest the U.S. government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis ravaging the LGBTQ community. More recently, environmental advocacy groups have blockaded roads to protest government inaction on climate change. These are cases of civil disobedience. But what exactly is civil disobedience? Can it be justified? If so, under what conditions? And what should happen to people who engage in civil disobedience? Should they be punished? Or should they be praised? This essay reviews some important philosophical answers to these questions.

It seems natural to think that protest for an unjust cause is unjustified. But citizens of a liberal democracy will inevitably disagree over which causes of protest are just. Accordingly, a theory that makes the justification of protest depend on its cause may seem somehow incompatible with the circumstances of democratic politics. For these reasons, it is unclear how theories of the justification of political protest should approach their subject. In this paper, I examine both sides of the problem. I begin with a basic ethical argument to support the intuition that the justification of protest should depend on its cause. I then consider the objection that such theories are politically untenable, and so useless. Finally, I argue that the objection fails: even if people disagree about the justice of a protest’s cause, they may be able to agree on the criteria by which we should evaluate the protest. I conclude that there is nothing in principle wrong with theories that make the justification of protest depend on its cause.

Many authors raise a democratic worry about the use of force and violence in protest. Protestors who rely on force or violence, the thought goes, do not attempt to win majority support for their position but instead attempt to directly bring about a political outcome by making the alternative more costly. Thus, the use of force and violence in protest may seem tantamount to forcing one’s views on others. This paper provides an alternative rationale for force and violence by presenting a theory of protest as a form of holding others accountable. When we hold others accountable interpersonally, we often use burdensome treatment to communicate with them about their conduct, but we do not try to force them to behave as we wish. In the same way, I argue, protestors may use force and violence to make a moral appeal to their audience without acting undemocratically.