Jason Byas

Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan’s data in Why Civil Resistance Works suggest that nonviolent resistance is much more effective than violent resistance. In that same data, however, they show that campaigns of violent resistance have been much more common than those of nonviolent resistance — and while nonviolent resistance has recently overtaken violent resistance, this has been alongside greater toleration of violence within nonviolent campaigns (which Chenoweth and Stephan argue should make those campaigns less effective.) This gives us a puzzle of apparently senseless violence, which may lead some to infer on rational choice grounds that Chenoweth and Stephan’s case is not as strong as it appears, and that this violence is not actually senseless. I offer a different rational choice explanation for this finding, which is compatible with Chenoweth and Stephan’s broader analysis. As they argue, the fact that it is much easier to participate in nonviolent resistance makes such campaigns more effective. Yet this advantage for nonviolent campaigns over violent campaigns reverses when we consider the positions of potential violent campaigns and potential nonviolent campaigns that have not yet gotten off the ground. In that strategic position, the costliness of participation in violence makes its preparation a costly signal for a movement’s seriousness. This makes it easier for such campaigns to get off the ground by helping them secure their most committed potential recruits. After outlining this explanation, I offer some practical ways that potential nonviolent resistance campaigns can make participation costlier in their early stages so that they can more easily signal seriousness and reach the level of a full-scale campaign.

My dissertation argues (with retributivists) that there is something morally significant achieved in criminal punishment beyond its consequences, but (against retributivists) that this purpose is not necessarily tethered to criminal punishment. That purpose is socially-realizing people's value by condemning wrongdoing and vindicating victims. It is not necessarily tethered to criminal punishment, because alternatives (such as restorative justice or greatly expanded tort law) could in principle provide the same job, and pending substantive criminological inquiry, may be able to do so in practice. The first chapter against desert as a freestanding moral principle (both in the case of retribution and elsewhere), the second chapter provides an account of what it means to "socially realize" someone's value (which is that our norms are such that behavior contradicting their worth is taken as unacceptable), the third chapter gives guidance for how to make our shared expressions of moral judgments more fitting, and the final chapter is essentially a postscript that ties everything together and explains the upshots for punishment. See the end of my CV for a full abstract.

In The Reason of Rules, Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan argue for what I call a “Rules First Theory of Justice.” On their Rules First view, rules are prior to justice, and justice is simply obedience to the most fundamental agreed-upon rules. I argue against this view by appeal to another reason for rules provided by Brennan and Buchanan: protection from arbitrary power. Without a standard of justice over and above existing rules, rules will not have the stability to provide this protection. This is because the attitude towards existing rules encouraged by the Rules First approach enables two paths to arbitrary power from well-designed constitutions: ambiguities resolving through elite-favoring interpretive drift, and acquiescence to longstanding elite violations of rules. Both paths allow for the unfortunate result of rendering arbitrary power necessarily just, with disobedience to that arbitrary power now unjust. The first path, additionally, can get there without any steps that the Rules First approach can even call unjust. I then offer natural rights frameworks and relational egalitarianism as possible alternatives for better serving Brennan and Buchanan’s motivations for the Rules First theory.

It is often assumed that politics is just about the state and what it does. Here I argue for a much broader view, in which politics can include activity that has nothing to do with getting the state to behave differently, by suggesting several ways in which the seemingly apolitical activity of entrepreneurship can fall into three broad categories of political action. The first is in establishing institutions or practices that help guarantee some demand of justice. The second is mitigating and circumventing state injustice. The third is in building a foundation for future action. After that, I discuss two benefits to entrepreneurial politics over state-mediated alternatives, both of which relate to dealing with the constraints of prevailing ideology. The first is that entrepreneurship allows those who are alert to alternative political possibilities to act on that alertness without first overcoming ideological barriers. This argument draws on Israel Kirzner’s account of entrepreneurship’s equilibrating function. The second point builds upon Joseph Schumpeter’s account of its disequilibrating function: successful entrepreneurial action can destroy existing ideological assumptions about what is possible.

Virginia Political Economy is characterized by a distinctive public choice analysis of the pathologies in existing political institutions and the constitutional political economy approach to reforming institutions. Unfortunately, the extent to which public choice is correct in its assessment of existing institutions, it will thereby render the recommendations of constitutional political economy harder to reach. Thus, in virtue of this meta-problem, Virginia Political Economy risks concluding in its own irrelevance. I consider and reject some possible answers to this meta-problem, before offering my own: a “constitutional political economy from below” aimed at building alternative institutions outside of the state and its pathologies.

Libertarians tend to noninterventionists on moral grounds, for which the simplest argument is national sovereignty. Yet, as some have argued, national sovereignty sits uncomfortably with libertarians’ moral individualism. I affirm the interventionists’ rejection of national sovereignty, but offer several reasons for why applying libertarians’ moral individualism to actual wars requires noninterventionism. The first is collateral damage that cannot be justified given interventions’ consistently low probability of success. The second is that creating war zones imposes terror and harm on everyone within a given area, regardless of whether they actually get killed or injured themselves. The third is that a general policy of intervention, and the standing army it requires, has recurring perverse effects on both the intervening country’s population and the world more generally. I then argue that the points raised here against intervention apply to all war, not just interventions, albeit weakened, and distinguish the resulting anti-war position from pacifism.

Two-tiered mixed theories of punishment hold that legislatures should act according to consequentialism, but the judiciary should act according to retributivism. A major motivation for these theories is wanting to preserve the idea that punishment is ultimately justified on consequentialist grounds, without falling prey to the Punishing the Innocent objection. Yet this benefit is illusory. While two-tiered mixed theories successfully avoid the Punishing the Innocent objection narrowly construed, they do not successfully escape the point behind it. This is because cases can be constructed with the same problems as those used to describe the classic Punishing the Innocent objection, just bumped up to the legislature.

This chapter surveys libertarian thought on the question of “historic injustice,” which is when serious injustice goes unresolved for many years. After some historical discussion of early libertarian writing on the subject, I turn to the contemporary debate surrounding reparations for slavery. After outlining three arguments common among libertarians for reparations, common reasons for skepticism are also discussed. Then, special focus is given to the topic of land theft. In particular, I hone in on what I call the “Poisoning Problem,” or the idea that natural rights approaches to property fail because so much of actually-existing property is founded in conquest. In the conclusion, I highlight two areas where libertarian writing on historic injustice is relatively quiet compared with broader writing on these topics: reparations of a less material sort and transitional injustice. Throughout this chapter, I typically refer to American slavery and land theft, but the discussion is meant to apply much further than those two cases.

There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks. Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. Firstly, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Secondly, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just – thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”