Epistemic Duties and the Right to Resist Injustice (In Progress)
Some scholars have argued that sometimes permissible to violently resist state injustice. This claim raises two problems that have received very little attention. The first is the problem of error. Many instances of violent resistance are misguided. The illegal occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, for example, was motivated by fringe and mistaken views about the limits of the powers of the federal government. The second is the problem of disagreement. In any society, there are deep disagreements about what counts as injustice. Consider debates over abortion, solitary confinement, policing, and vaccine mandates. These two problems raise difficult questions about the right to resist the state. How should we assess instances of resistance that stem from false beliefs about state injustice? What are the implications of disagreement for the legitimacy of violence aimed at resisting the state? This paper aims to address these relatively neglected questions. I argue that an instance of forceful resistance to the state is legitimate only if those who perpetrate it satisfy certain epistemic duties. Epistemic duties regulate our reasoning about what to believe. They apply to general beliefs about the justice or legitimacy of the state as well as to beliefs about policies such as vaccine mandates, and beliefs about state actions such as the belief that a certain instance of use of force by police is unjust. When agents use force to resist the state based on such beliefs, they are subject to epistemic duties. Foremost among these are the duty to gather evidence and the duty to minimize false beliefs. However, resisting agents also bear a less commonly recognized epistemic duty: the duty to give proper weight to expertise (e.g., legal expertise or medical guidance). These duties place important constraints on the legitimacy of force in resistance to injustice. They also provide a solution to the problems of error and disagreement. If an agent who forcefully resists the state has satisfied their epistemic duties, we may be required to regard their use of violence as legitimate, even when we believe that they are mistaken in their belief that the state is unjust.
This paper defends a domination-based argument against private prisons. I argue that it is impermissible for the state to delegate the administration of incarceration to private agents because, in doing so, it licenses private agents to exercise dominating power over inmates.
This chapter addresses questions about commodification in the sphere of security and prisons. It surveys potential forms of commodification and considers arguments that aim to show that they are morally wrong or unjust. The chapter considers the relationship between commodification and privatization. It examines economic, legal and moral commodification arguments against private prisons and prison labor. The economic arguments against private prisons considered here focus on efficiency and perverse incentives. The legal arguments focus on dignity and the commodification of the person. The moral arguments focus on human equality and corruption of important goods. The arguments against prison labor begin with the question of whether prison labor is market activity and then consider the possibility that prison labor may contribute to mass incarceration. The moral arguments focus on exploitation. The chapter also considers the relevance of the racial dimension of mass incarceration to arguments about commodification.
Legal moralists hold that the immorality of an action is a sufficient reason for the state to prevent it. Liberals in the tradition of Mill generally reject legal moralism. However, Larry Alexander has recently argued that a class of legal restrictions on freedom endorsed by most liberals must be justified on moralistic grounds. According to Alexander, environmental restrictions designed to preserve nature or beauty are a form of legal moralism. In this paper, I explore two liberal lines of response to Alexander’s argument. The first argues that an aesthetic interest is among our basic legally protectable interests. This argument claims that environmental and other regulations designed to protect beauty and nature are justified in order to prevent setbacks to this aesthetic interest. The second focuses on a democratic conception of the public interest. It holds that democratic communities are entitled, through their institutions, to shape their community and environment. On this view, the community need not appeal to moralism to justify its adoption of environmental regulations since in adopting such regulations it is simply enacting its collective preferences. On these grounds, I claim that Alexander’s case for the claim that aesthetic regulations can only be justified on moralistic grounds is much weaker than he takes it to be.
A republican conception of social justice specifies how republican freedom should be distributed among members of the political community. The goal of this paper is to assess the plausibility of recently proposed principles of republican social justice. I consider two candidates. The first is an aggregative maximizing principle defended by Philip Pettit in Republicanism. According to the maximizing principle, the republican state ought to aim to maximize expected non-domination. I argue that the maximizing principle must be rejected because it permits under-protecting vulnerable members of society in favor of increasing the freedom of the already powerful. The second is the sufficiency principle of republican social justice recently offered by Pettit in On the People’s Terms. According to the sufficiency principle, the republican state ought to aim to secure a degree of non-domination sufficient to ensure each the equal status of a free person. While the sufficiency principle avoids the most fundamental objection to the maximizing principle, I argue that it is at best an incomplete theory of social justice. First, social justice requires principle(s) for determining the justice of distributions above the sufficiency threshold. Second, republican theory does not determine which principle(s) should govern distributions above the threshold. Republicans must decide whether they will incorporate an independent commitment to equality within their theory of social justice.
Kant’s conception of enlightenment as emergence from immaturity in the use of reason is well known, but his main concern in his famous essay on enlightenment is the relation between enlightenment and the political order. Kant’s account of this relation turns on a rather cryptic idea of the freedom of public reason. Unfortunately, neither his concept of public reason nor his reasons for advocating the freedom of public reason have been well understood. This paper thus has two main goals. First, it argues that Kant conceives of public reasoning as a matter of speaking in one’s own name. Second, it draws on Kant’s republican conception of freedom in order to develop an account of the grounds of the freedom of public reason.
This paper develops a Lockean account of literary property. Seana Shiffrin has argued, on the basis of an egalitarian interpretation of Locke’s theory of property, that the Lockean view does not justify property rights in intellectual works. I argue that Shiffrin fails to take an important strand of Locke’s view into account, namely the view that makers have rights to what they have made. If this aspect of Locke’s view is given its proper place, a plausible Lockean account of property in literary works can be developed. This account of literary property places us in a better position to appreciate both the strengths and weaknesses of the Lockean theory of intellectual property.