Democratic Theory, Defensive Ethics, and Resistance

Abstract

Defensive ethics—a broad approach in moral philosophy which evaluates actions by resort to a moral individualist framework of self- and other-defense—gained increasing political significance in its application to the ethics of war. Yet more recently, its scope of application has been extended to the ethics of resistance, protest, and disobedience in response to injustice, gaining wide prominence in political ethics. This development, while enriching the literature on the political ethics of democracies and other regimes, raises both methodological and substantive questions about the respective roles of democratic theory—or more broadly, theories of political authority and legitimacy—and defensive ethics in the ethics of resistance to injustice. In terms of methodology: • What is the role of democratic theory, if any, in the political ethics of resistance, disobedience, protest, and even voting, when these political acts are evaluated in a defensive ethics framework? • To what extent is the defensive ethics framework theoretically self-sufficient when applied to democratic political ethics, and to what extent can or should the latter incorporate political moral ideals such as political equality, self-rule—or further moral concerns beyond defensive ethics? What are the limitations of the defensive ethics framework in political ethics? • What is the proper role of democratic authority and legitimacy, if any, in defensive ethics-based approaches to problems in (democratic) political ethics? • How can the moral ideals and norms of democratic theory and defensive ethics be combined in fruitful ways to account for challenges in the political ethics of democracies, including non-ideal, regressing democracies? • Is democratic theory relevant at all to the (regime-oppositional) political ethics of non-democratic regimes, and are defensive ethics or further moral approaches more relevant to the political ethics of such regimes than to that of democracies? Substantively: • Does defensive ethics exhaust the justificatory conditions of civil and uncivil disobedience? If not, does democratic theory supply additional necessary conditions? • Which forms of resistance are permitted in a democracy, and which forms are only permitted in non-democratic regimes—or the other way round? • How can futile resistance to injustice be justified in democratic as well as non-democratic regimes? • How can the ethics of resistance to injustice, originally developed for domestic political contexts, be applied to resistance to illegitimate international institutions?

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