The Right or Duty to Professional Resistance: a Republican Perspective

We live in highly differentiated societies in which various forms of expertise (technical, practical, local, etc.) play an important role. While such expertise can be put into the service of the common good, it can also be (ab)used for private gain. Often, profit-oriented organizations employ experts, e.g. medical professionals, and there are often conflicts about the use of their expertise for monetary gains or for what the logic of the expertise requires. I use the term “professional resistance” in a broad sense (not restricted to “professional” in the technical sense) for describing such constellations. The paper explores the normative dimensions of professional resistance from a republican perspective. Are experts being dominated in such constellations? Is there a right, or maybe even a duty, to professional resistance? The main challenge, I will hold, is that granting too much scope to experts can in turn lead to domination. Because of the nature of expertise as “esoteric” (Goldman 1999), holding experts accountable, and thereby avoiding domination, can only credibly be undertaken by peers. I defend a qualified right to professional resistance in cases in which not only individual professionals, but professional groups consider organizational directives problematic. In order to secure this right – which can sometimes also be a duty – to professional resistance, effective support structures are needed. To minimize domination, and to enable the use of expertise as oriented towards the public good, republicans should endorse the creation of such support structures.