The Right to Claim Solidarity

Political philosophers engaged in thinking about what morality requires under circumstances of injustice have argued that victims of injustice have duties to resist their own oppression. Recent philosophical work in this context has advanced, in parallel, arguments defending the idea that there are duties of solidarity to and with the oppressed. What these otherwise separate sets of arguments have in common is that they predominantly employ the language of duty. But a duty-based framework can be problematic when focusing on the victims of injustice because making resistance a moral requirement of the oppressed may seem too demanding and unfair. At the same time, when political theorists speak of duties of solidarity to and with the oppressed they are often silent on what exactly grounds such duties, taking their existence for granted, or they do not sufficiently specify what is their content i.e. what fulfilling them requires and what the appropriate moral reaction for failing to fulfil them is. While signalling these problems is important, I also believe that a duty-based approach is neither the most appropriate, nor the only perspective for articulating the demands of morality in circumstances of injustice. In this paper, I argue that we should not neglect the potential of a rights-based approach. In particular, I claim that prior and above whatever duties the oppressed may have, they possess a moral right to resist their oppression and that an important part of this claim-right entails placing demands on others to stand in solidarity with them. This rights-based approach does not seem to incur the kinds of problems about demandingness and unfairness mentioned above. It is also appropriate for two reasons: (i) it coheres with an understanding of solidarity as a concept in the neighbourhood of justice rather than charity and (ii) it coheres with an understanding of justice as being rights-based in the sense that it is grounded on a particularly important type of claim which is also directed. By articulating the right of the oppressed to claim solidarity I show that the content of the right has sufficient latitude to be compatible with different accounts of solidarity, and that an immediate consequence of such right is to specify the corresponding duty-bearers. Finally, my argument recognises the potential that exists in treating different moral demands in the context of injustice together rather than separately.