When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice, by Jason Brennan. (Princeton University Press), £22.00/$27.95
Coercion, deception, and sabotage are usually morally wrong. But they can be permissible when they’re necessary to prevent someone from causing unjust harm. For instance, one may use force, even deadly force if necessary, to stop another individual from committing a murder. May one, similarly, use force, deception, or sabotage to stop the government from causing unjust harms? Call these “defensive actions.” In When All Else Fails, Jason Brennan argues that it is permissible to take defensive actions against agents of the state, in the same conditions and for the same reasons that it would be permissible to take such measures against private individuals – government agents have no special immunity from defensive action. For instance, a citizen may shoot a police officer, if that is necessary to prevent the officer from killing or badly injuring an innocent citizen; a politician may lie to voters if doing so is necessary to attain public office and then prevent unjust policies; a judge may deliberately misinterpret the law, if doing so is necessary to prevent an unjust law from being enforced. Brennan calls his view the “Moral Parity Thesis” and the opposing view the “Special Immunity Thesis”.
The argumentative strategy: consider the most obvious arguments that could be given for Special Immunity. Each cites some alleged feature of the government or its actions that allegedly makes the government importantly different from private agents. But for each argument, it turns out that the feature in question either does not actually apply to the government or its actions, or is morally irrelevant. In the latter case, the feature’s moral irrelevance can be shown by the fact that private agents with that feature would not (according to common sense moral intuitions) thereby be exempt from defensive action when they attempted to commit injustices.
For example, you might think we should defer to the outcomes of the democratic process because we should assume that what the electorate chose is probably morally correct – that the group is more reliable than any of us are individually; thus, even if a democratically-made law appears to you unjust, you should not interfere with its implementation. As Brennan points out (harking back to his earlier work), this argument fails at the first step: voters tend to be extremely ignorant, irrational, and biased; it would thus be naïve to treat them as some sort of reliable justice-detector. For another example, some would argue that using defensive force against the government may provoke the government to commit even more injustices in the future. But this might also be true of private wrongdoers – for instance, resistance to the mafia might provoke the mafia to commit more crimes. We would not in general conclude that the mafia thereby enjoys a moral immunity against defensive action, so it is not obvious why we should draw that conclusion in the case of the state. (Brennan does allow that in some cases, we might have to let someone commit injustice to prevent their committing much worse injustices.)
The most obvious argument for Special Immunity goes through the belief that the government (at least some governments) has authority and legitimacy – perhaps due to a social contract, perhaps due to obligations of fairness, etc. Brennan addresses this in chapter 3, providing an excellent brief summary of some of the philosophical literature (including my own work) refuting the belief in government authority.
One might worry that the deck is stacked against the Special Immunity advocate: Brennan’s opponent says the government enjoys special immunity because it has feature F. Brennan then has us imagine a private agent who had feature F and asks whether, intuitively, that agent would enjoy immunity from defensive action. If we answer “no”, Brennan will say this shows that feature F is morally irrelevant, so the defence of Special Immunity fails. If we answer “yes”, Brennan will say this shows that private agents are immune from defensive action in the same conditions that the government is said to be immune, so again Special Immunity fails. I think this might show that the Moral Parity Thesis is something close to a disguised tautology (or more precisely, it is just a special case of the principle that moral facts supervene on descriptive facts).
The text is clear, fast-paced, and frequently funny – I breezed through it in a few days. It is punctuated with such entertaining examples as the group of benevolent but incompetent wizards who think that the spell known as “hurt people via bad government” actually helps people. (In that example, one is advised to falsely report the words of the “hurt people” spell to the wizards, so as to trick them into casting the “help people via good government” spell.) These examples are deployed to draw out common sense moral intuitions that can be used to support the permissibility of defensive action against governmental injustice.
I found Brennan’s central claims and arguments obviously correct – but then, as an avowed anarchist, I am hardly the most demanding critic. Though I suspect the central thesis is a near-tautology, most readers will nevertheless find the ideas controversial. It is worth noting, however, that Brennan is not advancing certain controversial claims in the vicinity: he is not addressing whether or when force may be used to punish government agents for past wrongs, or to change government policy, or to overthrow the government; he is only addressing the scenario in which force, deception, or sabotage might be used to prevent government agents from performing some particular unjust act. Brennan is not claiming that defensive action against government agents is often in fact justified – that would depend upon whether such force would be effective and whether there are better alternatives available, questions on which he takes no stand. (Defending Moral Parity only requires Brennan to hold that those same questions apply, with the same import, to cases of defensive force against private wrongdoers.) Nor does he comment on what defensive actions are prudent or effectual; his thesis concerns only what is morally permissible.
For this reason, I think there was a missed opportunity to address a number of important questions. Despite prominent references to cases of police brutality, readers are left unsure as to what anyone in realistic circumstances should actually do about the problem. Brennan’s style of argument might seem to be easily adapted to support retaliatory force, such as vigilante actions to punish wrongdoing government agents: there is no more reason for according government agents a Special Immunity against retaliatory force than for according them a Special Immunity against defensive force. Note that in cases where the government obviously cannot or will not defend a person from unjust harm, it is permissible (as Brennan would agree) for private agents to defend that person; why not hold, similarly, that in cases where the government obviously cannot or will not punish a wrongdoer (including cases where the wrongdoer is a government agent), it is permissible for private agents to do so? Brennan expressly declines to comment on this; if he had, the book would almost surely be more disturbing to mainstream readers than it already is.
As it is, the book attains just the right mix of edginess and academic respectability. The book will be of interest to philosophers, legal scholars, and all citizens with an interest in the problem of state-fostered injustice (which should include you!).
