The claim that guns can safeguard freedom is common in US political discourse. In light of a broadly republican understanding of freedom, I evaluate this claim and its implications. The idea is usually that firearms would enable citizens to engage in revolutionary violence against a tyrannical government. I argue that some of the most common objections to this argument fail, but that the argument is fairly weak in light of other objections. I then defend a different argument for the claim (...) that guns can safeguard freedom. I claim that firearm ownership among members of oppressed groups can hinder the use of systematic violence aimed at preventing them from exercising their basic liberties. I show how a commitment to armed self-defense is compatible with non-violent civil resistance as a tool of political change, and show how the former facilitated the latter during the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I consider the policy implications of my argument. I don’t think it vindicates lax gun control policies. However, it may vindicate some individuals acquiring guns and learning how to use them, and some organizations aiding them in doing so. (shrink)

It is an orthodoxy of modern political thought that violence is morally incompatible with politics, with the important exception of the permissible violence carried out by the state. The “commonsense argument” for permissible political violence denies this by extending the principles of defensive ethics to the context of state-subject interaction. This article has two aims: First, I critically investigate the commonsense argument and its limits. I argue that the scope of permissions it licenses is significantly more limited than its proponents (...) allow. Second, I develop an alternative (and supplementary) framework for thinking about permissible political violence. I argue that under certain circumstances, subjects may violently protest their treatment, where protest is understood as an expression of rejection of those circumstances. On my view, protest, including violent protest, is permissible when it is the fitting response to those circumstances. This alternative framework accounts for an important class of cases of intuitively permissible political violence, including cases in which such violence does not serve strategic political ends or is even counterproductive towards those ends. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 546-564, June 2022.

This article addresses a previously overlooked problem in the ethics of defensive killing. Everyone agrees that defensive killing can only be justified when it is necessary. But necessary for what? That seemingly simple question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Imagine Attacker is trying to kill Victim, and the only way one could save Victim is by killing Attacker. It would seem that, in such a case, killing is necessary. But now suppose there is some other innocent person, (...) suffering some entirely distinct threat, whose life one could save instead. Is killing still necessary? The seemingly obvious answer is “yes.” Killing is necessary since it is the only means to achieve the goal that stands to justify killing. The problem with this answer is that it presupposes a certain description of that goal as something like “saving Victim’s life” or “saving Victim’s life from Attacker.” Other descriptions are plausible, such as “saving a life.” On that latter description, killing is unnecessary in this case. The problem we are encountering is the problem of finding the right description of the goal of killing. Call this the “description problem.” This article sets out to solve the description problem and arrives at a radical conclusion. In a variety of cases, we should describe the goal of killing in broad terms, without reference to a specific victim or a specific threat. These broad descriptions—such as “saving a life”—make it easier to find relevant alternatives. Killing, it turns out, is much harder to justify than we might otherwise have thought. (shrink)