The article defends the forms of civil disobedience currently practised by environmental protesters. It reviews the justifications of civil disobedience by Dworkin, Rawls and Singer, and finds them more or less wanting. A new and more extensive justification is provided on the basis of our duties to prevent harm befalling future generations.

The purpose of this paper is not to define civil disobedience, but to identify a paradigm case of civil disobedience and the features exemplified in it. After noting the benefits of this methodological approach, the paper proceeds with an examination of two key, interconnected features: conscientiousness and communication. First, a link is made between the conscientious aspect of civil disobedience and moral consistency; a civil disobedient demonstrates a conscientious commitment to certain values through her willingness to condemn, and to dissociate (...) herself from, governmental decisions that violate those values. A parallel is then drawn between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state. Both practices are associated with an aim to demonstrate protest against certain types of conduct and an aim to bring about a change in that conduct. In paradigm situations, a civil disobedient aims to lead policymakers not only to reform existing law, but also to internalise her objections so as to produce a lasting change in the law. Having such aims places some constraints upon the modes of communication that she reasonably may use to achieve these aims. This paper concludes by considering three controversial modes of communication -- coercion, publicity and violence. (shrink)

This chapter examines the tension between the justification and the punishment of civil disobedience, and theorists’ common solutions to it, by focusing on two central questions: first, should the state punish civil disobedience? Second, should the civil disobedient accept punishment? It presents the theoretical lay of the land on each of these questions, with particular attention to American jurisprudence on civil disobedience. The third part takes a step back to ask anew, how should we think about civil disobedience? and uncovers (...) some problematic assumptions behind the common theoretical approach to the “problem” of civil disobedience. (shrink)

Increasingly, protests occur across borders and are carried out by non-nationals. Many of these protests include elements that break the laws of their host country and are aimed at issues of global concern. Despite the increasing frequency of transnational protest, little ethical consideration has been given to it. This article provides a cosmopolitan justification for transnational disobedience on behalf of self and others. The article argues that individuals may be justified in illegally protesting in other states, and that in some (...) circumstances they may do so even when laws have been legitimately constituted by the domestic constituencies of those states. Using a cosmopolitan reading of the notion of civility and of the civil realm, the article argues that transnational protests are capable of conforming to the normative and conceptual standards necessary for them to be labelled civil disobedience. As a result, they ought to carry a privileged moral status compared with other forms of protest. The article applies the All Affected Principle to argue that a democratic deficit can provide transnational protesters and resident migrants with a right to civil disobedience even where that right is not held by members of the demos they protest within. (shrink)

This article argues that, far from being a merely defensive act of individual protest, civil disobedience is a much more radical political practice. It is transformative in that it aims at the politicization of questions that are excluded from the political domain and at reconfiguring public space and existing institutions, often in comprehensive ways. Focusing on the reconstitution of the political community also allows us to reconceptualize constituent power. Rather than portraying it as a quasi-mythical force erupting only in extraordinary (...) moments, constituent power can be conceptualized as a dynamic situated within established orders, transgressing their logic and reconfiguring them from within. Civil disobedience as a transformative and potentially comprehensive practice aimed at reconstituting the political order can then be seen as an internal driving force keeping this dialectic in play. A concrete example can be found in protests and border struggles by irregularized migrants. They show how unexp... (shrink)

This article brings together two debates in contemporary political philosophy: on the one hand, the dispute between the distributive and relational approaches to equality and, on the other hand, the field of intergenerational equality. I offer an original contribution to the second domain and by doing so, I inform the first. The aim of this article is thus twofold: (1) shedding some light on an under-researched and yet crucial question – ‘which inequalities between generations matter?’ and (2) contributing to a (...) far-reaching debate that touches upon the nature of egalitarianism. After showing that there are two key problems that fall within the scope of intergenerational equality – questions of justice between age groups and questions of equality between birth cohorts – I argue that, contrary to what the default distributive view (complete lives egalitarianism) states, some inequalities between age groups matter independently of their diachronic impact, and so partly for relational reasons. I argue that, even if we are distributive egalitarians, we must endorse the relational egalitarian conception to successfully make sense of some inequalities between age groups. I infer from this both that the putative view that the ‘relational’ conception of equality can be redescribed as distributive must be rejected and that the distributive view requires supplementation (but not necessarily displacement) by the relational view. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter’s specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing (...) a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience. (shrink)

In Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower. Fricker's examples of identity-prejudicial credibility deficit primarily involve gender, race, and class, in which individuals are given less credibility due to prejudicial stereotypes. We argue that children, as a class, are also subject to testimonial injustice and receive less epistemic credibility than they deserve. To illustrate the prevalence of testimonial injustice against (...) children we document examples of negative prejudicial treatment in forensic contexts where children frequently act as testifiers. These examples, along with research on the child's competence and reliability as a testifier, reveal widespread epistemic prejudice against children. Given that subjection to prejudice can have a detrimental impact on children we discuss ways to ameliorate this form of testimonial injustice. We argue that, both in formal and natural contexts, the child's testimony should be evaluated alongside the relationships that support her development as a testifier. The adult can play a central role in creating successful testimonial interactions with children by acting as a. (shrink)

In her book, Conscience and Conviction, Kimberley Brownlee argues that there is nothing undemocratic about the robust, primary right to civil disobedience that she devotes most of her argument to defending. To the contrary, she holds that there is nothing paternalistic about civil disobedients opposing the will of democratic majorities, because, inter alia, democratic majorities cannot claim particular epistemic superiority, and because there are flaws inherent to democratic procedures that civil disobedience addresses. I hold that Brownlee’s arguments fail. In particular, (...) her argument fails because it does not properly construe the nature of the epistemic claim that can be made either by democratic procedures or by civil disobedients, and because it illegitimately conflates the concern about permanent minorities that has been a constant thorn in the side of democratic theorists, with a concern with all outvoted minorities, whether permanent minorities or not. (shrink)

According to current definitions of civil disobedience, drawn from the work of John Rawls and Carl Cohen, eco-saboteurs are not civil disobedients because their disobedience is not a form of address and/or does not appeal to the public's sense of justice or human welfare. But this definition also excludes disobedience by a wide range of groups, from labor activists to hunt saboteurs, either because they are obstructionist or because they address moral concerns other than justice or the public weal. However (...) earlier definitions of civil disobedience were not so narrow. I review the development of the current definition and the circumstances of its acceptance. I argue that the circumstances which help to explain the attractiveness of the Rawls/Cohen formulations in the 1970s are no longer applicable and that the question of civil disobedience should be revisited. I suggest a wider definition according to which at least some types of eco-sabotage would be civil disobedience. (shrink)

Four views concerning environmental disobedience are discussed in this chapter, focusing on the moral justification of lawbreaking on behalf of natural environments. The traditional view suggests that accounts of ordinary civil disobedience understood through the Rawlsian tradition can be extended to capture cases of environmental disobedience. The revisionary view argues that the concept of civil disobedience needs to be revised in order to account for environmental disobedience, ecosabotage in particular. The radical view militates against basic assumptions of civil disobedience to (...) argue that ecosabotage counts as forms of civil disobedience. The envisionary view suggests that environmental disobedience is best understood as a creative performance, a type of beautiful trouble or creative disruption that expresses environmental values that we must use the moral imagination to understand. (shrink)

This article seeks to illuminate the figure of the child in democratic politics by arguing that children play a constitutive role as temporary outsiders who present both renewal and risk to the demos. Using Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, we begin with an ontological account of children as new individuals that are central to renewing democratic freedom and plurality. In the second section, we explore how children can be conceived in terms of political risk by focussing on Arendt’s debate with (...) Ralph Ellison concerning the desegregation of American schools in the 1960s. Their arguments about whether children should appear in politics underscores the constitutive role that child–adult relationships play in debates about the normative fabric of democratic society. Finally, we use the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe to argue that children can be characterised as an excluded group of potential adversaries that appear in political contests over claims to represent the demos. From this perspective, the article reveals that children are central figures in democratic politics because they are constituents of an unknown future polity. (shrink)

Political exclusion on grounds of incapacity is the primary remaining source of exclusion from the franchise. It is appealed to by states and theorists alike to justify excluding young people and many people with cognitive disability from the franchise. Defenders of this exclusion claim that no wrong is done by this exclusion and that states gain some significant benefits from this restricting of the franchise. I have argued elsewhere that political exclusion as currently practiced in modern liberal democratic states in (...) fact causes significant harms, as it excludes some people who have the relevant capacity for political participation. Here, I argue that the exclusion of incapable actors prevents no significant harms to democratic outcomes, and that it confers no significant democratic benefits on the states practising this exclusion. As such, I argue that we ought to heavily modify and perhaps even abandon the capacity standard for political inclusion. (shrink)

This article examines Hannah Arendt’s bold and provocative proposal to institutionalize civil disobedience. First, I argue that the proposal follows from Arendt’s peculiar interpretation of this mode of protest. She sees it as an unexpected yet welcome echo of the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the foundation of the American republic. In seeking to bring civil disobedience into government, she aims to embed this spirit within the very institutional fabric of the polity. Second, I suggest that we have strong reasons to (...) take the proposal seriously as an account of how the constitutional state should respond to dissenting minorities. The call to institutionalize civil disobedience can be defended as an approach that is different to — and ultimately more appealing than — familiar liberal and democratic perspectives on this issue. (shrink)

While many contemporary political philosophers agree that citizens of a legitimate state enjoy a moral right to civil disobedience, they differ over both the grounds of that right and its content. This essay defends the view that the moral right to civil disobedience derives from a general right to political participation, and the characterization of that right as precluding the state from punishing, but not from penalizing, those who exercise it. The argument proceeds by way of rebuttals to criticisms of (...) both claims recently advanced by Kimberley Brownlee. While in some cases those criticisms fail on their merits, in other cases the responses offered here reveal that the dispute over the ground and content of a moral right to civil disobedience reflects deeper disagreements regarding two foundational issues: first, whether moral rights are best conceived of as defeasible evaluative principles or conclusive normative ones, and second, whether principles of justice should be theorized on the basis of full or partial compliance. (shrink)

This article identifies four approaches to arguing for democracy, showing that none has an adequate way of supporting both full adult inclusion and the exclusion of children. I focus in Section 2 on the arguments of David Estlund and Thomas Christiano, showing that their arguments against guardianship call into question the exclusion of children from the franchise. In Section 3, I explain why the exclusion of children constitutes an injustice, and in the final section, I consider two approaches to remedying (...) that injustice. Key Words: justice • democracy • children. (shrink)