When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice

by Jason Brennan

Why you have the right to resist unjust government

For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow the government and its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can’t fight back. But in When All Else Fails, Jason Brennan argues that we have every right to react with acts of “uncivil disobedience” when governments violate our rights. We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force to defend ourselves or others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials act unjustly or abuse their power.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, History

286 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2020

About the author

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His books include Against Democracy and The Ethics of Voting.

Reviews

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Third book in a row I've read by this author, and as usual he mixes complex philosophical insights with a liberal dose of popular culture, effectively raising questions about why police (or any other form of state) violence should be treated differently than violence by a normal citizen - in other words, defending the use of violence to stop police brutality or unjustified police shootings, as well as escape from police custody in the event of wrongful arrest/conviction, and assassination of political leaders who are about to carry out a war crime or human rights abuse.

The problem is the idea of rights, or of justice. In this book, the author's argument hinges on "rights" or "justice" being violated, and this being sufficient cause to carry out violence against state agents. I have my own ideas of what "rights" and "justice" mean and I imagine they are similar to the author's. My concern is that, say, Operation Rescue, the Black Bloc, Antifa and the Proud Boys all have their own ideas and certainly feel they are right to carry out violence in their own cases. If the author's focus had been a bit narrower, isolating the specific instances in which violence would be appropriate when responding to police injustice, or an entirely separate book about when violence can be justly directed against elected or appointed officials I believe it would have been more effective. But as an overarching theory of justifying violence against state agents, it's somewhat muddled.

But on the other hand, what other philosopher is going to name drop Slayer and Office Space alongside Kant and Habermas?

[Kyle van Oosterum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess I read this book in response to thinking about the injustice committed against George Floyd. In addition, I’ve had the general feeling of disappointment in the institutions that are designed to “protect and serve” the citizens. What this book argues for is a deeply compelling idea of moral parity - that whatever actions taken in defense of ourselves can be committed against citizens AS WELL AS government officials, such as police officers. Broadly I think Brennan has done a tremendous job in outlining what goes wrong with defenses of the immunity/impunity of police officers. He writes clearly, so clearly in fact that you can find out where you agree and where you disagree with incredible ease. I think for the most part the general arguments against special immunity and for moral parity are quite convincing, but I wonder if we can dismiss government legitimacy and authority that easily. In addition, I worry that some of the implications of his theory of defensive ethics - justifiably lying to ignorant voters and judges ignoring unjust laws - can fall apart in game-theoretic situations (what if everyone did that? And so on).

Overall though, I think Brennan’s style and use of argumentation is a work of excellent craftsmanship and I really think that philosophers ought to learn how to write better by reading his books. The subject of defensive ethics I think is fascinating and I’m happy to say I’ve been inspired to start learning and studying it because of this very book.

[MadameSoundso · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Brennan’s style. His strength is the ability to impart complex ideas in an easy and non-artificial language (unlike a lot of other philosophers). Nevertheless he makes his book look more provocative than it actually is (if you think his ideas through to the end and how they would be applied in the real world). Furthermore regarding certain aspects there would have been more argumentative work to be done.

[David Mihalyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a detailed philosophical elaboration on a single argument: we have a moral obligation to resist malign state actors.
I had started reading the book with sympathy towards the argument. In fact this sympathy is probably what drove me to purchase this book after stumbling into it at the bookshop and without knowing anything of the author. I'd say the book convince me to revise my beliefs slightly in favor of its central claim. But more importantly, the book made me realize how important this issue is and how little philosopher have had to say about it so far.

I rarely read moral philosophy, but this was a very easily digestible book. It has vivid examples and clear arguments. The arguments are demonstrated both on highly stylized cases and on some real world examples of well-known state injustice cases. Much of these were on US controversies around policing. I would have preferred a wider mix of real world cases.

My main quarrel with the author's argument is his presumption that state injustice is self-evident and that actors involved would know with certitude on how to judge these cases. Although the question of doubt is raised, he does not convincingly rebuke how anarchy or tribal warfare could be avoided in case of an escalation over moral disagreements.

[Ernst · Rating 1 out of 5]

The philosophy of ethics to state resistance (read in paperback) involves many questions I want to know, most of which this book ignores.
-- Some Senators oppose Obamacare because they prefer Medicare For All or prefer a Republican plan to be announced later. Under what circumstances must they do their best to make Obamacare work, and when should they let Obamacare fail so that they can implement their preferred plan?
-- What obligations, if any, did the summer 2020 protesters have to prevent the property damage and looting that occurred during their demonstrations?
-- If I think people are going to elect a disastrous candidate, can I (a) trick the voters into voting for the candidate they voted against, or (b) make voting so hard they don't do it or (c) shoot them as they stand in line at the polls?

Brennan's preferred questions are bizarre, often involving Batman, who is always right. If Batman knows a President is about to start an unjust war, can Batman shoot the President? Or, a question which apparently is receiving attention from numerous philosophers today, if prison guards know that their prisoners deserve sentences of five years, but receive sentences of twenty years, should the guards let the prisoners escape during the sixth year?

The last question is bizarre -- we have experience with it in Illinois where it was done legally and the results were pretty clear, without the programs and job trainings provided for prisoners about to depart prisons they struggled in society, and when one of them committed a horrible crime there was pressure to make sentences for everyone worse than ever. The Prison Department head who made the prison lost his job. That was without the additional consideration of prisoners being recaptured and sentenced for the escape in the philosophers' scenario. Illinois also passed earlier in 2021 reforms to reduce sentencing, so we are finally also an example of how to work on lower sentences effectively.

For my questions, Brennan, who states that he has sympathy with some anarchist philosophies, but does not detail them, does not say anything about the first two. On the third one, he favors solution A whenever possible, and supplies information about voter ignorance (figures not updated since 2003) to show that I'm probably smarter than the average voters. He allows solution C in extreme cases when no other solutions are possible. Although he does not opine on solution B, I believe he would prefer it to solution C.

I don't think the author agrees with the capitol protesters or with the legislators working now to restrict voting to communities whose voters disagree with the legislators, and I believe his answer is that they are not batman and do not know what is right or wrong. In The Republic Plato also wanted the state run by people who knew The Good, but he spent hundreds of pages showing how they would be educated (and I don't agree with him either.) This book is philosophy for Batman, and dangerous and not useful for any humans.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seems both theoretically flawed and, separately, useless in practice.

Let’s focus on the easier point first: there is no way to practically implement Brennan’s ideas. Let’s take it for granted that he’s correct about his primary theoretical point: we should respond to state violence and injustice the same way we’d respond to anyone else committing those acts. But if your response to seeing an assault is to call the police, this is of course not an effective response to seeing police assault. So let’s imagine that your response to assault is to physically intervene. So if you see police assault, you should physically intervene… except now there’s a high likelihood that the police will assault you. And even if you manage to incapacitate the officer or officers in question, the rest of the police and allied law enforcement agencies will now come after you.

Brennan notes that

Those who defend strategic nonviolence often worry that if citizens fight back against injustice, the state or its agents will retaliate by committing even greater injustices. [p. 19]

Yes, and such worries seem reasonable. Does Brennan address them? Nope!

Keep in mind that Brennan is not addressing revolution or large-scale social change. As he says later on the same page (19),

This book is about using defensive violence, deception, and sabotage to stop individual acts of injustice. I am not much concerned with offering a theory of social change—that is, a theory of how best to change laws, institutions, or prevailing social norms.

In this case, the worry about state retaliation is central, and it’s a deep flaw of the book that he does not address it (at least not through page 85, which is where I DNF’d this book as little better than sophistry).

Now let’s return to the deeper theoretical issue. Is there really no difference between the state and anyone else when it comes to use of force? Brennan argues this, and this forms the basis for his thesis that our responses to them should be the same. In doing so, he must argue that the state has no inherent legitimacy. He “understand[s] a government to be the subset of society that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion, and has coercive power sufficient (more or less) to maintain that monopoly” (p. 22). (The second clause is related to the first concern we had—the government has the power to maintain this monopoly…)

However, Brennan argues that governments do not have any authority. He takes this to mean that while governments have “permission to create and enforce rules over certain people” (p. 63), which he calls “legitimacy”, they do not have “the ability to create in others a moral obligation to obey those rules” (p. 63), which he calls “authority”.

In the end, this comes down to what you view as morality. Brennan cherry picks easy examples about things like slavery, which were (almost) universally condemned as immoral when he wrote this book in 2019, and thus argues “any purported theory of authority… implies I must let sheriffs enforce slavery” (p. 82) and that you should be able to resist arrest for “harbor[ing] an escaped slave in 1850s’ America” (pp. 12–13).

These examples are, however, useless because they are so uncontroversial by today’s standards. It follows from his theory that people should be able to shoot anyone trying to enforce tax collection if taxes are against their morals, and it suggests all-out warfare over abortion (it is legitimate for citizens to kill abortion providers and for citizens to kill those opposing abortion). He does not address the very real issue of coercive enforcement of morality in a morally pluralistic society. He does astutely note that “what makes a law good isn’t so much that it tracks justice perfectly but rather that it provides a workable compromise everyone can live with” (p. 18). Today this is realized by laws that allow protests at abortion providers but not in ways that endanger patients or providers, for example. But his theory of justified violence is not compatible with this:

Justice and morality are not merely decided by legal or democratic fiat [p. 23]

I think most of us would agree with this, but to then have our pluralistic society survive, we must renounce violence in cases where it might otherwise seem justifiable to us if the democratic and legal majority decides it to be so. E.g., someone who thinks violence is justified to stop a murder and also thinks abortion is murder must not in our society use violence to stop an abortion. I would say democratic and legal decisions do indeed create a moral imperative in such a person, and that our society acting collectively (i.e., government) does therefore have authority under Brennan’s definition.

I couldn’t continue for long after Brennan got very confused about consent to laws. He entirely misses the point that we don’t consent to laws as individuals. It’s collective consent. Very few people are going to volunteer for punishment, but collectively we’ve decided some people need to be punished. Speed limits. Taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes—but they want everyone else to pay taxes. We collectively bind ourselves to avoid things like the tragedy of the commons. In places Brennan is able to anticipate objections to his ideas, but it’s astonishing to me that he failed to anticipate something so basic as this, which undermines his entire argument.

It is interesting reading this book in the light of the second Trump administration, when masked plainclothes “officers” in unmarked vehicles are forcefully abducting people from the streets. In my mind, such actions remove special license the government has for actions, and certainly makes it unclear that there is governmental authority. Here I would agree with Brennan:

it would… be justifiable for me to shoot first and ask questions later. All the potential downsides and risks should fall on the police, and they, not my family and I, should bear all the risks from uncertainty about what’s happening. [p. 21]

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious book - it tackles serious ethical questions treated with relative flippancy. In the wrong hands this book could be dangerous - especially now with antivaxxers seeking to ‘fight back’ against perceived government coercion.

[Josh Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

When and how can individuals and groups justifiably resist government's actions? This is what Jason Brennan dissects in his book When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice . Brennan aims to explore the moral and ethical duties that we have in response to state injustices. He aims to prove that we must hold government agents accountable in the same way we do to the citizens of our state.

Brennan begins by questioning the state's legitimacy, arguing that governments may become morally indefensible in some situations. What he means by this is that when decisions or actions are made by the government that cross a certain line, they may become no longer justifiable, which obligates us to use resistance to fulfill our moral duties.

He goes on to explain the moral justification for resistance, dissecting when individuals and groups are justified in resisting government tyranny. This includes civil disobedience and revolution.

The ethics of civil disobedience, explained by Brennan, represent a form of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. The reader dives deep into examples ranging from the civil rights movement to the anti-apartheid movement.

Furthermore, we learn about the various types of resistance, ranging from peaceful protests to more radical, revolutionary actions, always remembering to invoke the least amount of force necessary. This ties in nicely with Brennan’s ethical boundaries. There are limits to when resistance can be justified, thus we must always be acquainted with our moral principles.

Brennan wonderfully and intelligibly analyzes the legitimacy of the state, the ethics of resistance, and civil disobedience versus revolution—his key points. Through the use of real world examples and provocative arguments, he challenges the reader to find a reasonable counterargument to his thesis.

"We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force to defend ourselves or others."

[Corey Hannan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise is perfectly reasonable, but it is too thin to turn into a book.

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

Jason Brennan is an iconoclastic and wide-ranging scholar. According to his home page, he "specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics." (Um, that's not what most people mean by "specialize", Professor Brennan!) I read his contrarian book Against Democracy, and I liked it quite a bit. So I had the good Interlibrary Loan folks at the University Near Here wangle me a copy from Boston College. And…

Here's the issue: Generally, we know that violence against other people is wrong. So is lying and sabotage. But there's an important exception: we (again, generally) accept that it's okay to use violence, even deadly violence, not only in self-defense, but in defense of others. And it's okay to lie to an abusive husband if you're hiding his wife: "No, man, she's not here." And it's okay to disable the bank robber's getaway car.

But some people think there's an exception to that: if the evildoers are government employees, acting ex officio, they have a magic immunity against interference.

Brennan argues against that exception: his claim is that you have pretty much the same right to thwart rights-violating agents of the state as you would civilian villains. Including, if necessary, the right to use deadly violence against them. There's no reason to think they have that magic immunity.

The argument is developed with the care you would expect from a philosopher. Brennan first examines your "right" to resort to (otherwise) bad behavior in response to injustice: when does it work, when doesn't it, and what are the limits? He then makes a powerful observation with much broader implications than his limited thesis here: in thousands of years of trying, political philosophers have entirely failed to come up with good arguments establishing the rightful authority of the state against its citizenry. (This is a separate and independent argument from whether established governments are legitimate; Brennan argues against the authority of even legitimate states.)

You probably have a host of objections and worries to Brenan's thesis. A bunch occurred to me as well. But he does a pretty thorough job of anticipating and replying to them. (If you'd like a article-sized summary, here it is, from the January 2019 issue of Reason.)

[xkdlaej · Rating 3 out of 5]

全本書只有一個重點：政府及政府代理人不具備特殊豁免權。
即是，當政府做了不公義的事，或嘗試做不公義的事，人民有權利（甚至有義務）去阻止並反抗，以維護自己的權利。這權利是先於法律和制度存在的，法律和制度不能限制人本身應擁有的權利。

作者從多角度論證這一論點，當中也牽涉很多有趣的討論
如防禦性暴力的使用原則、比例原則、防禦性行動是否義務等，可惜沒能再探討得更深入，流於表面（始終因為作者只是希望圍繞單一重點作論證）

不過作者的書亦能引發人作更多思考：


暴力螺旋的問題：
假設安遇到了需要防禦性行動的時候，使用了不合比例的暴力，那是否會造成新的 injustice？而為了阻止這 injustice，旁人是否應採取防禦性行動？

這是否會導致暴力升級的問題？因為即使最初的施害者做出了錯誤的行為，並不代表他在無論任何情況下，也有乖乖被暴力對待的義務？

而且，在人的理智能力備受質疑的時候，如何確保人們真的能合理判斷正確的武力程度，而非製造新的不公？作者在書中亦有提到有調查顯示，大多數選民都是 not informed / misinformed。雖然作者認為不需要得知所有資訊，在緊急情況下可以認為是正確，就可以進行防禦性行動。

但缺乏資訊，則容易令防禦性行動變得 disproportionate，甚或乎製造新的 injustice。作者似乎並不打算處理這些後續問題。

作者沒打算仔細討論「使用暴力 / 防禦性行動」的行動原則，但這是一個很重要的，辯證人民有權反抗政府。如要讓反抗保持正義，則需要小心不再製造新的不公義。可惜這本書沒有這方面的討論，似乎缺乏大局觀，或實際使用上的考慮。


專業操守與道德直覺的衝突：

法官、醫生等都是專業人員，而他們身處的崗位上，似乎要求他們重視專業多於自身的道德判斷。

希望作者能辯證為何個人的道德判斷優先於專業操守。往例顯示，無論躲在「專業操守」的名背後行齪齪之事，抑或是以自身道德判斷為重利用制度打壓異己，已經屢見不鮮。

如何平衡兩種考慮，會是頗有趣的討論。