Can one justify the use of disruption and violence to pursue political change while remaining committed to the ideal of civility in politics? When Black Lives Matter protestors set Minneapolis’ Third Police Precinct on fire during the riots sparked by George Floyd’s murder, were their actions permissible?
Oppressed people resorting to ‘uncivil’ means to challenge the status quo are often received with the sympathetic yet critical response that disruption and violence overshadow any legitimate reason for protesting. This reaction is common among commentators in the public sphere, and yet many share the intuition that it is badly wrong. Still, some feel uncomfortable with giving up on civility in politics. There is a way out of the longstanding dilemma between outrightly rejecting disruption and repudiating civility – it is one that builds on John Rawls’ political liberalism to keep on board both disruption and civility.
Rawlsian political liberalism
Rawls’s political liberalism is a very influential normative framework to think about disagreement in pluralistic societies. However, its capacity of accommodating the concerns typically voiced by the oppressed, including the need for disruption and violence, is disputed. Many argue that Rawls’ duty of public reason, which is framed as a duty of civility, prohibits uncivil means to pursue political change, even when deployed by the oppressed. According to Rawls, when constitutional essentials and issues of basic justice are at stake, citizens are required to decide which political arrangements to support based on the right sorts of reasons – public reasons. In other words, they should be able to offer each other at least one argument built from within a reasonable conception of political justice, not from within their religious or philosophical doctrines. Rawls’ duty of civility is importantly related to being ‘reasonable’, where reasonableness is the most crucial feature of Rawls’ political ideal of what a democratic citizen should look like. Specifically, reasonable citizens are characterised by the desire for a society organised as a system of fair cooperation between free and equal persons. Also, they believe that disagreement in liberal societies is not simply the result of other persons’ stupidity, ignorance, or stubbornness; at least some disagreement comes down to our imperfect reasoning abilities.
Public reason and incivility
Critics are right in stressing that public reason forbids disruptive and violent protest. When the full reach of the norms of public reason is appreciated, it becomes clear that public reason applies to protests aimed at influencing public officials to make certain political decisions. Also, it constrains both the type of reasons invoked by street protesters and the means they deploy to advance their goals. This is because disruption and violence violate political autonomy – a key value in political liberalism that public reason is meant to protect. When public officials are faced with disruption and violence, they might well decide to make concessions out of fear of escalation, without being motivated by a sincere belief in the justice of the new arrangements. So, they might reach their decisions in a politically non-autonomous way.
Still, our argument is that while public reason is inconsistent with the use of disruption and violence, public reason simply does not apply to the oppressed. This is because at a fundamental level, public reason is grounded on reciprocity; citizens are morally expected to comply with it only when they can be assured that others will do the same. Rawls explains that when compliance with public reason becomes so costly that it is self-sacrificial, reasonableness requires that persons should feel relieved of it. Crucially, members of social groups suffering from severe injustice are not given enough assurance; being at the receiving end of severely unjust arrangements provides evidence that one could not rely on the rest of society to refrain from taking advantage of her civility if given a chance, risking harming her further. So, in that context, it is perfectly reasonable to deviate from public reason by (among other things) engaging in disruptive and violent protest that can improve one’s severely unjust position and/or affirm one’s dignity in the face of oppression. As Rawls puts it, political liberalism is not an ethical framework for a ‘society of saints’ who are willing to follow public reason even if others do not.
Differentiated obligations
Based on our Rawlsian political liberal framework, the oppressed are morally entitled to use disruption and violence to advocate for political change. However, at the same time, we also acknowledge the importance of civility in political life. Indeed, different obligations apply to different citizens, depending on whether they belong to a group suffering from severe injustice or not. Indeed, when individuals are not victims of severe injustice, they should be expected to follow public reason and civility in advocating for political change, even when protesting. This should be the case unless members of privileged groups are authorised by the oppressed to join their disruptive and violent fights. If so, the privileged can depart from public reason, but only to pursue the interests of the groups authorizing them, not any other political goals.
Is everything permitted, then?
Does this mean that no moral constraints should be imposed on the political actions of the oppressed? This is a crucial question, which deserves more attention than what we can give it here or even in our article. Rawlsian political liberalism, however, clearly prohibits the oppressed from conducting political actions that would further compound the severe injustice that other groups in society experience. Once again, this prohibition follows from the key notion of reasonableness. Reasonableness involves a desire for its own sake for a society organised as a system of fair cooperation among free and equal persons, i.e., a society where nobody suffers from severe injustice. So, being reasonable is compatible with resorting to disruption and violence, if you are oppressed. However, it is irreconcilable with directing them at other oppressed groups. In our view, this is a precious insight for the ethics of resistance to injustice.
This blog piece is based on the forthcoming Journal of Politics article “Must the Subaltern Speak Publicly? Public Reason Liberalism and the Ethics of Fighting Severe Injustice” by Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti.
About the Authors
Gabriele Badano is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. Before starting in York, he conducted his doctoral studies at University College London and then held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge. His book – Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views –, co-authored with Alasia Nuti, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Gabriele work has appeared in journals including The Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Studies, and Social Theory & Practice.
Alasia Nuti is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. Before then, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Justitia Amplificata (Goethe-Universität of Frankfurt am Main and the Free University of Berlin). She is the author of Injustice and the Reproduction of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Politicizing Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2024), co-written with Gabriele Badano. In 2022 Alasia was awarded the Early Career Prize for excellence in research and teaching from the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought.