Futile Resistance as Protest

Edmund Tweedy Flanigan, 2023

NOTE: [This paper will appear in MIND. Please cite the published

version.]

ABSTRACT: Acts of futile resistance---harms against an aggressor

which could not reasonably hope to avert the threat the aggressor

poses---give rise to a puzzle: on the one hand, many such acts are

intuitively permissible, yet on the other, these acts fail to meet

the justificatory standards of defensive action. The most widely

accepted solution to this puzzle is that victims in such cases

permissibly defend against a secondary threat to their honor,

dignity, or moral standing. I argue that this solution fails,

because futile resistance is not plausibly regarded as defensive

in the relevant sense. I propose instead that futile resistance is

justified as a form of protest, where protest is analyzed as an

expression of rejection of victims' wrongs. Such protest is just-

ified, I argue, when and because it is the fitting response to the

circumstances of futility.

Introduction

Here is a classic puzzle in defensive ethics: You (the victim) are

being threatened with wrongful harm by me (the attacker). Because

of my overwhelming strength, you could not hope to avert my

threatened harm with a defensive act of your own. Resistance is

futile. Nevertheless, you could (say) punch me in the gut or

scratch my face as I carry out my attack. You could, that is,

engage in futile resistance. May you?

On the one hand, there is a strong intuition that some acts

of futile resistance are morally permitted. This intuition

is strongest when we think of certain important cases.

Interpersonally, think of rape and other serious assaults.

Collectively, think of invasions of small countries by powerful

aggressors, slave revolts, or ghetto uprisings. In many such cases,

victims could not hope to successfully defend themselves. Yet

surely victims in such cases may harm their attackers, even when

these harms would be futile. On the other hand, according to widely

accepted principles of defensive ethics, these acts fail to meet

the justificatory standards of defensive action. According to

the effectiveness condition (also called the success condition)

on permissible defense, a defensive act must effectively (or

successfully) avert a threatened or ongoing wrongful harm in order

to be permissible. And according to the necessity condition, only

those defensive acts which are necessary to avert a threatened or

ongoing wrongful harm are permissible.[1] But if an act is futile,

it could not be effective, or succeed. And if an act could not

succeed, it could not be necessary. If it could not be necessary,

it must be gratuitous. And how could gratuitous harm be justified?

This is the puzzle of intuitively permissible yet apparently

gratuitous harm---in brief, the puzzle of futile resistance. Since

both sides of the puzzle represent, in their own ways, foundational

commitments, we should hesitate to choose between them. But if we

do not choose, we must find a way to resolve the conflict instead.

Some simple solutions have been proposed. Among these are the ideas

that futile resistance might be wrong but blameless, that it might

be justified as a deterrent, or that it might be justified because

the harm it imposes is deserved. These simple solutions, however,

are widely thought to fail.[2] We might instead revise the

effectiveness and necessity principles so as to make an exception

for futile harms. But this solution will not do either: such

revised principles would be ad hoc; they would do nothing to

explain why futile resistance is not gratuitous. A deeper solution,

it seems, is called for.

The most influential solution offered thus far was first set out by

Daniel Statman (2008), who proposes that victims in these cases

permissibly defend their honor against their attackers. This

solution finds support among a number of leading theorists in the

defensive ethics literature. For instance, it has been endorsed by

Jeff McMahan (2016) (who prefers talk of defense of dignity), and

it has been developed and defended by Helen Frowe (2014, 2016) (who

prefers talk of defense of moral standing). We can refer to this

solution collectively as the status defense view.

While I think this solution points in the right direction, I do not

think it succeeds. After describing the view, I'll offer several

novel objections to it. These objections undermine the appeal of

the view as a solution to the puzzle of futile resistance---and

also thereby make space for alternatives. My own view, which I'll

then set out, is that acts of futile resistance are best understood

as a form of protest, where protest is understood as an expression

of rejection of wrongdoing; and that such protest is justified when

and because it is fitting. Forceful acts of resistance, including

violence, may be fitting when lesser, non-violent acts would not

be. This solution is attractive because it better captures our

considered reflections about what we do when we engage in acts

futile resistance, and because it provides a better account of the

regulative principles of futile resistance.

Defending Your Honor

I should first describe the status defense view. According to

Statman (2008, 668), when you are threatened by a wrongful

attacker, you 'face two kinds of threat': not only are you

threatened in the straightforward and primary sense that you may

suffer a wrongful harm, you are also threatened in the further

secondary sense that your attacker fails to give you your due as a

member of the moral community. Victims become, in their attackers'

eyes, 'just items to be used, mere objects', even 'literally

debase[d]'---a way of being treated that Statman characterizes as

an attack upon victims' honor. This secondary assault, he suggests,

itself permits a defensive response. That is, even when a victim

could not hope to defend herself against a primary attack, she may

take defensive action against this secondary threat to her honor.

Acts of futile resistance thereby become acts of effective defense

against this other kind of attack. As acts of effective defense,

they meet the effectiveness (or success) condition on defensive

action, and they also thereby avoid the charge of gratuitousness.

This is the core of the view. Beyond this, important nuances arise

depending on whether one takes honor to be the object of defense or

something else, such as dignity or moral standing; whether the

threat to that thing is its loss or some other sense of affront or

undermining; whether the merited response is that thing's defense

or (as Statman and others also sometimes say) its (re)affirmation,

assertion, or vindication; as well as the proper relation of

this response to the principles governing permissible defense:

necessity, liability, and proportionality.

Despite the view's wide acceptance, relatively little effort has

been put into developing these details. Among proponents, Frowe's

work has gone the furthest in this direction. In the criticisms

that follow, therefore, I'll principally challenge Statman's and

Frowe's stated views---as one where they agree, and individually

where they differ. Because the view is underdeveloped, it may be

possible to develop it in ways that meet the various challenges I

describe. However, I doubt that this can be done consistently or in

a way that makes the resulting view attractive. Most importantly,

the challenges I raise point to deeper problems with the basic idea

that acts of futile resistance are acts of defense at all.[3]

Against Defense

Defense of what?

The view that acts of futile resistance are acts of successful

defense immediately demands an answer to the question, 'Defense of

what?', since what makes such cases futile is that they do not

successfully defend life, limb, or property, the paradigmatic

objects of defense.[4] The status defense view says that it is one

of those things---honor, dignity, or standing---that is defended.

But since honor, dignity, and standing are things very unlike

life, limb, and property, justification of the extension of the

principles of defensive ethics to those objects is needed.

I should acknowledge that we do often sensibly speak of defending a

person's honor or dignity (if less so moral standing). But that we

can sensibly speak of defense of these things does not show that we

may act to defend them in the relevant sense. Consider: defendants

defend themselves, or are defended, in courts of law; players of

various games and sports defend their goals, championships, pieces,

and so on; indeed, I am presently defending a series of claims. Yet

in none of these cases may one engage in defensive action in the

same way that one may defend oneself against a threat of physical

harm. This is because when we ask whether one may violently defend

some putative object of defense, we are not asking whether

a permissible act of violence could be sensibly described as

a defense of that thing; we are asking, rather, whether the

principles of defensive ethics license such an act, or whether the

object in question is a proper object of those principles. Since

those principles have been developed mainly through consideration

of cases of defense of life and limb, they are presumptively

limited to those objects and those substantially similar to them

(such as property). The more different in kind a putative object of

defense is from those things, the less readily we should apply the

principles of defensive ethics to it. We cannot assume that simply

because the language of defense applies that the principles of

defense do as well. This is particularly true for honor, dignity,

and standing, since these things are very unlike life, limb, and

property.[5]

Now, the familiar problem with Statman's proposal---that honor is

what is defended---is that honor does not seem like the kind

of value (if it is a value) whose protection clearly merits

defense, nor especially violent defense. A common claim, indeed, is

that honor is not a moral value at all.[6] Moreover, many of

the practices that honor and its defense have been central

to---dueling, honor killing, retribution---are widely regarded as

morally unjustifiable. Additionally, since one's honor can be

lost, a perverse consequence is that those whose honor has been

antecedently lost (those who are 'without honor') may not be

permitted to engage in futile resistance, as they will have nothing

to defend; and likewise, acts of futile resistance which undermine

rather than defend one's honor (pathetic resistance, perhaps) will

not be permitted, as they will fail to contribute to this defensive

aim. These are difficult consequences to bear.[7]

For perhaps these reasons, McMahan prefers to talk of defense

of dignity, and Frowe prefers to talk of defense of moral

standing. As Statman anticipates, however, this move carries with

it difficulties of its own (2008, 669). Dignity, and still more so

moral standing, are thought to be things one cannot lose, even if

they can be affronted, undermined, and so on. But how could one

have permission to violently defend something one cannot lose? If

defense is not loss preventive, then it must have other aims:

(re)affirmation, assertion, vindication, and so on. But again, it

is not clear that the principles of defensive ethics pertain to

achievement of such aims. We do not ordinarily think, after all,

that I am permitted to harm others in order to affirm, assert, or

vindicate my beliefs. Why answer differently in the case of status

values?

Similar remarks apply to the question of which acts merit a

defensive response. Even if it is granted that honor, dignity, and

standing are proper objects of defense, we need to know what kinds

of attacks on them may be properly defended against. It is

not clear---and again demands argument---that having one's honor

threatened with affront, undermining, and so on, is the kind of

threat whose prevention is governed by the principles of defensive

ethics.[8]

Proponents of the status defense view owe a compelling argument

that the principles of defensive ethics apply to the objects

and modes of defense they propose characterize acts of futile

resistance. Absent one, these challenges count as a strike against

the view.

Proportionality and additivity

The concern about whether honor, dignity, and standing are proper

objects of defense is compounded by implausible implications

entailed if we so regard them, particularly with respect to matters

of proportionality in defense.

The proportionality principle in defensive ethics requires that

defensive acts be proportionate in seriousness to that of the harm

being defended against. A defensive act is disproportionate if (and

because) it is excessive with respect to the attack it averts.[9]

On Statman's view, what is being defended is one's honor, so the

proportionality principle straightforwardly requires that acts

which defend one's honor be comparable in seriousness to that of

the threat to one's honor against which they defend. This poses a

problem because, on the one hand, threats to honor (or dignity or

standing) are in many contexts not thought to be serious enough

to license violent harms in response: think of grave insults,

humiliating acts, and so on; yet on the other hand, rape and other

serious assaults intuitively license quite seriously harmful acts

of resistance. The status defense view thus faces a dilemma. Either

such attacks on honor are much more serious than we might have

thought, and so allow for much more serious responses, or else acts

of futile resistance must be much less serious than we intuitively

want, in many cases, to permit.

Statman takes the view that threats to honor are comparatively

minor, and so his concern is with the implication that defense of

one's honor may not justify the quite serious harms that are

intuitively permitted in cases of futile resistance. His solution

to this difficulty is to suggest that while secondary threats to

honor in the cases we are concerned with are not themselves

seriously harmful, they are 'parasitical' upon their quite serious

primary threats, such that the standard for proportionate defense

of honor is actually the seriousness of the primary threat---though

only in cases in which the primary threat cannot be defended

against. That is, whether an act of defense is proportionate to a

threat to honor is determined, in futile resistance cases only, not

by the seriousness of that threat but by the seriousness of the

primary threat it accompanies---even though the threat it responds

to is the threat to honor. This is, as Statman (2008, 677-80)

admits, an 'oddity' that is unmotivated, but he takes the theory to

require such a move in order to match our intuitions about relevant

cases. While this may be a compelling move if we are convinced that

the status defense view is the right one, it is a strike against it

if we are not.

Frowe instead argues that threats to (as she prefers to say) moral

standing may simply be quite serious, so that proportionate defense

against them may too be quite serious. For Frowe (2016, 166),

secondary threats to standing scale in seriousness with the primary

threats with which they are associated, and they add to those

threats. This offers a plausible explanation for why threats to

standing are insufficient to merit violent defense in most ordinary

circumstances, yet why they are sufficient to do so in these

serious cases. It also preserves the proportionality dependency

between defensive acts and the threats to which they respond.

However, Frowe's solution carries difficulties of its own. An

implication of Frowe's solution is that primary and secondary

threats are additive, in the sense that the overall seriousness of

a threat is an additive function of the seriousness of each of the

primary and secondary threats. Thus, what is proportionate in

response to an assault will almost always be more serious than the

(primary) assault itself, since such assaults will typically be

attended by an additional assault upon the victim's standing. For

instance, when I threaten to punch you, or kill you, I (often)

really threaten to punch-plus-dishonor you, or kill-plus-dishonor

you, and the proportionality of your permitted response depends

upon the seriousness of that compound attack. This deserves more

careful consideration, since we normally think that the seriousness

of a permissible defensive act depends upon only the seriousness of

the primary threat to which it responds.[10]

Now, as Frowe points out, if a defender successfully averts an

attack, then she may also be thought to successfully avert the

attendant threat to her standing, since that secondary threat

(plausibly) depends on the presence of the primary threat.[11] In

cases in which a defender cannot avert the primary threat, the

defensive harm she is able to muster will ex hypothesi be less than

what would be proportionate to the primary threat. We might

therefore think that in all actual cases, defensive harms are

subject to a practical maximum, commensurate in seriousness to that

of the primary threat, which renders the additivity challenge moot.

But this is not so; we can imagine cases in which this practical

maximum is exceeded. Suppose an attacker wrongly threatens a victim

with some quite serious assault A, which is accompanied by a

corresponding quite serious threat to the victim's honor h. Imagine

that the compound seriousness of these threats is comparable to the

seriousness of death (S_(A + h) ~ S_(death)), though S_(A) and

S_(h) individually are not. Now imagine that the victim's only

options are to do nothing or to kill her attacker. In such a case,

on Frowe's view, to kill me would be a proportionate and, all else

equal, permitted defense against my mere assault.[12]

Note, importantly, that this result is not attributable merely to

the constrained choice you face. If it were, we should expect a

moral remainder with respect to the gap between the seriousness of

my assault and the seriousness of your defensive act. But this

cannot be, since your defensive act is proportionate to my compound

attack; it is justified, on Frowe's view, by the principles of

defense.

This amounts to a serious revisionism about proportionality

in defense quite generally. Most ordinary assaults are also

accompanied by an attendant attack upon victims' standing---cases

of futile resistance are not importantly different from ordinary

defense cases in this respect. Frowe's view implies that we have

been systematically underestimating the seriousness of what are in

fact compound attacks in all of these ordinary cases.[13] Yet this

does not seem to be so: a proportionate defense against (say) the

threat of a broken arm is thought to be, roughly, equivalent to a

broken arm in return---not a broken arm and then some in proportion

to the attendant threat to one's standing.[14]

Now, this might not be troubling if the seriousness of status

assaults were relatively minor, so that the difference between the

seriousness of such an assault and death were not so significant.

But this too cannot be, since the point of the status defense view

is to justify quite serious harms against attackers. (Frowe

herself suggests that a broken limb, for instance, is plausibly

proportionate to the status assault involved in rape.) Put in terms

of the case presented above, there must be significant space

between S_(A) and S_(A + h).

Frowe's revisionism might ultimately reflect the truth of the

matter. Perhaps we should revise our proportionality judgments when

we consider the many attacks on victims' honor, dignity, or

standing that attend assaults on ordinary defense and futile

resistance cases alike. But without independent grounds for

thinking this is so, we should hesitate to accept this implication

of her view. The status defense view thus leaves Statman and Frowe

stuck on alternative horns of an uncomfortable dilemma---between

accepting Frowe's revisionist conclusion or Statman's ad hoc one.

Put another way, we must choose between taking status threats to be

quite serious, in which case we must accept Frowe's proportionality

revisionism, or we must allow that status threats are not quite so

serious, in which case they will not license harm in cases of

futile resistance. Neither option is a good one.

Much of the status defense view's appeal lies, I believe, in

its being the best solution we have to the puzzle of futile

resistance.[15] This is compelling, because we need a solution

to this puzzle. But if this is so, the view's appeal would

be importantly undermined by the availability of a suitable

alternative. In the remainder of this paper, I shall outline such

an alternative.

Protest

The alternative view I wish to propose is this: Those engaged in

acts of futile resistance are not engaged in defense at all;

instead, they are protesting their treatment at the hands of their

attackers by expressing rejection of the wrong done to them. Futile

resistance is a way of saying 'no'---which in some circumstances

may be only adequately said with an act: a kick, a scratch, a

punch, and so on.

The idea that acts of futile resistance carry an important

expressive dimension is not a wholly novel one. What is new in my

proposal is the claim that these expressions of protest are

justified and regulated by considerations of fit, and that it is

these acts' fit that explains why the harms they involve are

permissible. Acts of futile resistance are justified, I claim, when

and because they are fitting expressions of rejection of a

threatened wrong.

Before discussing the features of the protest view (as I'll

call it), however, it is worth pausing to motivate it as

an independently attractive solution to the puzzle of futile

resistance.

Expression

When victims resist superior attackers, what are they doing?

Are they defending themselves, or are they engaging in futile

resistance? No doubt in many real-life cases, the answer is not

clear. What begins as an act of attempted defense may become an act

of futile resistance, for it may only later become clear that one

is hopelessly outmatched. Even when this fact seems clear from the

start, one may feel nonetheless that one ought to try, because one

might just succeed. David, after all, slew Goliath. Moreover, some

acts may be both defensive and futile: one may successfully defend

against a particular act (this assault) while futilely resisting a

wider condition of which that act is partly constituent (slavery).

Yet while real-life resistance may rarely be clearly futile or

defensive, we can imagine clear cases of futile resistance in the

abstract. We can also imagine not knowing whether one's resistance

will be successful or futile while committing oneself to it

anyway---not because one might just succeed, but assuming one will

not. As an instance of the latter kind, consider Frederick

Douglass's famous recollection of his confrontation with the 'slave

breaker' Covey. Douglass reports that

... the cowardly tyrant asked if I 'meant to persist in my

resistance'. I told him 'I did mean to resist, come what might';

that I had been by him treated like a brute, during the last six

months; and that I should stand it no longer. (Douglass 1855,

244, emphasis in the original)

Implied in Covey's question is the threat of reprisal should

Douglass persist in his resistance, as well as the certitude that,

eventually, Covey would win---Douglass was after all a slave in an

entrenched and brutal system of chattel slavery. Nevertheless,

Douglass fought back. As a matter of fact, Covey's threat was

empty, and Douglass successfully defended himself: Covey failed to

beat Douglass on this occasion, and he never harmed him again. But

this might not have been the case, as Douglass acknowledges. Covey

might have punished, persecuted, or even killed him. Yet Douglass

planned to resist 'come what might'---in defense or futility---and

his justification for this was that he had been gravely wronged and

that he would permit such wrongs 'no longer'.

Douglass's declaration to Covey is, beneath all else, a refusal. By

promising to fight back, and then by doing so, Douglass said 'no'

to Covey's treatment of him. This expression of rejection, in words

and deed, was called for regardless of the success of Douglass's

resistance to Covey.

In moments of circumspection, Statman and Frowe make gestural

remarks that approach this view. Both, that is, characterize acts

of futile resistance as expressive acts which express refusal to an

attacker. Here is Statman:

Concrete acts of resistance are needed in order to communicate to

the aggressor, to ourselves, and to an actual or potential

audience that we are not just passive objects to be trodden upon.

(Statman 2008, 669)

And Frowe:

When we think about what it is that such [futile] harms try to

convey---a refusal to be passive, a refusal to be complicit,

a means of asserting oneself as a person worthy of better

treatment---it seems that ... to manifest such an attitude ... is

what constitutes the defense of one's moral standing. (Frowe

2016, 167)

Both recognize, that is, the important expressive function of

futile resistance, and both draw a connection between that and the

purpose they take it to serve: insistence upon one's honor,

dignity, or standing.[16]

Crucially, however, these considerations bear no philosophical

weight in the accounts Frowe and Statman offer about what

justifies acts of futile resistance. For them, it is the right to

self-defense, rather than the importance of any expression of one's

humanity, that permits harms against one's attacker.[17]

Although it has gone unremarked upon in the defensive ethics

literature, this idea echoes a long tradition of writing about

protest as a form of resistance to the overwhelming edifice of

racial oppression, particularly under circumstances in which it

cannot be defeated. Here are some signal examples: W. E. B Du Bois

(1904, 523) writes that 'whenever we submit to humiliation and

oppression it is because of superior brute force; and even when

bending to the inevitable we bend with unabated protest'. Bernard

Boxill (1976, 62) writes that 'people do protest their wrongs, even

when it is clear that this will bring no respite and, instead,

cause them further injury' and that such protest is not only

justifiable but required. For Thomas Hill (1979, 97), 'what makes

symbolic protest commendable'---that is, protest when there is 'no

reasonable hope' of averting an injustice, or indeed of bringing

about any beneficial consequences---'is not intended results but

the underlying values expressed'. And Tommie Shelby (2018, 272-73)

writes that 'symbolic impure dissent can be a valuable public act

of protest ... But its value is easily missed if we fail

to recognize that the political morality of dissent includes

noninstrumental elements that are purely expressive'.

What unites these remarks is the idea that protest is the

appropriate response to wrongs that can be neither accepted nor

defeated. We should take these remarks seriously when we think

about the puzzle of futile resistance. My suggestion is that when

people engage in futile resistance, they protest their wrongs. To

protest one's wrongs is to express rejection of one's treatment at

the hands of another---to say 'no', that one should 'stand it no

longer'. This is not defense. It is, rather, what one does when

defense seems sure to fail.

Fitting expression

If an expressive act of protest is not justified as a form of

defense, then by what is it justified? Other discussions of this

idea have adopted the strategy of identifying a value that symbolic

protest realizes, then arguing that the importance of that value,

or the duty to realize it, is what justifies any harm involved.[18]

These strategies, however, are vulnerable to counter-productivity

objections as well as to the concern that they could not capture

enough instances of intuitively permissible futile resistance.

By contrast, I do not claim that protest is justified in virtue

of the value it realizes or a duty it satisfies. Instead, I

propose that protest, understood as an expression of rejection,

is justified when and because it is the fitting response to

circumstances of futility. In other words, it is what is correct,

appropriate, proper, apt, and called for when facing a threat of

wrongdoing one cannot overcome.

I take the fitting to be a basic normative category[19]---one which

is, in virtue of this fact, not amenable to deeper explanation or

analysis. However, like other basic pieces of normative machinery,

it can be helpfully described in other terms. Much as the reason

relation is commonly described, though not analyzed, as the

relation of counting in favor between a fact and an action, we can

describe the fit relation as one of matching or suiting between two

objects. More precisely, fit (of the variety that is of interest

here) is the relation that stands between an object and a response

to that object when, as Howard (2018; following Brandt 1946 and

others) puts it, 'the object merits---or is worthy of---that

response'. As I use the term, whenever we say that something is the

'fitting' response, we can equivalently say that it is 'correct',

'appropriate', and other synonyms. For example, gratitude is the

correct response to kindness, and blame is the appropriate response

to what is blameworthy.

Fitting responses are, normatively speaking, called for or

demanded, and so yield a pro tanto reason in favor of so

responding. But they also appear to bear a distinctive normative

status. This status is distinctive at least inasmuch as it seems to

be stronger than mere permission (one is not merely permitted to

respond to a kindness with gratitude) but also clearly weaker than

requirement, duty, or obligation (one is not required to blame the

blameworthy). The fitting, in other words, is not merely a form of

value, nor is it a form of duty.[20]

The question of what range of things can be fitting

responses---(emotions? attitudes? acts?)---has been given many

answers, and it remains controversial how fitting responses relate

to moral judgment and to reasons for action.[21] These are deep

waters which, however, can be largely avoided here. For in many

contexts, particularly within the domain of interpersonal morality,

expression is itself understood to be directly subject to standards

of appropriateness, or fit.[22] In response to a kindness, for

example, not merely the attitude of gratitude but its expression is

what is called for. It is appropriate to give thanks, usually by

saying 'thank you'. To put the point another way, even if one feels

grateful---that is, possesses the emotion gratitude---to fail to

express one's thanks is a way of failing to meet the normative

standard to which gratitude is subject. This is the kind of claim I

make when I claim that protest is the fitting response to

the circumstances of futility. Protest is expressive. Such an

expression is itself called for, I believe, over and above any

further claims we might make about the fitting attitudes or

emotions that may underly or be reflected in it.

Importantly, such expression is not limited to expression in the

form of speech. Just as we can do things with words, we can say

things with acts. Indeed, engaging in expressive acts can be an

important way of adequately expressing oneself. In response to some

deep acts of kindness, for example, acts of thanks may be needed in

order to adequately express the depth of one's gratitude---a

thoughtful gift or a deep bow, say---because merely saying 'thank

you' may not be enough. In this way, certain expressive acts may be

called for as a matter of adequacy, which is to say as a dimension

of fit.

My claim is that justified acts of futile resistance are like this.

They are expressive acts that are fitting and adequate to the

circumstances they respond to; and because they are fitting, they

are, normatively speaking, called for. When Douglass stands up

to Covey's tyranny, saying---with his words but also with his

fists---that he has been 'by him treated like a brute' and that he

will 'stand it no longer', he correctly responds to Covey's

treatment of him. This response is what is adequate to and called

for in the circumstances. This is, I claim, what justifies

Douglass's decision to fight back, 'come what might'.

This idea is, I think, plausible enough on its own. In what remains

here, however, I shall attempt to substantiate it, first by

describing and discussing some of the necessary conditions for

fitting protest, then by making some remarks about what may make

acts of futile resistance fitting in these cases.

Necessary conditions

To see what is distinctive about the protest view, it will help to

compare it with the status defense view.

As I have said, my claim is that permissible acts of futile

resistance, understood as expressive acts of protest, are justified

when and because they are fitting. By contrast, the principles

of defensive ethics require that defensive acts be necessary,

proportionate, and correctly directed (i.e. meeting constraints of

liability). While these standards are different, there is less

difference here than these formulations might initially suggest.

For one thing, an act of protest can likewise be fitting only if it

is proportionate to what is protested.[23] It would not fit, for

example, to protest some social slight with disproportionate

reprisal. For another, an act of protest can be fitting only if it

is correctly directed. It would not fit to protest one's wrongs

against one who is not liable for them.[24] In this way, the

protest view includes corresponding principles of proportionality

and liability as necessary conditions for fit.

Indeed, I take expressive acts of protest to be fitting only when

they are directed by the person who protests at the person, or

collective, who is responsible for what is protested against.

Shouting into the void is not fitting protest, even if it may be

other things (such as cathartic or poetic).[25] Protesting against

wrongs committed by S (the police) by directing one's protest at P

(one's fellow citizens) is appropriate only when the latter bear

some liability for the wrongs committed by the former.[26]

The matter of necessity is more complex. Recall that according

to the necessity condition on defensive action, only those

acts which are necessary to avert a threatened or ongoing

wrongful harm---those which represent the least harmful effective

means---are permissible. There are, as I have suggested previously,

really two issues of independent concern here. The first has to do

with the successful avoidance or mitigation of a wrongful threat or

attack. This is simply about the achievement of the goal towards

which defensive action is basically oriented. An act which cannot

achieve S cannot be necessary to achieve S. The second issue has to

do with ensuring that the least harmful means of defense is chosen

from among available effective alternatives; in other words, it has

to do with the avoidance of gratuitous harm. If two acts could

achieve S, then necessity licenses only the act which is least

harmful.

Notice that if this same standard were applied directly to acts of

protest, very little would be permitted. This is because very

little is needed to successfully express rejection of a wrong. To

utter 'no', for instance, will often suffice. Even raising one's

voice, and a fortiori most expressive acts, would therefore be

gratuitous.

But this train of thought misunderstands necessity as applied to

protest, because it misunderstands the basic aim of expression.

The basic aim of fitting expression is not the achievement of

successful expression. Rather, it is the achievement of adequate

expression. As Anderson writes,

The basic form of an expressive norm is: act so as to adequately

express attitude B toward Z. (Anderson 1995, 33)

When we say that it is fitting to express one's gratitude, not just

any words of thanks will do; we mean that adequate thanks are

demanded. Likewise, when we say that an apology is called for, we

mean that an adequate expression of regret is called for. In this

way, for an act of protest to be fitting, more than what is

strictly necessary to express rejection will often be demanded. An

act of protest can be fitting only if it adequately expresses

rejection of the wrong in question.

This is because adequacy is in many contexts a central dimension

of fit. Here are some further examples of what I have in

mind. Sympathetic members of dominant groups are often said to

inadequately protest the treatment of subjugated groups. The meek

are sometimes said to fail to adequately protest their own

downtroddenness. And again, in other contexts, we may fail to

adequately express our thanks, our regret, our love, and many other

things besides. In all of these cases, the charge of a failure of

adequacy is that one has not done enough to express oneself, or

otherwise not done so properly, where 'enough' and 'properly' can

be analyzed here only in terms of fit between the expression and

its object (between an act of protest and the thing protested).

In this way, the requirement of adequacy places a lower bound

on fitting action, whereas necessity places an upper bound on

defensive action. Adequacy too, then, is a necessary condition on

fittingness.

Now, if adequacy sets a lower bound on fitting acts of protest,

are acts of protest which do less than this (those which are

inadequate) impermissible? This may seem perverse in many of the

cases that motivate the puzzle of futile resistance. Surely rape

victims are not required to protest their wrongs by engaging

in futile resistance, and surely the politically oppressed are

permitted to opt for the restrained but strategically optimal

course.

While the protest view does imply that in such circumstances,

adequate protest is called for, this falls short of the further

implication that milder forms of protest are impermissible.

For one thing, this is because (as mentioned already) there is not

a straightforward relationship between the deontic categories of

the permitted and the required and the normative category of the

fitting. Fitting acts are more than merely permitted, but they are

less than required. (It is called for, and of course permitted, but

not required that one praise the praiseworthy.)

For another thing, victims in the circumstances of futility may

have a prerogative to do less than would adequately protest their

wrongs. It is often only victims themselves (if anyone) who would

be wronged by such a failure, so they may plausibly waive any

complaint against themselves for not doing more.[27] This answer

also squares with the intuition that when protesting on another's

behalf, one really can fail to do enough, since the duty in such

cases is other-directed.

Furthermore, if the adequacy condition does partly ground a duty

to resist, it is surely one that interacts with and may be

overridden by other moral and prudential considerations. Since

futile resistance often carries with it risk of further wrongs,

victims may permissibly choose not to protest their wrongs in order

to avoid compounding them.

A related concern is that even if it is admitted that violent

protest is a fitting response to wrongs one cannot overcome, it

mightn't be the only fitting response. King's Selma-to-Montgomery

marches, for example, like Gandhi's earlier Salt March, were

powerful non-violent expressions of protest against conditions of

severe oppression. To use violence in such circumstances, according

to this objection, remains gratuitous.[28]

It is worth emphasizing that acts of non-violent resistance are

often extremely costly to those who participate in them, as the

histories of Indian independence and the American civil rights

movement demonstrate. Many were severely beaten or died in service

of these ends (see Miller 1937; Eckelmann 2008). But the costs are

not only physical. As Gandhi writes, non-violence is 'an intensely

active, ... inward force' that is 'rooted in internal strength' and

'must be consciously exercised' (Gandhi 1942, Volume I:68); 'it

means the pitting of one's whole soul against the will of the

tyrant' (Gandhi [1920] 1999, 135).[29] In other words, the internal

strength involved in non-violent protest is another kind of

substantial cost, over and above the costs imposed by the attacker.

In this way, non-violence is often more costly or difficult than

violent resistance to the same wrong. Victims are not morally

required to bear these costs in order to prevent harm to their

attackers.

In some cases, however, non-violent resistance might be no more or

less costly to victims than violent resistance, yet it may be

thought to do just as well as an apt expression of protest. In such

cases, why is violence not gratuitous?

The answer, I believe, involves complex issues concerning the

fittingness of non-violent protest which I can only partly enter

into here. My suggestion, in brief, is that non-violence is

actually not a fitting response in such cases. As I explain in

detail in the next section, I take the fittingness of protest to be

grounded in the way that it correctly responds to the moral

attitudes conveyed by a wrongdoer, along lines first suggested by

Strawson (1962). The justification of violent resistance lies,

I claim, in its being the merited reaction in such cases.

Non-violent resistance, by contrast, is most often characterized as

a way of directing a gracious attitude of love towards one's

attacker[30]---an attitude that, strictly speaking, they do not

merit. Indeed, part of the power of non-violence may be in the

way that it 'turns the other cheek' rather than does what is

fitting.[31] If this is right, then the availability of a gracious

response, like the availability of self-sacrificing responses, does

not render the fitting resort to violent resistance gratuitous.[32]

To say that an act of protest is fitting is, on my view, to say

that it is proportionate, correctly directed, and adequate to the

wrong protested. This explains why victims engaged in futile

resistance may do more than say 'no' or 'stop' to their aggressors.

Sometimes, when a wrong is severe enough, words may not be enough,

and only an act---and a forceful one at that---will do to

adequately protest it. This also helps explain why some feel they

must resist even when doing so may make them worse off. On the

protest view we can also claim, with Statman and Frowe as with

Boxill and Hill, that by engaging in futile resistance victims

affirm their dignity, while not also claiming that these are acts

which defend one's dignity in Statman's and Frowe's sense. This is

because, as Boxill (1976, 61) writes, 'when a person protests his

wrongs, he expresses a righteous and self-respecting concern for

himself'. One can, that is, affirm one's dignity by protesting

one's wrongs---without thereby engaging in self-defense.

Fit-making

Since my claim is that justified acts of futile resistance are

fitting acts of protest, a further question is what makes these

acts fitting. I'll explore one answer to this question now.

The question of what makes the fitting fit turns not only on this

question's most general form (a question about the metaphysics of

fit) but also substantially on questions about the nature of

fit's objects. Just as we can learn about what makes thanks or

blame fitting by attending to the nature of gratitude and moral

appraisal, we can attend to basic features of the interaction

between attacker and victim in cases of futile resistance in order

to discover what may make acts of futile resistance fitting in

those cases.

This strategy is supported by the observation that fit and the idea

of fitting response appear closely linked to a central aspect of

interpersonal morality. To see what I have in mind in saying this,

it will help to consider the view presented in Strawson's 'Freedom

and Resentment' (1962).

Strawson's central notion there is, famously, that of a 'reactive

attitude', an attitude of moral appraisal---'resentment, gratitude,

forgiveness' and so on (194)---that we take towards someone in

response to the attitudes their behavior manifests towards us. They

are reactions which we judge by whether they are appropriate or

inappropriate to the circumstances---or in other words by standards

of fit.[33] Strawson claims, for example, that resentment is the

appropriate response to 'contempt, indifference, or malevolence',

gratitude the appropriate response to 'goodwill, affection, or

esteem', and forgiveness the appropriate response to contrition

(191).

These attitudes are also united in that they 'belong to involvement

or participation with others in interpersonal human relationships'

(194) and centrally 'involve, or express, a certain sort of demand

for interpersonal regard' (201). It is our participation in

interpersonal relationships that makes the normative standard of

appropriateness and inappropriateness apply. This is, if you like,

Strawson's claim about what makes the reactive attitudes fitting.

The counterpart to the 'participant attitude' is what Strawson

calls the 'objective attitude,' the attitude we take towards

towards someone or something that is not morally appraisable.

Strawson primarily discusses occasions on which we might rightly

take the objective attitude towards someone: when they are, due to

age or mental incapacity, not 'fully responsible agents' (193). But

if there are occasions on which one may rightly regard another with

the objective attitude, there must also be occasions on which one

might wrongly doing so.

The cases of futile resistance we have been discussing are

plausibly of this kind. That is, they may be particularly serious

cases of wrongly taking the objective attitude towards someone who,

on the contrary, merits interpersonal regard. The harms involved in

rape, slavery, and other severe wrongs are bad enough. But to

act in such cases so as to leave one's victim with only one

prudentially rational option---submit---all while ignoring the

clear and urgent claims she has that you treat her differently, is

to commit an additional, very deep wrong. It is to refuse, through

one's actions, to regard her as a member of the moral community

owed interpersonal regard.

This expressed attitude has a fitting response, as perhaps all

directed attitudes do. It is, I believe, rejection of the

attacker's refusal of regard. When someone says (including through

their acts), 'you are not owed interpersonal regard' or 'you are

not a co-member of the moral community', the fitting response is to

insist on the truth that you are. There may, in various cases, be

various ways of expressing this truth.[34] As I have argued,

however, in the most severe cases, to adequately reject one's

subjection to the circumstances of futility may require forceful

expression. Indeed, one's words may simply be inadequate, and an

expressive act, including perhaps a violent act, may be demanded

instead.

These reflections offer a further clue about the difference between

the status defense view and the protest view that is worth

highlighting.

Strawson includes among the class of circumstances in which the

objective attitude is rightly adopted towards another those in

which someone is to be taken 'precautionary account of' (194), or

in which 'reasons of policy or self-protection' (197) centrally

bear. The suggestion, I take it, is that we might understand cases

of self-defense as cases in which a victim permissibly adopts the

objective attitude towards an attacker. I think this suggestion is

correct; if it is, I also think it points to something important

about what distinguishes defense from protest.

To adopt the objective attitude towards people is, Strawson says,

to treat them as something 'to be managed or ... avoided' (194) or

'as creatures to be handled' (197). Importantly, this is compatible

with their being seen as objects of moral concern and indeed as

holders of rights, as the archetypal examples of children and the

mentally infirm demonstrate. To engage with someone from the

standpoint of this attitude is, however, to engage with them

instrumentally: they become, through our acts, instruments of 'our

own interest, or our side's, or society's---or even theirs'

(ibid.).

Put differently,

If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though

you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you

may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with

him. (195)

In this way, for example, throwing a grenade to forestall an

attacker is not fundamentally different from throwing a grenade to

derail a runaway railcar. Though there are moral constraints

governing injury to humans that do not apply to damage to

railcars, the attitude---objective versus participant---adopted by

the defender towards the attacker and the railcar is the same:

their (or its) destruction is not a form of engagement, it is a

means to the prevention of harm.

By contrast, protest, like expressions of blame and gratitude, is a

way of interpersonally engaging---talking, quarreling---with the

person to whom the protest is directed, a way of making an

interpersonal moral claim. This contrast is telling, even granting

proponents of the status defense view their position. If harming

someone is a way to defend one's dignity or standing, then these

harms should be instruments to that end, and their ability to serve

this end should be what justifies them. But if this is so, then it

cannot be claimed, as Statman claims, that acts of resistance 'are

needed in order to communicate to the aggressor ... that we are not

just passive objects to be trodden upon'; nor, as Frowe claims,

that to 'convey' refusal and dignity through futile harms 'is what

constitutes the defense of one's moral standing'. For expressing

these things through one's acts of resistance is a way of

expressing reactive attitudes towards one's attacker, or in other

words of taking up the participant attitude toward them. This is at

odds with the attitude we take towards attackers as means to

defensive ends. If defense involves taking the objective attitude

towards one's attacker, then these forms of expression cannot be

more than incidentally related to the defensive justification of

acts of resistance.[35]

Statman and Frowe might reply that engaging interpersonally with

one's attacker by communicating one's dignity to them is how one

defends one's honor, or standing, and that the distinction between

the objective and reactive attitudes does not apply here. If

fitting expression is defense, however, and defense is affirming

one's dignity, then one wonders whether defense as such is doing

any real justificatory work at all, or why we should appeal to it.

We can instead appeal to the appropriateness of this kind of

expression directly.

Conclusion

I have argued that victims engaged in acts of futile resistance are

engaged in a form of protest, including when their protest takes

the form of violent acts. I have also argued that such protest is

justified when (and because) it is the fitting response to the

circumstances of futility and the wrongs involved therein. If I am

right, then the solution to the puzzle of futile resistance lies

not in the ethics of defense but in the ethics of protest.

I have argued this point narrowly---by claiming that the puzzle of

futile resistance demands a solution, that extant solutions are

inadequate, and that the protest view succeeds where others

fail---but it points the way toward larger conclusions. The view

suggests that protest generally, including therefore political

protest, is regulated by considerations of fit. When we judge acts

of protest, then, it may often be wrong to focus on the ends

achieved (or achievable). It may also be wrong to think, as many

do, that violence is always to be condemned. Rather, it may be the

only response adequate to the circumstances.[36]

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[1] To be 'necessary' in this context is to be (roughly) the

least harmful effective means of defense rather than, as it

might otherwise seem, causally necessary. See Oberman (2020) and

Lazar (2012) on defensive necessity generally. Necessity and

effectiveness are usually taken to apply prospectively: an agent's

defensive act is justified if she reasonably believes the act to be

necessary and effective (see Uniacke 2014). My discussion in

what follows is agnostic between so-called 'internalism' and

'externalism' about liability and necessity (see McMahan 2016;

Firth and Quong 2012; Frowe 2014, ch. 4; Oberman 2020, sec. 7).

[2] Statman (2008), 666-667; Frowe (2016), 159-161; though see

Ferzan (2018) for a partial defense of a desert-based view.

Overland (2011) proposes a forfeiture-based account of the

permissibility of futile resistance. I'll not rehearse objections

to forfeiture views here except to note that the claim 'S lacks a

right against my PHI-ing' is not the same as the claim that my

PHI-ing is morally justified. My view is that imposing harm

requires moral justification even when someone lacks a right

against suffering it, and that not just any 'minor subjective

benefit' (247) enjoyed by the one imposing the harm will do. See

Benbaji and Statman (2021) for detailed criticism of Overland's

view. See also Oberman (2020, 456; citing Draper 2015, 67) and

Quong (2020, 6; citing Fabre 2009), for a similar point about

justification. See Renzo (2017) on forfeiture views generally.

[3] Additional sustained challenges for the status defense view,

and for Frowe in particular, are raised by Bowen (2016) and Ferzan

(2018). Bowen pursues two principal lines of objection: (1) that

Frowe cannot avoid licensing ex-post ('deferred') harms in defense

of a victim's status, and (2) that her view has (to his mind; I

am less sure) intuitively unacceptable implications regarding

permitted counter-defense. Ferzan likewise believes Frowe has not

successfully ruled out deferred harming, and argues that necessary

refinements to Frowe's view---regarding the mechanics and moral

nature of status attacks---point to the conclusion that acts of

futile resistance are actually expressive rather than defensive---a

point Bowen also notes, and a point with which I of course agree.

The two objections I raise below for Statman and Frowe are distinct

from those raised by Bowen and Ferzan, and my elaboration of a view

that takes expression to be central to the justification of acts of

futile resistance goes substantially beyond the suggestions offered

by those authors.

[4] Discussions of the ethics of defense often explicitly limit

their objects to these things. See Coons and Weber (2016) and the

authors in that collection.

[5] All this is pace Steinhoff (2015), who appeals to ordinary

language to justify a broad notion of defense as anything amounting

to resistance. He does not, however, consider counterexamples such

as those mentioned here.

[6] Appiah (2010) says that honor is not 'part of morality' but is

'allied' with it. Kumar and Campbell (2016) analyze it as a 'moral

attitude' having to do with respect that can 'hinder or aid moral

progress'. Krause (2002) treats it as a political concept that sits

uneasily astride liberal values and likewise can be used in service

of moral or non-moral ends.

[7] Oberman (2020) raises an aligned concern for Statman's view: In

many more cases than Statman allows, 'there is no reason to assume

that a victim's honor needs defense' (451) since anyone with an

'ordinary sense of self' can be 'sufficiently secure in her own

standing that [an] Attacker cannot threaten it' (n. 16).

[8] Bowen (2016, 90-91) makes a different burden-shifting argument

against the status defense view. Ferzan (2018, 691-92) also wonders

whether 'attacks on honor' are 'just culpability by another name'

and offers some considerations in favor of that conclusion.

[9] For more on proportionality, see Uniacke (2011). Note that the

proportionality principle is concerned only with excessiveness

which arises in virtue of the comparison between the seriousness of

the defensive act and the attack it averts. A defensive act can

also be excessive in virtue of being unnecessary to the achievement

of a defensive end. This is of course the concern of the necessity

principle.

[10] Must Frowe take these threats to be additive? After all, they

threaten quite different objects. But ordinary (physical) threats

do combine, and I can see no reason for denying that these threats,

as proper objects of defensive action, combine as well. The

challenge may be posed as a dilemma: either these threats combine,

in which case Frowe faces the proportionality objection I raise in

this section, or the threats do not combine in virtue of their

different objects, in which case the need for Frowe to explain why

these objects are both proper objects of defensive action is even

more acute. I thank a referee for pressing this point.

[11] Frowe (2016, 167) writes, 'If ... the moral standing-based

justification for harming supervenes upon the existence of the

primary threat, this entails that once the primary, physical threat

is over, the threat to moral standing (notice: not the harm to

moral standing) is also over'. Of course, this dependency claim

might be doubted with respect to all relevant cases, for it seems

plausible that one's honor, dignity, or moral standing could

continue to be threatened even when a corresponding primary threat

fails or is defeated. (See Bowen 2016, 86-87, for criticism of

Frowe's supervenience argument in this vein; and see Ferzan 2018,

692-93, for a similar objection.) I shall argue that Frowe's view

faces serious objections whether or not we grant this dependency

claim.

[12] Intuitions about proportionality vary widely, and assigning

precise proportionality weights to imagined cases can sometimes

seem ridiculous. To help see the force of the objection, however,

imagine the following case:

An attacker, motivated by feelings of hatred, violently beats a

helpless victim---a physical attack commensurate in seriousness

to injury requiring long-term use of a wheelchair. The manner of

this attack also represents an attack on the victim's status

that is very serious---40% as bad as the physical assault

itself---commensurate in seriousness to significant long-term

pain.

Let's stipulate that neither attack alone is proportionate to

death, but that taken together they are. Frowe is committed

to the view that while neither attack alone is sufficient to

license deadly defense, together they are---such that were killing

possible, it would be permitted. It is difficult to understand

this commitment other than as a serious revision to ordinary

proportionality judgments.

[13] Alternatively, Frowe might argue that it is not our overall

judgments about proportionate force that must be revised but our

view of those judgments' components. We have not noticed, she might

say, that in many ordinary cases, proportionality depends on a

compound of what would be proportionate in response to both primary

and secondary (status) threats. But if this were so, we should

notice clear intuitive differences in what would be a proportionate

response to otherwise similar attacks with differing status

components---being beaten by someone who rains down slurs and yells

'you are a cockroach!' versus someone who beats you simply in

order to take your money, for example. But such differences are

not intuitively apparent (to me, anyway). Moreover, rather than

being a significant revision to proportionality judgments, this

would instead be a significant discovery about the nature of

proportionality. This too would demand greater justification than

Frowe provides. My thanks to a referee for encouraging me to

clarify this point.

[14] To be clear, few think that proportionality requires anything

like simple equivalence between the seriousness of a defensive harm

and the attack it responds to, and that is not my suggestion here.

However, the thought that it requires, in light of various relevant

deontic considerations, a rough commensurability between the two is

common. (See e.g. Rodin (2011, 80); McMahan (2017, 131).)

Others hold the view that a proportionate defense may be much more

serious than the threat it responds to. For instance, Quong

suggests at one point that a defensive harm four times as serious

as the threat it averts could be proportionate. His view is that

proportionality is determined by the 'stringency' of the right a

threat would violate, i.e. what it would take to justify imposing

equivalent harm on an innocent bystander (Quong 2020, 109).

However, if status threats themselves violate defensible rights,

then a version of the objection I have made here will still arise.

(Frowe's own view of what proportionality substantively permits is

far less permissive than Quong's (see Frowe 2016, 166-67).)

[15] Frowe (2016, 162) says as much: 'The moral standing-based

justification for harming is appealing because it captures our

sense that victims need not be passive in the face of attacks that

they cannot avert'.

[16] Ferzan (2018, 693-94), reflecting on Frowe, makes the

suggestion explicit: 'perhaps defending honor is more expressive

than defensive ... 'fighting back' has intrinsic expressive value'.

Similarly, Bowen (2016, 90), reflecting on Statman, writes that 'I

think ... there is expressive value realised when victims defend

themselves, even when they know that this defence is not going to

avert the physical threat they face'. Neither, however, develops

the proposal substantially beyond this suggestion. (Nor, in my

view, do we need to appeal to the murky idea of intrinsic

expressive value.)

[17] Although it may seem tempting, the two thoughts cannot be

simply combined into the view that expression of status values is

defense and that therefore the right to self-defense covers such

expression. If defense of one's status just is ('constitutes')

manifestation of an attitude of refusal, then no 'concrete acts of

resistance' would be necessary to accomplish this defense: merely

saying 'no' would be enough. Moreover, if we appeal to the

morality of expression in order to explain why expressive acts are

permitted, we gain nothing by adding that these acts 'constitute[]

the defense of one's moral standing'; we should instead appeal

directly to the norms governing expression, as I suggest we do. My

thanks to a referee for encouraging me to address this point.

[18] For instance, Boxill argues that protest serves evidentiary

value, to oneself, of one's own self-respect, and Hill argues that

protesting injustice satisfies a duty to dissociate from evil.

[19] See Berker (2022); Howard (2019). It is worth emphasizing,

however, that my argument here does not depend on any particular

view about the relationship between the category of the fitting and

other basic normative categories or concepts.

[20] For more on this topic, see again Berker (2022, especially

sec. 4).

[21] D'Arms and Jacobson (2000) and Shoemaker (2017) make important

recent contributions regarding this question. On the question of

whether acts can be directly fitting, Howard (2018, n. 2) offers

some brief remarks and historical references.

[22] Elizabeth Anderson is an important standard-bearer of the

tradition that recognizes fit applies directly to expression, even

if this is taken to be ultimately in virtue of the way expression

outwardly manifests fitting attitudes (see Anderson 1995; Anderson

and Pildes 2000, 1506-8).

[23] That proportionality is a necessary condition for fit is also

noted by (among others) D'Arms & Jacobson (2000, 74) and Srinivasan

(2018, 130).

Is the protest view is vulnerable to the same additivity objection

leveled at the status defense view in sec. 3.2? For when one could

successfully defend oneself (by doing PHI), might one not also

permissibly protest one's wrongs (by doing PSI), thereby doing

additional permitted harm to one's aggressor (PHI + PSI)? But

because defense and protest are different kinds of response to

wrongdoing, regulated by different principles, defensive acts

and acts of protest do not straightforwardly combine. (On the

non-additive nature of fitingness facts, see also Maguire (2018).)

[24] For example, it was important that the actions taken in

Detroit's Uprising of 1967 targeted shops and buildings in Detroit

rather than just across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

[25] If fitting protest is (as I have suggested) normally

directed at a wrongdoer, what if the wrongdoer refuses to listen,

or communication otherwise fails? Directed expression can be

appropriate, I believe, even when 'robust' communication is not

achieved. To say something to someone does not require that they

listen, and if they do not listen, it is not the same as having

said something to no one, or as having said nothing. Indeed, it may

be that what matters is just that the target of one's expression

could listen. Think here of expressive theories of punishment: if

an offender refuses to hear their punishment's insistence that they

have done wrong, it seems no less worth saying. But if the offender

could not hear the message, then what would be the point? (I set

aside, of course, views on which the expressive aim is to say

something to the victim or to society.)

[26] One might also worry that the protest view cannot account for

the apparent permissibility, in some cases, of killing in protest.

If fitting protest must be directed, how could one express anything

to someone whom one kills? But the protest view does not (normally)

license killing. When one has the ability to kill, one also has the

ability to defend oneself. Protest is, I have suggested, the

fitting response to wrongs one can neither permit nor overcome.

When threatened wrongs can be overcome, expressive acts no longer

seem clearly demanded.

Not all cases are like this, however. Suppose one is under the heel

of an oppressive machine that one cannot topple, but that one could

dismantle some small part of the machine in protest, perhaps by

killing one of its agents. Surely even lethal resistance may be

called for in some such cases? The answer depends on whether one

can express something to someone whom one kills, or else (say) to a

collective agent of which they are a part. It also depends, in the

latter case, on complex questions of individual liability for

collective wrongs. If these conditions are met, then the protest

view might indeed license killing. If not, then killing could not

be fitting---but this strikes me as a natural limit to the protest

view. I thank a referee for pressing this point.

[27] In some cases, victims may owe it to themselves to do more and

may be open to criticism for failing to do so. Think of charges

like 'I really should have stood up for myself'.

[28] I thank a referee for pressing this objection.

[29] King (1958, 90) makes similar claims, e.g.: '[Nonviolence] is

ultimately the way of the strong man. ... The method is passive

physically, but strongly active spiritually'. See also King (1963).

[30] See e.g. King (1958, ch. 6). King there recasts Gandhi's

metaphysical notion of satyagraha using the Christian language of

love, but the ideas are much the same.

[31] If non-violence is not a fitting response to certain

wrongs---wrongs which, on my view, call for forceful expressions

of protest---is it (even pro tanto) wrong to respond with

non-violence? This too may seem deeply counterintuitive. My view is

that on the contrary, in such cases it is permissible to choose

non-violence for the same sort of reason that it's permissible not

to blame even when blame is called for, or to let go of one's anger

even when anger is appropriate. These are, as it were, permissible

acts of grace, and a general account of the moral dynamics of grace

will explain their permissibility in these cases. (See e.g.

Pettigrove (2012).)

[32] One might also opt, all things considered, for non-violence

for strategic reasons (Sharp 1973), for religious reasons (e.g.

Gandhi 1951), or as a method of moral repair (Zheng 2021). But

these are independent considerations which do not bear on the

gratuitousness of violence as a fitting form of protest.

[33] Strawson's view is a locus classicus of modern work on

fittingness in the moral domain. Scanlon (1986, 2008), Smith (2012,

2015), and Darwall (2006), among others, all develop Strawson in

this direction. Shoemaker (2017) explicitly presents a fittingness

interpretation.

[34] It might be thought that, even if rejection of this attitude

is the fitting response to it, an inner attitude of rejection might

suffice. As argued earlier, however, in many paradigm cases

of interpersonal response, a merely fitting attitude would be

inadequate. When one owes thanks or apology, it is not enough to

feel thankful or apologetic, one must express one's feeling to the

person towards whom it is felt. To fail to say thank you, or sorry,

is in an important way to fail to give thanks, or apologize, at

all. Very serious wrongs are no different in this respect. When we

say that it is fitting to insist on the truth that you are owed

interpersonal regard, this also means that it is fitting to say so

to the person who would deny you it. My thanks to a referee for

pressing this point.

[35] One might take the objective attitude towards an attacker

while also trying to appeal to them on moral grounds, or take a

not-fully-objective attitude towards them (as we do with children).

But the possibility of mixed cases does not undermine the general

point that the basic orientation of defense is (as we might say)

'objective' whereas protest is 'participant oriented'.

[36] Many people have helped me with the ideas presented in this

paper. I am especially grateful to Selim Berker, James Brandt, and

two referees at MIND for their helpful and detailed comments. For

thoughtful discussion, I am also grateful to friends, colleagues,

teachers, and audiences at Harvard University, LMU Munich, the

Central European University, to Holly Dykstra, and to Lavender

McKittrick-Sweitzer and her social and political philosophy seminar

at Butler University.