March 06, 2017
Promises and the Right to Resist Injustice
I’ve been working on a project called When All Else Fails: Resistance to State Injustice. The thesis is of the book is simple: We have exactly the same rights of self-defense and…
Posts filed under self-defense
July 08, 2016
The Fall-Out Objection: Self-Defense vs. War
(Please excuse typos. I’ve got to write this quickly.) We don’t know all the facts yet. But it appears that during the Dallas protests, some attackers killed a number of police…
April 30, 2016
In Defense of Defensive Violence against Government Agents
Suppose you see a cop using excessive force. Can you use violence to stop the cop? Suppose it’s wrong to criminalize pot. Can you violently resist a drug arrest?…
December 01, 2014
On Killing Government Agents in Self-Defense: Authority and Legitimacy
In my paper “When May We Kill Government Agents? In Defense of Moral Parity,” I argue that the conditions under which we may justifiably kill democratic government agents, acting ex…
November 26, 2014
Retaliation and Extortion: More on the Morality of Killing Government Agents in Self-Defense or Defense of Others
Here is another excerpt from the current draft of “When May We Kill Government Agents?”. This section appears after I’ve debunked (or tried to debunk) a range of arguments for…
November 25, 2014
When May We Kill Government Agents? In Defense of Moral Parity
That’s the title of a paper I’ll be presenting at the Morality of Aggression conference in Tucson in early December. I haven’t done any work on this in recent months,…