Recently Published Book Spotlight: When All Else Fails

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. He is the author of 10 books, including Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, with Phil Magness (OUP 2019), In Defense of Openness (OUP, 2018), with Bas van der Vossen, and Against Democracy (PUP, 2016).

What is your work about?

When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice defends a simple thesis: Whatever right of self-defense, or to defend others, that you have against me, you also have against state agents, even agents acting ex officio and in accordance with the law. I argue this holds even if you yourself are a government agent who has promised to do certain things and follow orders in exchange for money.

In contrast, many people seem to believe in what I call the Special Immunity Thesis, which holds that the conditions under which you may exercise self-defense or act in defense of others are much more tightly constrained when the wrongdoer/perpetrator is a democratic government agent

My basic strategy in the book is to examine every plausible argument for the Special Immunity Thesis, and then show these arguments fail. By default, I argue, we should assume that government agents and the rest of us morally equal unless we have strong reasons to think otherwise. No such reasons are available.

For instance, people claim that government agents enjoy special immunity because they have authority and legitimacy, which ordinary people lack. But this argument faces two problems. First, it’s unclear whether government agents have any authority, period, since the arguments to that effect are so bad. Second, even if agents have a kind of general authority, say to set some taxes or speed limits, that’s not relevant—what needs to be shown is that they have the specific authority to commit severe rights violations or impose severe harms and wrongs, the very actions you would be permitted to use deception, sabotage, or violence to stop if they were committed by a civilian. No one has come close to demonstrating that.

If I’m right—that you have the same right to defend others from government agents that you have to defend them against me—this has radical implications. It means certain government agents may whistleblow and share state secrets. It means you may resist—violently—arrest for anything that shouldn’t be a crime and which carries a serious penalty. It means you may violently escape prison if mistakenly convicted. It means you could kill cops in a situation like the Rodney King beating. It means you could assassinate democratic executives who are about to launch unjust wars or wrongful military strikes, even if doing so merely delays the strike a few days. It means you may sabotage government property which is being used to commit severe injustices or rights violations. It means that in some cases politicians may lie to stupid or ignorant voters, that jurors can engage in nullification, and that judges can in many cases do what’s right rather than what the law says.

You can read a precís of the book at Reason Magazine. You can listen to a radio interview with audience call-ins here.

Does your analysis hold just for individual interactions, or can it be applied to collective action as well (i.e. an oppressed people have the right to defend themselves violently against oppressors)? What implications do your views have for movements like Occupy, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter, the Alt-Right, and related movements?

The right of self-defense or to defend others goes something like this: You may use violence or deceit to stop an aggressor when you reasonable believe that you or others are in imminent danger of suffering serious harm or a serious rights violation at the aggressor’s hands. People accept this broad outline; what they dispute is where to draw the lines on some of the terms in the principle, such as just what counts as “imminent danger”, “reasonable belief”, or a serious-enough harm.

There’s nothing in the right to self-defense or to defend others that specifies the defenders must be individuals rather than groups of individuals. If my five buddies and I see a mugger trying to rob someone, the group of us may intervene. By extension, if a group of people see police choke Eric Garner to death, they may put down their cell phone cameras and intervene. (Doing so is morally permissible but dangerous; the police will probably send a SWAT team to murder you.)

We should be careful about extending this to related but different cases. You engage in self-defense when you fight back against the bully as he pushes you. You engage in self-defense if you escape prison when convicted incorrectly or unjustly. If, on the other hand, you beat up the bully a year later, when he isn’t threatening anyone, or you attack the prison guards after you’ve been released, you aren’t engaging in self-defense, but instead in revenge, retaliation, or private punishment.

I support Black Lives Matter, but they’re not to my knowledge engaging in self-defense so defined. They’re a protest movement trying to induce social change, including changes in what the laws are and in the way they are administered. So, their actions go beyond the scope of the book, though I do discuss some of the trade-offs between different kinds of resistance. Perhaps a better example would be the Black Panthers, at least some of whom armed themselves and were prepared to fight back against oppression. Some of their actions are justified by the book, while some actions (such as the confrontation on Apr. 6, 1968) fall outside the scope of what I discuss.

Who has influenced this work the most?

Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back and Charles Cobb, Jr’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed were the two most important history books I read before writing this book. Both provide strong evidence that the later non-violent portion of the black civil rights movement was successful only because in early stages, blacks violently resisted white oppression. Most people today unknowingly accept sanitized, inaccurate story about the respective roles of violent resistance and strategic peaceful civil disobedience in promoting black civil rights.

Among philosophers, I was heavily influenced by Michael Huemer’s Problem of Political Authority. Most laypeople and many philosophers believe governments have the right to rule and can induce in us an obligation to obey. If so, then there must be some special features or set of features which explain why governments and their agents have these two moral powers. Mike’s basic strategy is to say something like this: “You, the statist philosopher, say that what imbues government with these special powers is F. Well, here’s an instance where a non-governmental agent has F, and yet the agent obviously doesn’t have authority or legitimacy. So your putative theory of what imbues governments with authority and legitimacy is mistaken.” He then provides a plausible psychological theory about why belief in authority is so widespread even though every theory of political authority fails.

Why did you feel the need to write this work? How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?

Thanks to smart phones, most people carry a video camera at all times. As a result, we know get numerous documented, filmed instances of police malfeasance and brutality almost every week. You can watch police officers on YouTube shoot or beat handcuffed, prostrate men. You can read about cases where police officers kill innocent people during no-knock raids on the wrong house. Some well-known incidents like these helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement. At the same time, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and Eric Snowden published various state secrets. We have numerous stories of drone strikes killing innocent people. The US government continually engages in civil rights violations.

I was curious: What are we allowed to do in response to government’s wrongful actions?

Note that I’m not trying to produce a theory of social change in this book. Rather, I’m interested in the question of what you’re morally allowed to do to stop an immediate injustice from happening, rather than the question of what kinds of behaviors are most effective in produce systematic changes in policies or governmental behavior.

Consider an analogy: If a woman kills her would-be rapist in self-defense, she’s trying to stop that rape, not end the patriarchy, end rape-culture, or promote women’s rights. Similarly, if you were to kill (former) police officer Michael Amiott when he was pummeling the defenseless Richard Hubbard III in the back of the skull, you would be trying to save Hubbard from possible death, not trying to end systematic police brutality, reduce racism, or improve Euclid Ohio’s traffic management systems.

Violent or deceitful defense actions are often useful ways to stop immediate injustices from occurring. They are less effective as means of producing lasting social change or policy changes.

What writing tips do you have? What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?

In the 2018-2019 academic year, I’ll have three books come out, two with Oxford and one with Princeton. I’m on pace to continue that kind of output up for the next few years. I have five books under contract right now, and I’ll turn in four of those five for review in the next six months. I also have a number of papers under review and am working on other independent papers.

The secret to such productivity, I think, is simple: I write every working day and I make writing a priority. I write for three hours each morning before I answer emails, do any class prep, do any service work, referee papers, read books for my own erudition, or do anything else. I make sure to do 20 hours of writing each week, weekdays only. (I don’t work weekends.) If you can maintain such discipline about writing, you can easily write a book plus a bunch of articles every year.

Of course, I have a 3 course/year teaching load. Obviously someone teaching 8 courses/ year won’t have the luxury of spending that much time writing, at least not without working overtime. But then most such professors aren’t expected to produce as much research either. I don’t mean to denigrate anyone who lacks the freedom I enjoy.

However, I would advise graduate students working on their dissertations to get into a routine like this. Write first. Then read. Then revise.

It’s helpful to see writing and editing as separate process. I think many people get writer’s block out of a fear of path dependency: I must get this sentence/concept/idea perfect in my head before I dare write it down, because once I write it down, I’m stuck. Instead, you need to see writing itself as a mode of thinking. Writing is the way you figure stuff out, not the thing you do after you’ve figured things out. First, just write a bunch of stuff. Most of it will be bad. But then trust yourself to come back and delete the bad stuff. Take the good ideas and go with those.

I learned this early on as a grad student. My first “good” publication was a response to Julia Driver’s excellent book Uneasy Virtue. (I now pretty much agree with her, but at the time, I was unfortunately more of an Aristotelean.) I wrote a 30-page paper responding to her work and presented it at a utilitarianism conference she helped organized. She had a good response to my critique. I went home and deleted something like 29.5 pages of material. I took the one paragraph with a big idea and turned that into an entirely new paper. A few months later, it was accepted at PPR. I learned then that the most important key on the keyboard is the delete button.

My other bit of advice is to write for the ages. Try to answer questions you think are genuinely interesting, rather than currently sexy. Try to answer questions you think will be of interest in 100 or 500 years. If you work on stuff that genuinely intrigues you, it won’t feel like work.

How has your work influenced your teaching?

I think a large amount of my work—such as Markets without Limits or Against Democracy—concerns debunking symbolic arguments for various policies and institutions. I want to measure things by their results, not by the “meaning” philosophers and others impute to policies, and certainly not by the supposedly noble intentions of the policy advocates or the philosophers who come up with the basic ideas.

In most of my classes, I ask students to complete a semester-long project where they have to do something good of their own design. They are free to do anything: Start a for-profit business, improve the campus atmosphere, run a philanthropic project, raise money for charity, etc. Some of the results have been amazing: One group started the Unsung Heroes club, which has spread to multiple campuses across the country, and which was featured on over a dozen national news programs. Another helped teenagers in a poor part of the world start their own business and, as a result, lifted those families out of poverty. One group raised over $15,000 to help Mocoa mudslide victims. Another started an iPhone repair business that was grossing something like $30,000 or more a semester.

I ask students to answer a number of difficult philosophical, economic, and business-related questions about their project. One of the main things they have to do is to subject their project to cost-benefit analysis. They must find a way to commensurate their inputs (time, effort, any money they use which my research institute provides) with their outputs, and then demonstrate their project added value to the world. There’s no bullshitting their way out of this. (“We raised awareness!” Response: “Great, did you raise $1000 and 40-hours worth of awareness?”) I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m teaching students that it’s not the thought that counts, but I would say I’m helping them see that the thought doesn’t count for very much.

You can read more about this project in a forthcoming paper: “Teaching Business Ethics through Student-Created Entrepreneurial Action” at The Journal of Business Ethics Education.

What’s next for you?

I mentioned before that When All Else Fails is about how we have the permission to resist government injustice, but it’s not a theory of or a prescription for social change. One of my current projects is instead about social change. Chris Surprenant of the University of New Orleans and I are writing Injustice for All: How Financial Incentives Created America’s Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System and How to Fix It for Routledge. In that book, we argue that main thing which explains why the US has such an unusually disastrous criminal justice system isn’t racism (like progressives say), the drug war (like libertarians claim), or family collapse and crime (like conservatives say), though all three of these things are indeed major contributors. Rather, we argue, the institutions of criminal justice create bad incentives; the existing rules (about how people are paid, about how they get their jobs, about who pays for what) incentivize voters, politicians, police, district attorneys, judges, private and public correctional guards, and everyone else involved to act badly. We try to explain just why this happens and then offer as much advice we can about how to change the incentives to produce better outcomes. Some of our advice involves changing who pays for what, or about creating new checks and balances, or using different mechanism for appointing people to work in the system. (For instance, we need to stop electing judges and district attorneys.) Some of it involves reducing the scope of criminal justice and the way people get punished.

You can ask Jason Brennan questions about her/his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.