Candice Delmas's "A Duty to Resist"

Candice Delmas is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Northeastern University and the Associate Director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program. She previously served as a Dworkin-Balzan Fellow at New York University School of Law from 2016 to 2017. She works in moral, social, political, and legal philosophy.

Delmas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil, and reported the following:

Page 99, which is situated toward the end of the third chapter, is representative of the book. The book argues for political obligations in the face of injustice, on the basis of several grounds that philosophers commonly use to support the moral duty to obey the law. It also conceptualizes and defends uncivil disobedience, that is principled lawbreaking that deviates from the standard norms of civility (publicity, nonviolence, nonevasion, and decorum).

Chapter 3, “Justice and Democracy,” uses the natural duty of justice—which requires supporting just institutions—to defend a duty to resist injustice in basically legitimate states. The chapter develops a typology of injustice ranging from democratically sanctioned violations of basic rights to official abuses, and defends a series of political obligations corresponding to the contexts of injustice identified: obligations to engage in education efforts, protest (including civil disobedience), covert disobedience, vigilante self-defense, and whistleblowing. Page 99 discusses this last political obligation:

The duty of justice can thus support special obligations to blow the whistle against public ignorance, even if doing so involves breaking the law by disclosing state secrets. Snowden’s leaks educated the public about digital rights infringed upon by government surveillance; and the Panama and Paradise Papers exposed systematic tax evasion by the wealthy and politicians’ conflicts of interest. Government whistleblowing can remedy significant cognitive deficits in the public sphere, thereby enabling a deliberative environment. It can also frustrate injustice by halting or diminishing the wrongdoing in question as soon as it is exposed. These functions make it a particularly powerful way of addressing democratic deficits (in the form of public ignorance) and enhancing justice and the rule of law (when the state uses secrecy in order to conceal its own wrongdoing). Government whistleblowers can thus appeal to the duty of justice to justify their actions.

On my view, government whistleblowing should not be understood as a kind of civil disobedience. Indeed it often fails to satisfy the basic norms of civility, especially publicity (the Panama Papers were leaked anonymously) and nonevasion or acceptance of legal sanctions (Edward Snowden sought asylum in Russia to escape U.S. prosecution). In addition, whereas civil disobedients protest laws without being able to change them, government whistleblowers unilaterally undo state secrets, imposing serious national security risks in the process. It is thus important to keep these two kinds of principled disobedience distinct—and to evaluate them using different lenses.

Learn more about A Duty to Resist at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue