Rights and Resistance: Interpersonal and Political Implications of Our Rights

Rights and Resistance features ten essays by Christopher Heath Wellman on our moral rights, and the measures we may take to protect them. In addition to offering original accounts of various rights, in these essays Wellman considers how we may permissibly enforce our moral claims against others on both the individual and political levels. Virtually everyone agrees that we may defend our rights with only necessary and proportionate force, but should we accept these restrictions even when our resistance would be unnecessary or disproportionate only because a wrongdoer is employing overpowering force? What about citizens who endure political injustice?

Although it is no longer fashionable to insist that we must obey the laws of an illegitimate regime, most theorists remain reluctant to condone forcible resistance against a legitimate government. Given that states can be fully legitimate without being perfectly just, prohibiting resistance against legitimate regimes requires oppressed citizens to simply endure injustices at the hands of the state. How are we exhibiting fidelity to justice if we constrain innocent victims whose moral rights are being trampled in these ways?

This volume analyzes interpersonal issues alongside political questions in the hopes that if we begin with clear, intuitive ideas about interpersonal morality, we might make important progress tackling complex issues in political philosophy. Wellman argues that it is crucial to properly understand our pre-institutional rights and correlative duties. These rights leave space for institutions to create further rights and duties, but they place important limits on the kind of legitimate authority those institutions can possess. Even if conventions play an ineliminable role specifying the contours of our property rights, for instance, the moral dominion we enjoy over our self-regarding affairs restricts what states may do to and require of us. Ultimately, Rights and Resistance challenges us to reconsider the boundaries of moral and political resistance, urging a deeper understanding of the rights and duties that shape our interactions and the limits of state authority.

Christopher Heath Wellman is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Liberal Rights and Responsibilities, Rights Forfeiture and Punishment, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (with Phillip Cole), and (with Andrew Altman) A Liberal Theory of International Justice.