Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Sit-ins, blockades and lock-ons are common protest tactics. They work partly because continuing the operation or attempting quickly to remove activists risks injuring or killing them. Injuring or killing the activists is morally wrong, so the targets of the protest must (temporarily) yield to the activists. This appears to be a case of moral blackmail: the blackmailer makes it so that the blackmailed must either do what the blackmailer wants or do something morally wrong. Here, protestors appear to exploit the targets’ tendency to be moral. Can such tactics be justified? I contend that they can insofar as such activists merely add further reason to what their targets already have decisive reason to do. The problem of moral blackmail, however, complicates the morality of primarily communicative civil disobedience.
Source: Analysis
Author: Ten-Herng Lai
Institution: University of Stirling
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,866
OpenAlex ID: W6959850409