The answer is always going to be “it depends.” A more interesting question might be: when is it effective? It seems like when an act of violence doesn’t achieve anything good and a reasonable...
The answer is always going to be “it depends.” A more interesting question might be: when is it effective?
It seems like when an act of violence doesn’t achieve anything good and a reasonable person wouldn’t have expected it to achieve anything good, then it’s easy to say it wasn’t justified. But answering that is going to depend on specifics, so it’s hardly worth discussing in the abstract.
Denying the right to resistance poses a far greater threat to a decent society than embracing it. It would mean that people would be expected to passively endure the most extreme injustice. Slavery, genocide, apartheid – all of these would have to be tolerated by bystanders and endured by victims. To deny the right to resistance collapses the very notion that we have rights at all, because they would ultimately rest on the discretion of those with power.
The answer is always going to be “it depends.” A more interesting question might be: when is it effective?
It seems like when an act of violence doesn’t achieve anything good and a reasonable person wouldn’t have expected it to achieve anything good, then it’s easy to say it wasn’t justified. But answering that is going to depend on specifics, so it’s hardly worth discussing in the abstract.