Politically Motivated Property Damage

The Harvard Review of Philosophy 28:89-106 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Can politically inspired property damage or destruction be justified? This question is hardly of mere academic interest, in light of recent political protests in Hong Kong, the USA, and elsewhere. Against some contemporary writers, I argue that placing property damage under an open-ended rubric of uncivil disobedience does not generate the necessary conceptual and normative distinctions. Drawing on Martin Luther King, Jr., I instead argue that property damage should not be equated or conflated with violence against persons; it also takes a variety of quite different forms. Anyone hoping to pursue politically motivated property damage should meet preconditions whose stringency will be determined by a key question: Do their acts generate or at least plausibly relate to violence against persons? Our answer to the question provide some space for legitimate, politically motivated property damage. Although some theories of property resist the strict delineation of violence to persons from property damage I defend, they fail to capture the realities of property ownership in existing societies, including the USA and, as such, do not undermine my defense, under existing conditions, of limited property damage.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,551

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Property, Persons, Boundaries: The Argument from Other-Ownership.Hugh Breakey - 2011 - Social Theory and Practice 37 (2):189-210.
Owning the Natural World.Derek Shaw - 1996 - Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder
Do Property Rights Presuppose Scarcity?David Faraci - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (3):531-537.
Cultures and cultural property.James O. Young - 2007 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (2):111–124.
Why Metaphysics Matters: The Case of Property Law.Ben Ohavi - 2024 - Law and Philosophy 43 (4):367-391.
Self-Ownership, Labor, and Licensing.Daniel C. Russell - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (2):174-195.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-12-16

Downloads
137 (#162,642)

6 months
35 (#112,652)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

“Political disobedience and the climate emergency”.William E. Scheuerman - 2021 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 48 (6):791-812.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references