I want to talk about your most recent work, a book called when
all else fails, the ethics of resistance to state injustice.
What is the moral parity thesis? Good, Sadia, the moral parity
thesis is the claim that the conditions under which.
You are able to resist. Injustice conducted by a
government official, even one acting in the capacity of their
office, are exactly the same as the conditions under which
you're allowed to resist me. So basically, there's one set of
rules of self-defense and one set of rules for when you're
allowed to use violence or subterfuge or deceit or other
things to defend other people from injustice.
And that same set of rules applies to government agents as
it does to defendants against civilians.
They are one in the same, so government agents are not owed.
Any greater? Uh, they.
So the reverse. That thesis I think I'm arguing
against is what you might call the special immunity clear
thesis, which says that government agents, either when
they're working within their office or not, or maybe just
democratic government agents. But some government agents enjoy
a kind of special immunity against resistance and actions
to resist their injustice. So in that, like, if I were to
try to kill you right now just for the hell of it, because I'm
having a bad day and I'm misbehaving, everyone thinks you
be allowed to defend yourself against me and that other people
be allowed to intervene to defend you against me.
But most people think that if a police officer has a bad day and
starts beating the crap out of somebody, that you just have to
stop and let them do it. You can complain later.
You can file, maybe you should get there should be a formal
investigation, but you're not permitted to an intervene
violently. You're not permitted to lie to
the government, you're not permitted to resist them except
under really extreme circumstances.
And so the book, the simple claim is just.
Whatever you can do in self-defense or defense of
others against anything that I, Jay Brennan, do you can do
against the US president's race. So Bernie Sanders was actually
asked about, you know, what do you think about all this
excessive force that we see because of people with cell
phones and whatnot? And he says that we need to
peacefully. His general response was we need
to act peacefully through the judicial system and we also need
to make sure we have training for the officers.
So why? So maybe we shouldn't talk about
resisting, we should talk about these other mechanisms for
change. How does a professor, Brendan
respond to that? I mean I wish if I were.
Faster my feet. I'd change my guitar amplifier
background to that meme that has like, little girl going.
Why not both? And everyone picks her up.
Because I think it's important we disambiguate 2 questions
here. One is what's the best mechanism
for stopping a systematic problem?
And the other is what's the mechanism for stopping this
particular problem right now. So imagine you take the case of,
like, there's evidence to say college fraternities have an
unusually bad drinking culture that leads to an excess of of
date rape. And then imagine a guy is about
to, like, date rape a girl and she thinks about violently
resisting him because he's using violence against him.
And then imagine Bernie Sanders shows up.
I'm not saying he would say this, but.
G shows up and says, hold on. You know, there's this whole
problem of rape culture and date rape culture and a systematic
explanation for why these sorts of behaviors take place.
If we wanna fix fraternity culture, you punching this guy
and running away isn't gonna fix that.
What's gonna it's gonna do is like maybe make him more violent
in the future for perhaps. And and what we really need to
do is like shut down fraternities or reform them or
have better education and have a better kind of civic culture
that eliminates rape culture. He could say all that stuff and
he's talking about what does it take to fix the system.
Ethnic problem. It will require probably
systematic changes, but that doesn't mean that you have to
suffer the injustice at that moment, or that you have to
permit someone else to suffer that injustice.
Like if a police. If you wanna fix police officers
like as a whole, then shooting this particular police officers
are unlikely to do that. But you're not obligated to
suffer the consequences or permit someone from committing
an injustice just because it won't fix the systematic
problem. She would be justified in
resisting rape. You would be justified in
resisting arrest. Or resisting the excess of
violence, or whatever else it might be.
No. Yeah, no.
Oh, oh. You're free, yeah.
Will be good. OK, OK, help me.
Please call me. Ohh.
No.