The Epistemic Dimensions of Civil Disobedience

IF 2.9 1区 哲学 Q1 ETHICS
Alexander Bryan
{"title":"The Epistemic Dimensions of Civil Disobedience","authors":"Alexander Bryan","doi":"10.1111/jopp.12310","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, protests against the public health measures instituted by governments have become a familiar sight on the streets of major cities across the world. The policies these protests challenge, and the kinds of claims made by protestors, have differed across jurisdiction and have evolved through different stages of the pandemic, with protests across Europe and North America focussing at various times on the supposed injustice of initial lockdown measures, the rollout of vaccines, and the implementation of vaccine mandates. A significant number of these protests have been, in various respects, legally prohibited; many of the earlier protests violated emergency legislation restricting the number of people or households permitted to gather in public, while later actions include occupations of the offices of media companies and refusal to pay taxes.1 At least some participants in these protests have been animated by false claims that the pandemic is a hoax, or that it is in some sense deliberate, or that it is being exploited by politicians and businesses to implement policies of radical social control. Many participants and commentators have described some of these actions as forms of civil disobedience; a placard displayed by one protestor in Bristol in November 2020 stated that ‘civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt’,2 while a Canadian anti-lockdown campaigner compared his refusal to provide details of his vaccination status in a coffee shop to the actions of Rosa Parks.3 Similar claims have been made regarding the protests in Ottawa in late 2021/early 2022.4 These protests raise important questions regarding the conditions for permissible civil disobedience in a pandemic specifically,5 but also highlight some more general questions for theories of civil disobedience. Some of these relate to the use of civil disobedience in the pursuit of ‘anti-democratic and illiberal goals’, such as whether broadly liberal theories of civil disobedience effectively apply across these cases as well as the justice-promoting paradigm examples.6 In this article I focus on a slightly different issue: is the justification of civil disobedience conditional on dissenters satisfying some epistemic conditions? If so, what kinds of conditions? Perhaps surprisingly, the two most directly relevant philosophical literatures suggest quite different answers to these questions. Within broadly liberal theories of civil disobedience they have received little direct attention. Such accounts generally view the justification of civil disobedience as primarily relating to the conduct of the dissenters during and after disobedience. The justification of an act of civil disobedience just relates to the question of whether agents act in accordance with certain constraints, which may include non-violence, civility, and accepting punishment. However, there are some accounts within this literature, such as those developed by Ronald Dworkin and Kimberley Brownlee, which incorporate explicit epistemic constraints. These identify these constraints as tests by which we can determine whether an agent's claim qualifies as a conviction, and thus as a commitment which deserves a special kind of consideration in liberal democratic societies. As such, the constraints are viewed as relatively minimal tests of coherence rather than as tests of epistemic responsibility. The literature on political epistemology presents a very different picture. Political epistemologists disagree about the nature and scale of the epistemic obligations or responsibilities of citizens in a democratic polity. But they broadly agree that citizens do have some epistemic responsibilities when they act politically in various ways, including voting, engaging in public discussion, and even dissenting. If citizens in a democratic polity have responsibilities to act in epistemically responsible ways when voting in elections or discussing political issues in public, it might seem straightforward that these responsibilities will also constrain their civil disobedience. I argue that the political epistemologists are right that the justification of our political acts is sensitive to our epistemic conduct, and outline a particular way of incorporating epistemic constraints into theories of civil disobedience. This article has three aims. The first of these is to show that even those liberal theories of civil disobedience which incorporate explicit epistemic requirements generate an implausible picture of what is wrong with misguided disobedience. Incorporating epistemic conditions solely within the concept of conviction produces an implausible picture of conviction itself and relies on an untenable view of how claims of conviction relate to a political order. My second aim is to provide a more plausible alternative. I argue that agents have a defeasible epistemic obligation to their fellow citizens to take steps to minimise the risk that the claim under whose name they intend to disobey is mistaken. Like the obligation of dissenters to ensure that their actions inflict as little harm as is compatible with a reasonable chance of success, the obligation to take these steps bears on the justifiability of a civilly disobedient action. I show how this obligation is continuous with the epistemic obligations of ordinary political action, but made stronger by virtue of the different justificatory conditions of the burdens generated by disobedience. Finally, I aim to show that this account does not impose unreasonably stringent restrictions on dissenters. The stringency of this obligation is sensitive to competing considerations: appearing in a stronger form when agents have meaningful and broadly equal political influence under just institutions and in a reasonably healthy epistemic environment, and when the proposed disobedience imposes more severe costs; and in a weaker form, and in some cases no longer applying, in contrary circumstances. Exploring the factors which can mitigate this obligation in different circumstances has the additional benefit of illuminating the imperfect epistemic conditions in which most dissenters act and the relevance of such conditions to questions of the justification of civil disobedience. Before proceeding, a note on my use of the concept of ‘civil disobedience’. This concept, especially in its most influential articulations, has been subject to a range of important critiques from political theorists and philosophers in recent years, including that it functions as a ‘counter-resistance ideology’ in assuming the basic legitimacy of the constitutional order and repackaging the strategic commitments made by those engaged in paradigmatic disobedience campaigns (such as the Civil Rights struggle in the US) as necessary features of permissible disobedience.7 Although I find aspects of these critiques compelling, I am more optimistic that a conception of civil disobedience which retains some of the central dimensions of the liberal conception can, when revised to include a wider range of disobedient actions and a broader range of complaints, and conceived as just one, rather than the sole, form of permissible disobedient action, continue to be a useful category. In lieu of a full defence of the concept here, I note two reasons for sticking with a broadly conventional use of it in this article. The first is that my focus is on the kind of action which is the precise target domain of the concept–that is, ‘principled and deliberate breach[es] of law intended to protest unjust laws, policies, institutions, or practices, and undertaken by agents broadly committed to basic norms of civility’, with ‘civility’ in this context interpreted variously in terms of conditions such as nonviolence, publicity, and the willingness to accept punishment or other forms of public accountability.8 I think there is good reason to think that some of the arguments presented apply to some other ‘uncivil’ forms of principled disobedience, but I do not argue for that here. Second, the prominence of calls for civil disobedience and the use of the term itself by those engaged in the kinds of protests I outlined at the start of the article, as well as many others, indicates that scholarly disputes regarding the coherence and application of the concept have not undermined the normative standing it is granted in the public sphere. Many of these protestors take themselves to be engaged in permissible civil disobedience; whether this claim is true or false, and why, has important implications for democratic theory and practice.9 Few philosophical theories of civil disobedience incorporate explicit, substantive epistemic components. No meaningful epistemic requirements feature in the influential liberal accounts developed in the 1960s and early 1970s by Hugo Bedau and John Rawls. These theories claim that agents engaged in civil disobedience must act conscientiously (that is, with a demonstrated recognition of the authority and legitimacy of the legal and political institutions of the state) and in support of a claim which is their ‘sincere and considered opinion’, but clearly do not intend these requirements to have epistemic content. The former can be satisfied simply by acting in a way which indicates ‘fidelity to law’, such as accepting punishment for one's act of dissent, while the latter is most plausibly interpreted as a requirement of good faith which rules out merely opportunistic or strategic disobedience.10 Those working within (and, indeed, against) this tradition have by and large maintained this focus on the conduct of dissenting agents and the justice of their cause. Our acts of civil disobedience can go wrong in many ways, according to these accounts, but not by virtue of our epistemic conduct. Some liberal accounts, though, have incorporated resources which enable them to say otherwise. These build epistemic constraints into the familiar component of conviction. The most influential contemporary account of this kind is developed by Kimberley Brownlee, who constructs an unusually rich and expansive account of the epistemic conditions internal to the concept of moral conviction. On her account, the moral right to engage in civil disobedience is correlative to the duty that society holds to respect the facts that persons have capacities for reasoning and for developing deep moral convictions and that coercing agents to follow the law instead of expressing those convictions is deeply burdensome.11 Respecting our capacity for deep moral conviction generates ‘a limited moral right of conscientious action as our expression of our conscientious convictions’, and a further right protecting the cognitive and psychological pre-conditions for the development of these convictions.12 The ‘communicative principle of conscientiousness’ lies at the heart of Brownlee's account of deep moral conviction, and generates limits as to the kind of action which can properly be termed ‘civil disobedience’.13 There are four elements of this principle: (a) a consistency condition; (b) a universality condition; (c) a non-evasion condition; and (d) a dialogic condition. As Brownlee notes, both (a) and (d) have ‘cognitive elements’. The consistency condition requires a level of consistency between our judgements, motivations, and conduct. If agents are not sufficiently consistent in the application of their stated convictions–say, if an agent launches a campaign against blood sports, but regularly participates in fox hunts–their claim to hold that conviction will itself appear to be dubious. What is important to note for our purposes is the pre-conditions for such consistency noted by Brownlee: that convictions ‘must meet minimal standards of intelligibility, internal coherence, and evidential satisfactoriness’.14 Although she does not provide a comprehensive account of these standards or what it means to meet them, it is notable that in this discussion Brownlee remarks that ‘conscientiousness is not about the correctness of moral judgements, but about the consistency of moral judgements and the credibility of factual assumptions that have moral implications’.15 The dialogic condition also directly concerns the nature of the beliefs of the dissenter, and the processes by which those beliefs are tested. Conscientiousness not only requires us to hold our beliefs sincerely, but to engage in discussion of them with others and defend them against certain kinds of criticism.16 Civil disobedience cannot be communicative unless we are willing to engage in this kind of dialogue. Nor can others be reasonably expected to regard our views as sincerely and seriously held if we are not willing to defend them publicly and rationally.17 But the dialogic condition is not satisfied if we merely defend our claim automatically, without due regard for our interlocutors as reasoning moral agents or the willingness to take their claims and criticisms seriously; this would be a crude performance of dialogue rather the real thing. As Brownlee puts it, ‘having a sincere intention to engage others in a dialogue means that we do not wilfully immunize ourselves from their communicative efforts.18 Our readiness to heed and interpret them correctly is necessary for communication to occur’. In at least some cases, satisfying the communicative principle requires dissenters to both have a particular stance towards the object of their conviction, and to be willing to sincerely subject their beliefs to criticism and, if such criticisms are sufficiently powerful, revision. beliefs that fail to meet the logical and evidentiary standards for conviction cannot claim the degree of toleration or respect that genuine convictions might claim because they lack both the determinate content and reflection that confirm our psychological and emotional investment. Without determinate content and reflection, our declared convictions are flighty, capricious, incoherent things that warrant neither respect nor toleration from others. Brownlee's account is unusual in being explicit about the epistemic conditions it relies on, and in the resultant richness with which those conditions are drawn. Nevertheless, it fails to provide a plausible explanation of what kinds of epistemic considerations should influence our determinations of the permissibility of an act of civil disobedience, and why. It is implausible to claim that all the epistemic requirements bearing on the moral right to civil disobedience are internal conditions of serious moral conviction. Doing so mischaracterises agents who fail to meet these conditions of intelligibility, evidential satisfactoriness, and so on. On Brownlee's account, agents who so fail are simply doing something other than civil disobedience. But it seems very strange to view those who make claims which fail to meet these standards in their protests against COVID-19 public health measures – which they themselves regard as civil disobedience, and which appear to fit into most definitions of the category fairly easily – not as launching unjustified civil disobedience, or civil disobedience which they do not have a right to perform, but as simply doing something else. Brownlee's account then misdescribes the epistemic wrong involved in these cases. The flip side of this is that Brownlee's account also gives too much weight to conviction, granting a moral right to engage in civil disobedience on the basis of any genuine conviction without any reference to the broader political context or the competing values that might bear on the case. There must, though, be some considerations which bear on the question of whether an agent has this right which go beyond an analysis of the conviction of the dissenter. If not, this seems to leave the very establishment of political authority in a precarious position.20 Brownlee herself seems to regard this as a question of justification rather than right, and places faith in the constraints of conscientiousness to ensure that dissenters act responsibly.21 Locating the epistemic requirements of civil disobedience exclusively in the concept of conviction leads us to identify the epistemic considerations bearing on civil disobedience as solely introspective. But acts of civil disobedience do not only involve deep moral conviction. They also rely on moral and non-moral beliefs about the world–about the structure of social reality, the kinds of claims being made by other agents, the nature of the political and legal system–which, though always contested, cannot be regarded as a matter of deep and intractable disagreement in the way that religious or political conviction can. We should then reject the idea that limiting the moral right to civil disobedience according to the interests of other agents or society at large is in all cases insufficiently respectful of conscientious conviction. It is therefore implausible to identify the concept of conviction as the site of all of the epistemic constraints bearing on the justification of civil disobedience. Freeing the epistemic demands of a theory of civil disobedience from the inside of a conception of moral conviction enables a more plausible process of determining whether an act of civil disobedience is justified. Viewing these as one of a number of elements bearing on that question, alongside others such as the nature of the political regime, the character of the epistemic environment, the extent to which disobedient agents are able to make their claims through other means, and the weight of competing claims and interests enables us to recognise the epistemic constraints as an independent criterion which can generate different requirements in varying circumstances. What, though, might the epistemic conditions bearing on these determinations actually be? In the next section I advance an alternative to the conviction-based account, in which agents hold (defeasible) epistemic obligations to others which constrain their epistemic conduct prior to engaging in civil disobedience. The idea that agents have epistemic obligations is widely held. On Richard Feldman's definition, these are ‘duties that one must carry out in order to be successful from an intellectual (or epistemological) perspective’.22 My argument does not rely on accepting any general account of these duties, such as that these are duties to believe propositions supported by the evidence available to us, or to behave in ways which maximise true belief. I am concerned only with a relatively minimal subset of these obligations; those obligations agents have to take reasonable steps to avoid holding false beliefs.23 Note that these concern only the process of belief formation and verification rather than the content of those beliefs. It is important to distinguish between purely epistemic obligations and the kinds of obligations with which I am concerned. An example of the former would be a (prima facie) obligation on an agent to believe P if and only if P is supported by the available evidence at the time.24 This is not a moral obligation, but an obligation which is conditional on the pursuit of something like epistemic excellence. Often, though, we have moral or political obligations (as, say, members of a jury) which have epistemic elements, or which impose on us obligations to seek out certain kinds of information, to alter or reflect on our epistemic practices, or to discount certain kinds of information from our reasoning. Sometimes, we come to hold these obligations because we take on particular roles or offices or engage in particular actions or practices. My claim is that we have an obligation of this kind when we seek to engage in civil disobedience. Agents have an obligation to be epistemically responsible–that is, to seek to become informed about important topics, to take steps to avoid forming false beliefs, to be careful in their reasoning, to participate in processes which promote these goals–when voting,25 participating in democratic deliberation,26 or advocating a political view.27 As Candice Delmas has argued, ‘since citizens of a democracy make decisions on the basis of their beliefs, they ought to form their beliefs responsibly’.28 If we don't, we fail to give due weight to the interests of our fellow citizens. Both Delmas and Eric Beerbohm have articulated compelling accounts of this kind of epistemic care as a practice which citizens must engage in to identify and discharge their political obligations more effectively (including, for Delmas, their obligations to engage in various forms of disobedience against injustice).29 There are any number of ways in which we can fail to meet these standards in our regular interactions with our fellow citizens.30 But there are reasons to think that this obligation is especially weighty when citizens are considering engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Those who engage in civil disobedience impose burdens on other citizens by doing so, and imposing these burdens without institutional authorization may, without further justification, be interpreted as a rejection of mutual cooperation between agents as the basis of shared citizenship. I will defend this characterisation before outlining the content of the epistemic obligations I posit in more detail. There are burdens involved in making space for civil disobedience.31 Some of these burdens are financial, based on the initial costs of making space for civil disobedience and the economic consequences of protests.32 Others might involve the obstruction of an agent's capacity to advance important interests or exercise their rights. In either form, the lives of other citizens are often seriously disrupted by such action. Whereas fair-play accounts of political obligation lead us to think of these costs in terms of undeserved advantage or free-riding, no such step is needed to recognise the significance of this distribution of costs. Instead, I suggest simply that those who involuntarily assume these burdens are owed a justification. Burdens distributed through political institutions can be justified by reference to the value and legitimacy of those institutions (though such justifications will generally fall short when provided in support of unjust policies; in such cases, even the burdens levied by legitimate institutions may count as unjust). An answer of this kind cannot provide a justification for acts of civil disobedience, which are extra-institutional and thus attempt to override or challenge the way in which burdens would ordinarily be assigned. In such circumstances, a justification must be attached to the token of civil disobedience itself, and must be of such a kind that no agent could reasonably object to being forced to carry the burdens the disobedience loads on to them. In the absence of such a justification, a dissenter may reasonably be viewed as indifferent to the claims that others have on her as a member of the community. In many cases, such a justification will be provided through the kinds of claims made in the act of civil disobedience. However any given agent might respond, the burdens taken on by those who are stuck in traffic as a result of civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the urgent need to reduce emissions can be justified by reference to the severity of the injustice being protested and the insensitivity of the democratic process to such claims; similarly, those whose property was damaged in the protests against racial injustice across the US in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd did not have a reasonable complaint against the protestors.33 In speaking of a ‘justification’ offered to those who take on the burdens generated by civil disobedience, we are not then speaking of agreement between actual persons, but rather invoke the contractualist sense of the term whereby acts or principles may be justified on the basis of meeting certain standards of reasonableness.34 It is striking that discussions of the burdens imposed and taken on by those engaged in civil disobedience rarely engage with the epistemic dimensions of civil disobedience. We may reasonably displace burdens (especially, but not exclusively, when they have been unjustly distributed in the first place) on to others if we engage in civil disobedience which is in support of a just cause, in which we do not impose excessive costs on others, and following which we take responsibility.35 My suggestion is that the justification of these acts rests not only on the justness of the cause and the insensitivity of political institutions to the claims being made, but also on protestors' epistemic conduct. We can easily imagine civil disobedience which serves good causes or is undertaken in conditions which permit such action but which other agents may have legitimate complaints against because of the conduct of dissenters; if, without sufficient reason, considerably more harm than necessary is inflicted to achieve a good chance of success, or if those burdens fall disproportionately on the least advantaged.36 In the same way, legitimate complaints may be made against agents who do not take sufficient epistemic care in advance of participating in civil disobedience.37 We are now in a position to identify the nature of this obligation more precisely. My claim is that the legitimate interest of agents in not being subject to significant unjustified burdens gives rise to an obligation held by those seeking to engage in civil disobedience to take reasonable steps to minimise the risks that they are mistaken about the claims under whose name they disobey. It is prima facie wrong for an agent to foreseeably inflict significant burdens on others through disobedience if that agent has not taken reasonable steps to ensure that the cause which they aim to promote in their actions is in fact truthful and just.38 It would indicate disrespect for those agents who involuntarily take on the burdens generated by those actions. How might agents operating in a reasonably healthy epistemic context satisfy this obligation? They will seek to corroborate and check the factual claims on which their case relies through trustworthy media sources, eyewitness reports, or experts in the relevant field. They may engage in dialogue with others (ideally including a diverse range of perspectives) to come to a considered analysis of a policy or institutional arrangement. This might include public debate or questioning of public officials or others. On topics which require technical expertise that agents cannot be expected to acquire, they will try and identify experts who are respected within that field and trust in their guidance, though not to the exclusion of other dissenting views within the field (especially on highly contentious issues). They will recognise to some extent those inferences and claims which can and cannot be supported by the relevant forms of evidence, and seek a sound logical basis for their claims. They will respect and recognise others as knowers and treat their relevant personal testimony accordingly. As these examples show, this obligation is not especially onerous even for advantaged agents operating in contexts where information is widely accessible and there is a wealth of independent sources of expertise and experience one can draw on in verifying one's claims. Of course, dissenters generally operate in less healthy epistemic contexts. Even those relatively epistemically advantaged actors can be faced with circumstances in which some of the above ways of acting become unduly onerous, or even impossible. As Boyd Millar has put it, ‘for a belief-influencing action to constitute an epistemic obligation it must be the case that a given individual could reasonably have been expected to perform or omit that action under the relevant circumstances’.39 What epistemic obligations, if any, do agents bear in hostile epistemic circumstances? The obligation I have outlined is, as I show in the next section, sensitive to epistemic barriers that dissenters may face. It is a defeasible obligation which may be weakened or obviated when dissenters are subject to certain kinds of epistemic or pragmatic barriers. Agents who engage in any kind of political action, including civil disobedience, always face some epistemic constraints, such as limited time and resources and incomplete information. Not all such constraints alter the epistemic political obligations of agents. Some, however, do. In hostile epistemic environments, the ‘reasonable steps’ agents can be expected to take will be more modest than those that would apply in better circumstances. In some instances, agents may be released from any such obligation at all. There are (at least) two kinds of epistemic obstacle which can have this effect: oppression and urgency. Oppression can make epistemic checking too difficult or costly for agents to be expected to engage in it to the extent expected in better conditions. The claims that other agents have on dissenters to take epistemic care will in these cases be dissolved by the weightier claims of all individuals in being able to resist severe injustice. My fellow citizen can have no reasonable complaint if I launch an act of civil disobedience without engaging in epistemic checking or corroboration when the public distribution of information is tightly controlled, or I have been prevented from accessing what information is available, or public discussion of political topics is prohibited. Any attempt to act in accordance with the requirements that apply in better circumstances would be supererogatory in these conditions. There are a number of ways in which oppression can have this effect. Firstly, it can make epistemic checking overly costly, or restrict the means by which we might more or less reliably verify claims. This is most obviously the case when the state imposes","PeriodicalId":47624,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Political Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12310","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, protests against the public health measures instituted by governments have become a familiar sight on the streets of major cities across the world. The policies these protests challenge, and the kinds of claims made by protestors, have differed across jurisdiction and have evolved through different stages of the pandemic, with protests across Europe and North America focussing at various times on the supposed injustice of initial lockdown measures, the rollout of vaccines, and the implementation of vaccine mandates. A significant number of these protests have been, in various respects, legally prohibited; many of the earlier protests violated emergency legislation restricting the number of people or households permitted to gather in public, while later actions include occupations of the offices of media companies and refusal to pay taxes.1 At least some participants in these protests have been animated by false claims that the pandemic is a hoax, or that it is in some sense deliberate, or that it is being exploited by politicians and businesses to implement policies of radical social control. Many participants and commentators have described some of these actions as forms of civil disobedience; a placard displayed by one protestor in Bristol in November 2020 stated that ‘civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt’,2 while a Canadian anti-lockdown campaigner compared his refusal to provide details of his vaccination status in a coffee shop to the actions of Rosa Parks.3 Similar claims have been made regarding the protests in Ottawa in late 2021/early 2022.4 These protests raise important questions regarding the conditions for permissible civil disobedience in a pandemic specifically,5 but also highlight some more general questions for theories of civil disobedience. Some of these relate to the use of civil disobedience in the pursuit of ‘anti-democratic and illiberal goals’, such as whether broadly liberal theories of civil disobedience effectively apply across these cases as well as the justice-promoting paradigm examples.6 In this article I focus on a slightly different issue: is the justification of civil disobedience conditional on dissenters satisfying some epistemic conditions? If so, what kinds of conditions? Perhaps surprisingly, the two most directly relevant philosophical literatures suggest quite different answers to these questions. Within broadly liberal theories of civil disobedience they have received little direct attention. Such accounts generally view the justification of civil disobedience as primarily relating to the conduct of the dissenters during and after disobedience. The justification of an act of civil disobedience just relates to the question of whether agents act in accordance with certain constraints, which may include non-violence, civility, and accepting punishment. However, there are some accounts within this literature, such as those developed by Ronald Dworkin and Kimberley Brownlee, which incorporate explicit epistemic constraints. These identify these constraints as tests by which we can determine whether an agent's claim qualifies as a conviction, and thus as a commitment which deserves a special kind of consideration in liberal democratic societies. As such, the constraints are viewed as relatively minimal tests of coherence rather than as tests of epistemic responsibility. The literature on political epistemology presents a very different picture. Political epistemologists disagree about the nature and scale of the epistemic obligations or responsibilities of citizens in a democratic polity. But they broadly agree that citizens do have some epistemic responsibilities when they act politically in various ways, including voting, engaging in public discussion, and even dissenting. If citizens in a democratic polity have responsibilities to act in epistemically responsible ways when voting in elections or discussing political issues in public, it might seem straightforward that these responsibilities will also constrain their civil disobedience. I argue that the political epistemologists are right that the justification of our political acts is sensitive to our epistemic conduct, and outline a particular way of incorporating epistemic constraints into theories of civil disobedience. This article has three aims. The first of these is to show that even those liberal theories of civil disobedience which incorporate explicit epistemic requirements generate an implausible picture of what is wrong with misguided disobedience. Incorporating epistemic conditions solely within the concept of conviction produces an implausible picture of conviction itself and relies on an untenable view of how claims of conviction relate to a political order. My second aim is to provide a more plausible alternative. I argue that agents have a defeasible epistemic obligation to their fellow citizens to take steps to minimise the risk that the claim under whose name they intend to disobey is mistaken. Like the obligation of dissenters to ensure that their actions inflict as little harm as is compatible with a reasonable chance of success, the obligation to take these steps bears on the justifiability of a civilly disobedient action. I show how this obligation is continuous with the epistemic obligations of ordinary political action, but made stronger by virtue of the different justificatory conditions of the burdens generated by disobedience. Finally, I aim to show that this account does not impose unreasonably stringent restrictions on dissenters. The stringency of this obligation is sensitive to competing considerations: appearing in a stronger form when agents have meaningful and broadly equal political influence under just institutions and in a reasonably healthy epistemic environment, and when the proposed disobedience imposes more severe costs; and in a weaker form, and in some cases no longer applying, in contrary circumstances. Exploring the factors which can mitigate this obligation in different circumstances has the additional benefit of illuminating the imperfect epistemic conditions in which most dissenters act and the relevance of such conditions to questions of the justification of civil disobedience. Before proceeding, a note on my use of the concept of ‘civil disobedience’. This concept, especially in its most influential articulations, has been subject to a range of important critiques from political theorists and philosophers in recent years, including that it functions as a ‘counter-resistance ideology’ in assuming the basic legitimacy of the constitutional order and repackaging the strategic commitments made by those engaged in paradigmatic disobedience campaigns (such as the Civil Rights struggle in the US) as necessary features of permissible disobedience.7 Although I find aspects of these critiques compelling, I am more optimistic that a conception of civil disobedience which retains some of the central dimensions of the liberal conception can, when revised to include a wider range of disobedient actions and a broader range of complaints, and conceived as just one, rather than the sole, form of permissible disobedient action, continue to be a useful category. In lieu of a full defence of the concept here, I note two reasons for sticking with a broadly conventional use of it in this article. The first is that my focus is on the kind of action which is the precise target domain of the concept–that is, ‘principled and deliberate breach[es] of law intended to protest unjust laws, policies, institutions, or practices, and undertaken by agents broadly committed to basic norms of civility’, with ‘civility’ in this context interpreted variously in terms of conditions such as nonviolence, publicity, and the willingness to accept punishment or other forms of public accountability.8 I think there is good reason to think that some of the arguments presented apply to some other ‘uncivil’ forms of principled disobedience, but I do not argue for that here. Second, the prominence of calls for civil disobedience and the use of the term itself by those engaged in the kinds of protests I outlined at the start of the article, as well as many others, indicates that scholarly disputes regarding the coherence and application of the concept have not undermined the normative standing it is granted in the public sphere. Many of these protestors take themselves to be engaged in permissible civil disobedience; whether this claim is true or false, and why, has important implications for democratic theory and practice.9 Few philosophical theories of civil disobedience incorporate explicit, substantive epistemic components. No meaningful epistemic requirements feature in the influential liberal accounts developed in the 1960s and early 1970s by Hugo Bedau and John Rawls. These theories claim that agents engaged in civil disobedience must act conscientiously (that is, with a demonstrated recognition of the authority and legitimacy of the legal and political institutions of the state) and in support of a claim which is their ‘sincere and considered opinion’, but clearly do not intend these requirements to have epistemic content. The former can be satisfied simply by acting in a way which indicates ‘fidelity to law’, such as accepting punishment for one's act of dissent, while the latter is most plausibly interpreted as a requirement of good faith which rules out merely opportunistic or strategic disobedience.10 Those working within (and, indeed, against) this tradition have by and large maintained this focus on the conduct of dissenting agents and the justice of their cause. Our acts of civil disobedience can go wrong in many ways, according to these accounts, but not by virtue of our epistemic conduct. Some liberal accounts, though, have incorporated resources which enable them to say otherwise. These build epistemic constraints into the familiar component of conviction. The most influential contemporary account of this kind is developed by Kimberley Brownlee, who constructs an unusually rich and expansive account of the epistemic conditions internal to the concept of moral conviction. On her account, the moral right to engage in civil disobedience is correlative to the duty that society holds to respect the facts that persons have capacities for reasoning and for developing deep moral convictions and that coercing agents to follow the law instead of expressing those convictions is deeply burdensome.11 Respecting our capacity for deep moral conviction generates ‘a limited moral right of conscientious action as our expression of our conscientious convictions’, and a further right protecting the cognitive and psychological pre-conditions for the development of these convictions.12 The ‘communicative principle of conscientiousness’ lies at the heart of Brownlee's account of deep moral conviction, and generates limits as to the kind of action which can properly be termed ‘civil disobedience’.13 There are four elements of this principle: (a) a consistency condition; (b) a universality condition; (c) a non-evasion condition; and (d) a dialogic condition. As Brownlee notes, both (a) and (d) have ‘cognitive elements’. The consistency condition requires a level of consistency between our judgements, motivations, and conduct. If agents are not sufficiently consistent in the application of their stated convictions–say, if an agent launches a campaign against blood sports, but regularly participates in fox hunts–their claim to hold that conviction will itself appear to be dubious. What is important to note for our purposes is the pre-conditions for such consistency noted by Brownlee: that convictions ‘must meet minimal standards of intelligibility, internal coherence, and evidential satisfactoriness’.14 Although she does not provide a comprehensive account of these standards or what it means to meet them, it is notable that in this discussion Brownlee remarks that ‘conscientiousness is not about the correctness of moral judgements, but about the consistency of moral judgements and the credibility of factual assumptions that have moral implications’.15 The dialogic condition also directly concerns the nature of the beliefs of the dissenter, and the processes by which those beliefs are tested. Conscientiousness not only requires us to hold our beliefs sincerely, but to engage in discussion of them with others and defend them against certain kinds of criticism.16 Civil disobedience cannot be communicative unless we are willing to engage in this kind of dialogue. Nor can others be reasonably expected to regard our views as sincerely and seriously held if we are not willing to defend them publicly and rationally.17 But the dialogic condition is not satisfied if we merely defend our claim automatically, without due regard for our interlocutors as reasoning moral agents or the willingness to take their claims and criticisms seriously; this would be a crude performance of dialogue rather the real thing. As Brownlee puts it, ‘having a sincere intention to engage others in a dialogue means that we do not wilfully immunize ourselves from their communicative efforts.18 Our readiness to heed and interpret them correctly is necessary for communication to occur’. In at least some cases, satisfying the communicative principle requires dissenters to both have a particular stance towards the object of their conviction, and to be willing to sincerely subject their beliefs to criticism and, if such criticisms are sufficiently powerful, revision. beliefs that fail to meet the logical and evidentiary standards for conviction cannot claim the degree of toleration or respect that genuine convictions might claim because they lack both the determinate content and reflection that confirm our psychological and emotional investment. Without determinate content and reflection, our declared convictions are flighty, capricious, incoherent things that warrant neither respect nor toleration from others. Brownlee's account is unusual in being explicit about the epistemic conditions it relies on, and in the resultant richness with which those conditions are drawn. Nevertheless, it fails to provide a plausible explanation of what kinds of epistemic considerations should influence our determinations of the permissibility of an act of civil disobedience, and why. It is implausible to claim that all the epistemic requirements bearing on the moral right to civil disobedience are internal conditions of serious moral conviction. Doing so mischaracterises agents who fail to meet these conditions of intelligibility, evidential satisfactoriness, and so on. On Brownlee's account, agents who so fail are simply doing something other than civil disobedience. But it seems very strange to view those who make claims which fail to meet these standards in their protests against COVID-19 public health measures – which they themselves regard as civil disobedience, and which appear to fit into most definitions of the category fairly easily – not as launching unjustified civil disobedience, or civil disobedience which they do not have a right to perform, but as simply doing something else. Brownlee's account then misdescribes the epistemic wrong involved in these cases. The flip side of this is that Brownlee's account also gives too much weight to conviction, granting a moral right to engage in civil disobedience on the basis of any genuine conviction without any reference to the broader political context or the competing values that might bear on the case. There must, though, be some considerations which bear on the question of whether an agent has this right which go beyond an analysis of the conviction of the dissenter. If not, this seems to leave the very establishment of political authority in a precarious position.20 Brownlee herself seems to regard this as a question of justification rather than right, and places faith in the constraints of conscientiousness to ensure that dissenters act responsibly.21 Locating the epistemic requirements of civil disobedience exclusively in the concept of conviction leads us to identify the epistemic considerations bearing on civil disobedience as solely introspective. But acts of civil disobedience do not only involve deep moral conviction. They also rely on moral and non-moral beliefs about the world–about the structure of social reality, the kinds of claims being made by other agents, the nature of the political and legal system–which, though always contested, cannot be regarded as a matter of deep and intractable disagreement in the way that religious or political conviction can. We should then reject the idea that limiting the moral right to civil disobedience according to the interests of other agents or society at large is in all cases insufficiently respectful of conscientious conviction. It is therefore implausible to identify the concept of conviction as the site of all of the epistemic constraints bearing on the justification of civil disobedience. Freeing the epistemic demands of a theory of civil disobedience from the inside of a conception of moral conviction enables a more plausible process of determining whether an act of civil disobedience is justified. Viewing these as one of a number of elements bearing on that question, alongside others such as the nature of the political regime, the character of the epistemic environment, the extent to which disobedient agents are able to make their claims through other means, and the weight of competing claims and interests enables us to recognise the epistemic constraints as an independent criterion which can generate different requirements in varying circumstances. What, though, might the epistemic conditions bearing on these determinations actually be? In the next section I advance an alternative to the conviction-based account, in which agents hold (defeasible) epistemic obligations to others which constrain their epistemic conduct prior to engaging in civil disobedience. The idea that agents have epistemic obligations is widely held. On Richard Feldman's definition, these are ‘duties that one must carry out in order to be successful from an intellectual (or epistemological) perspective’.22 My argument does not rely on accepting any general account of these duties, such as that these are duties to believe propositions supported by the evidence available to us, or to behave in ways which maximise true belief. I am concerned only with a relatively minimal subset of these obligations; those obligations agents have to take reasonable steps to avoid holding false beliefs.23 Note that these concern only the process of belief formation and verification rather than the content of those beliefs. It is important to distinguish between purely epistemic obligations and the kinds of obligations with which I am concerned. An example of the former would be a (prima facie) obligation on an agent to believe P if and only if P is supported by the available evidence at the time.24 This is not a moral obligation, but an obligation which is conditional on the pursuit of something like epistemic excellence. Often, though, we have moral or political obligations (as, say, members of a jury) which have epistemic elements, or which impose on us obligations to seek out certain kinds of information, to alter or reflect on our epistemic practices, or to discount certain kinds of information from our reasoning. Sometimes, we come to hold these obligations because we take on particular roles or offices or engage in particular actions or practices. My claim is that we have an obligation of this kind when we seek to engage in civil disobedience. Agents have an obligation to be epistemically responsible–that is, to seek to become informed about important topics, to take steps to avoid forming false beliefs, to be careful in their reasoning, to participate in processes which promote these goals–when voting,25 participating in democratic deliberation,26 or advocating a political view.27 As Candice Delmas has argued, ‘since citizens of a democracy make decisions on the basis of their beliefs, they ought to form their beliefs responsibly’.28 If we don't, we fail to give due weight to the interests of our fellow citizens. Both Delmas and Eric Beerbohm have articulated compelling accounts of this kind of epistemic care as a practice which citizens must engage in to identify and discharge their political obligations more effectively (including, for Delmas, their obligations to engage in various forms of disobedience against injustice).29 There are any number of ways in which we can fail to meet these standards in our regular interactions with our fellow citizens.30 But there are reasons to think that this obligation is especially weighty when citizens are considering engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Those who engage in civil disobedience impose burdens on other citizens by doing so, and imposing these burdens without institutional authorization may, without further justification, be interpreted as a rejection of mutual cooperation between agents as the basis of shared citizenship. I will defend this characterisation before outlining the content of the epistemic obligations I posit in more detail. There are burdens involved in making space for civil disobedience.31 Some of these burdens are financial, based on the initial costs of making space for civil disobedience and the economic consequences of protests.32 Others might involve the obstruction of an agent's capacity to advance important interests or exercise their rights. In either form, the lives of other citizens are often seriously disrupted by such action. Whereas fair-play accounts of political obligation lead us to think of these costs in terms of undeserved advantage or free-riding, no such step is needed to recognise the significance of this distribution of costs. Instead, I suggest simply that those who involuntarily assume these burdens are owed a justification. Burdens distributed through political institutions can be justified by reference to the value and legitimacy of those institutions (though such justifications will generally fall short when provided in support of unjust policies; in such cases, even the burdens levied by legitimate institutions may count as unjust). An answer of this kind cannot provide a justification for acts of civil disobedience, which are extra-institutional and thus attempt to override or challenge the way in which burdens would ordinarily be assigned. In such circumstances, a justification must be attached to the token of civil disobedience itself, and must be of such a kind that no agent could reasonably object to being forced to carry the burdens the disobedience loads on to them. In the absence of such a justification, a dissenter may reasonably be viewed as indifferent to the claims that others have on her as a member of the community. In many cases, such a justification will be provided through the kinds of claims made in the act of civil disobedience. However any given agent might respond, the burdens taken on by those who are stuck in traffic as a result of civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the urgent need to reduce emissions can be justified by reference to the severity of the injustice being protested and the insensitivity of the democratic process to such claims; similarly, those whose property was damaged in the protests against racial injustice across the US in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd did not have a reasonable complaint against the protestors.33 In speaking of a ‘justification’ offered to those who take on the burdens generated by civil disobedience, we are not then speaking of agreement between actual persons, but rather invoke the contractualist sense of the term whereby acts or principles may be justified on the basis of meeting certain standards of reasonableness.34 It is striking that discussions of the burdens imposed and taken on by those engaged in civil disobedience rarely engage with the epistemic dimensions of civil disobedience. We may reasonably displace burdens (especially, but not exclusively, when they have been unjustly distributed in the first place) on to others if we engage in civil disobedience which is in support of a just cause, in which we do not impose excessive costs on others, and following which we take responsibility.35 My suggestion is that the justification of these acts rests not only on the justness of the cause and the insensitivity of political institutions to the claims being made, but also on protestors' epistemic conduct. We can easily imagine civil disobedience which serves good causes or is undertaken in conditions which permit such action but which other agents may have legitimate complaints against because of the conduct of dissenters; if, without sufficient reason, considerably more harm than necessary is inflicted to achieve a good chance of success, or if those burdens fall disproportionately on the least advantaged.36 In the same way, legitimate complaints may be made against agents who do not take sufficient epistemic care in advance of participating in civil disobedience.37 We are now in a position to identify the nature of this obligation more precisely. My claim is that the legitimate interest of agents in not being subject to significant unjustified burdens gives rise to an obligation held by those seeking to engage in civil disobedience to take reasonable steps to minimise the risks that they are mistaken about the claims under whose name they disobey. It is prima facie wrong for an agent to foreseeably inflict significant burdens on others through disobedience if that agent has not taken reasonable steps to ensure that the cause which they aim to promote in their actions is in fact truthful and just.38 It would indicate disrespect for those agents who involuntarily take on the burdens generated by those actions. How might agents operating in a reasonably healthy epistemic context satisfy this obligation? They will seek to corroborate and check the factual claims on which their case relies through trustworthy media sources, eyewitness reports, or experts in the relevant field. They may engage in dialogue with others (ideally including a diverse range of perspectives) to come to a considered analysis of a policy or institutional arrangement. This might include public debate or questioning of public officials or others. On topics which require technical expertise that agents cannot be expected to acquire, they will try and identify experts who are respected within that field and trust in their guidance, though not to the exclusion of other dissenting views within the field (especially on highly contentious issues). They will recognise to some extent those inferences and claims which can and cannot be supported by the relevant forms of evidence, and seek a sound logical basis for their claims. They will respect and recognise others as knowers and treat their relevant personal testimony accordingly. As these examples show, this obligation is not especially onerous even for advantaged agents operating in contexts where information is widely accessible and there is a wealth of independent sources of expertise and experience one can draw on in verifying one's claims. Of course, dissenters generally operate in less healthy epistemic contexts. Even those relatively epistemically advantaged actors can be faced with circumstances in which some of the above ways of acting become unduly onerous, or even impossible. As Boyd Millar has put it, ‘for a belief-influencing action to constitute an epistemic obligation it must be the case that a given individual could reasonably have been expected to perform or omit that action under the relevant circumstances’.39 What epistemic obligations, if any, do agents bear in hostile epistemic circumstances? The obligation I have outlined is, as I show in the next section, sensitive to epistemic barriers that dissenters may face. It is a defeasible obligation which may be weakened or obviated when dissenters are subject to certain kinds of epistemic or pragmatic barriers. Agents who engage in any kind of political action, including civil disobedience, always face some epistemic constraints, such as limited time and resources and incomplete information. Not all such constraints alter the epistemic political obligations of agents. Some, however, do. In hostile epistemic environments, the ‘reasonable steps’ agents can be expected to take will be more modest than those that would apply in better circumstances. In some instances, agents may be released from any such obligation at all. There are (at least) two kinds of epistemic obstacle which can have this effect: oppression and urgency. Oppression can make epistemic checking too difficult or costly for agents to be expected to engage in it to the extent expected in better conditions. The claims that other agents have on dissenters to take epistemic care will in these cases be dissolved by the weightier claims of all individuals in being able to resist severe injustice. My fellow citizen can have no reasonable complaint if I launch an act of civil disobedience without engaging in epistemic checking or corroboration when the public distribution of information is tightly controlled, or I have been prevented from accessing what information is available, or public discussion of political topics is prohibited. Any attempt to act in accordance with the requirements that apply in better circumstances would be supererogatory in these conditions. There are a number of ways in which oppression can have this effect. Firstly, it can make epistemic checking overly costly, or restrict the means by which we might more or less reliably verify claims. This is most obviously the case when the state imposes
公民不服从的认知维度
在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间,反对政府制定的公共卫生措施的抗议活动已成为世界各大城市街头常见的景象。这些抗议活动挑战的政策,以及抗议者提出的各种主张,在不同的司法管辖区有所不同,并在大流行的不同阶段有所演变,欧洲和北美各地的抗议活动在不同时期集中在所谓的初步封锁措施、疫苗的推出和疫苗任务的执行方面的不公正。这些抗议活动中有相当一部分在各个方面都受到法律禁止;许多早期的抗议活动违反了限制公众集会人数或家庭数量的紧急立法,而后来的行动包括占领媒体公司的办公室和拒绝纳税至少这些抗议活动的一些参与者受到虚假说法的鼓舞,这些说法认为,疫情是一场骗局,或者在某种意义上是蓄意的,或者是政客和企业正在利用疫情来实施激进的社会控制政策。许多参与者和评论员将其中一些行动描述为公民不服从的形式;2020年11月,一名抗议者在布里斯托尔展示的一张标语上写道,“当国家变得无法无天或腐败时,公民不服从成为一项神圣的职责”,2而加拿大一名反封锁活动人士将他在咖啡店拒绝提供疫苗接种情况的细节与罗莎·帕克斯的行为进行了比较。3类似的说法也适用于2021年底/ 2022年初在渥太华发生的抗议活动特别是在流行病中的不服从,但也强调了一些更普遍的问题,关于公民不服从的理论。其中一些与公民不服从在追求“反民主和非自由目标”中的使用有关,例如公民不服从的广义自由主义理论是否有效地适用于这些案例以及促进正义的范例例子在这篇文章中,我关注的是一个稍微不同的问题:公民不服从的正当性是否以持不同政见者满足某些认知条件为条件?如果有,是什么样的条件?也许令人惊讶的是,两种最直接相关的哲学文献对这些问题给出了截然不同的答案。在广泛自由主义的公民不服从理论中,他们很少受到直接关注。这种说法通常认为,公民不服从的正当性主要与不服从期间和之后持不同政见者的行为有关。公民不服从行为的正当性只是与行为主体的行为是否符合某些约束有关,这些约束可能包括非暴力、文明和接受惩罚。然而,在这些文献中有一些描述,比如罗纳德·德沃金和金伯利·布朗利提出的那些描述,其中包含了明确的认知约束。这些规定将这些限制作为检验,通过这些检验,我们可以确定代理人的要求是否有资格作为一种信念,从而作为一种承诺,在自由民主社会中值得特别考虑。因此,这些约束被视为对连贯性的相对最低限度的测试,而不是对认识责任的测试。关于政治认识论的文献呈现出一幅截然不同的图景。政治认识论家对民主政体中公民的认识论义务或责任的性质和规模持不同意见。但他们普遍认为,公民在以各种方式进行政治行为(包括投票、参与公共讨论,甚至持不同意见)时,确实负有一定的认知责任。如果民主政体中的公民在选举投票或公开讨论政治问题时有责任以认知上负责任的方式行事,那么这些责任也会限制他们的公民不服从,这似乎是直截了当的。我认为政治认识论论者是正确的,我们的政治行为的正当性对我们的认识论行为是敏感的,并概述了一种将认识论约束纳入公民不服从理论的特殊方法。本文有三个目的。第一个是证明,即使是那些包含明确认知要求的公民不服从的自由主义理论,也会产生一幅令人难以置信的画面,说明被误导的不服从是错的。仅仅将认识论条件纳入信念的概念中,就会产生一种难以置信的信念本身的图景,并依赖于一种关于信念主张如何与政治秩序相关联的站不住脚的观点。我的第二个目标是提供一个更合理的替代方案。 我认为,行为主体对其公民同胞有一种可行的认知义务,即采取措施,尽量减少他们打算不服从的主张是错误的风险。就像持不同政见者有义务确保他们的行为在合理的成功机会范围内尽可能少地造成伤害一样,采取这些步骤的义务与民事不服从行为的正当性有关。我展示了这种义务是如何与普通政治行动的认知义务相延续的,但由于不服从所产生的负担的不同辩护条件而变得更加强大。最后,我想说明的是,这种说法并没有对持不同政见者施加不合理的严格限制。这一义务的严格性对相互竞争的考虑很敏感:当代理人在公正的制度和合理健康的认知环境下具有有意义和广泛平等的政治影响力时,以及当提议的不服从造成更严重的代价时,这种义务就会以更强的形式出现;在一种较弱的形式下,在某些情况下,在相反的情况下,不再适用。探索在不同情况下可以减轻这一义务的因素,还有一个额外的好处,那就是阐明大多数持不同政见者所处的不完善的认知条件,以及这些条件与公民不服从正当性问题的相关性。在继续之前,请注意我对“公民不服从”概念的使用。这一概念,尤其是在其最具影响力的表述中,近年来受到了政治理论家和哲学家的一系列重要批评,包括它作为一种“反抵抗意识形态”的功能,它假设了宪法秩序的基本合法性,并将那些参与范例不服从运动(如美国的民权斗争)的人所做的战略承诺重新包装为可允许的不服从的必要特征尽管我发现这些批评的某些方面令人信服,但我更乐观地认为,保留了自由主义概念的一些核心维度的公民不服从概念,当被修改为包括更广泛的不服从行为和更广泛的抱怨,并被视为一种,而不是唯一的,被允许的不服从行为形式时,仍然是一个有用的类别。在这里,我没有对这个概念进行充分的辩护,而是指出了在本文中坚持使用它的广泛传统用法的两个原因。第一个是,我的重点是这一概念的精确目标领域的那种行为——即“有原则的和故意的违反法律,旨在抗议不公正的法律、政策、制度或实践,并由广泛致力于文明的基本规范的代理人承担”,在这种情况下,“文明”在非暴力、公开、愿意接受惩罚或其他形式的公共责任等条件下得到不同的解释我认为有充分的理由认为,所提出的一些论点适用于其他一些“不文明”的有原则的不服从形式,但我不在这里争论。其次,呼吁公民不服从和参与我在文章开头概述的各种抗议活动以及许多其他活动的人对该术语本身的使用的突出表明,关于该概念的一致性和应用的学术争议并没有破坏它在公共领域被授予的规范性地位。这些抗议者中的许多人认为自己参与的是被允许的公民不服从;这种说法是对还是错,以及为什么是对的,对民主理论和实践具有重要意义很少有公民不服从的哲学理论包含明确的、实质性的认知成分。在20世纪60年代和70年代初由雨果·贝道和约翰·罗尔斯发展的有影响力的自由主义理论中,没有任何有意义的认识论要求。这些理论声称,参与公民不服从的行动者必须认真行事(即,表现出对国家法律和政治制度的权威和合法性的认可),并支持他们“真诚和深思熟虑的意见”的主张,但显然不打算让这些要求具有认识论的内容。前者可以简单地通过表明“对法律的忠诚”的方式来满足,例如接受对异议行为的惩罚,而后者则最合理地解释为对诚信的要求,它排除了仅仅是机会主义的或战略性的不服从那些在这一传统内工作(实际上是反对)的人总体上保持着对持不同政见者的行为和他们事业的正义性的关注。根据这些说法,我们的公民不服从行为可能在很多方面出错,但不是由于我们的认知行为。 但是,那些在抗议COVID-19公共卫生措施时提出不符合这些标准的主张的人——他们自己认为这是公民不服从,而且似乎相当容易符合这一类别的大多数定义——不是发起不合理的公民不服从,或者他们没有权利执行的公民不服从,而只是做了别的事情,这似乎非常奇怪。布朗利的描述错误地描述了这些案例中涉及的认知错误。另一方面,布朗利的描述也过于重视信念,在任何真正的信念的基础上,给予参与公民不服从的道德权利,而没有参考更广泛的政治背景或可能与此案有关的竞争价值观。但是,对于代理人是否有这种权利的问题必须有一些考虑,这些考虑超出了对异议者定罪的分析。如果不这样做,这似乎将使政治权威本身处于不稳定的地位布朗利本人似乎认为这是一个正当的问题,而不是正确的问题,并相信尽责性的约束,以确保持不同意见者的行为负责将公民抗命的认识论要求完全置于信念的概念中,使我们将与公民抗命有关的认识论考虑确定为仅仅是内省的。但公民不服从的行为不仅涉及深刻的道德信念。他们还依赖于对世界的道德和非道德信仰——关于社会现实的结构、其他主体提出的各种主张、政治和法律体系的本质——这些尽管总是有争议,但不能像宗教或政治信念那样被视为深刻而棘手的分歧。因此,我们应该拒绝这样一种观点,即根据其他代理人或整个社会的利益将道德权利限制为公民不服从,在所有情况下都是对良心信念的不够尊重。因此,将信念概念确定为与公民不服从正当性有关的所有认知约束的场所是不合理的。将公民不服从理论的认识论要求从道德信念概念的内部解放出来,可以更合理地确定公民不服从行为是否合理。将这些视为与该问题相关的众多因素之一,以及其他因素,如政治制度的性质、认知环境的特征、不服从的主体能够通过其他手段提出要求的程度,以及相互竞争的主张和利益的重要性,使我们能够认识到认知约束是一个独立的标准,可以在不同的情况下产生不同的要求。然而,与这些决定有关的认知条件究竟是什么呢?在下一节中,我提出了基于信念的解释的另一种选择,在这种解释中,行为主体对他人持有(可废除的)认知义务,这约束了他们在参与公民不服从之前的认知行为。主体有认知义务的观点被广泛接受。根据理查德·费尔德曼(Richard Feldman)的定义,这些是“为了从知识(或认识论)的角度取得成功,一个人必须履行的义务”我的论证并不依赖于接受对这些义务的任何一般解释,比如,这些义务是相信由我们所能获得的证据支持的命题,或者以最大化真实信念的方式行事。我只关心这些义务中相对最小的一部分;这些义务代理人必须采取合理的步骤来避免持有错误的信念请注意,这些只涉及信念形成和验证的过程,而不是这些信念的内容。区分纯粹的认知义务和我所关注的义务是很重要的。前者的一个例子是,当且仅当P有当时可得的证据支持时,代理人有(初步的)相信P的义务这不是一种道德义务,而是一种以追求知识卓越为条件的义务。然而,我们经常有道德或政治义务(比如,作为陪审团成员),这些义务有认知因素,或者强加给我们义务去寻找某些类型的信息,改变或反思我们的认知实践,或者从我们的推理中剔除某些类型的信息。有时,我们之所以承担这些义务,是因为我们承担了特定的角色或职务,或从事了特定的行动或实践。我的观点是,当我们试图进行非暴力反抗时,我们有这样的义务。 我们可以很容易地想象,公民不服从是出于正当理由的,或者是在允许这种行为的条件下进行的,但由于持不同政见者的行为,其他代理人可能有合法的投诉;如果在没有充分理由的情况下,为了获得良好的成功机会而造成了远远超过必要的伤害,或者这些负担不成比例地落在最不利的人身上以同样的方式,对那些在参与公民不服从之前没有采取足够的认知注意的行为者,可以提出合理的抱怨我们现在能够更准确地确定这一义务的性质。我的主张是,代理人不受重大不合理负担的合法利益,使那些寻求参与公民不服从的人有义务采取合理步骤,以尽量减少他们对他们所不服从的主张的误解的风险。如果行为人没有采取合理的步骤来确保他们在行动中旨在促进的事业实际上是真实和公正的,那么行为人通过不服从可预见地给他人造成重大负担,这是初步错误的这将表明对那些不自觉地承担这些行动所产生的负担的特工的不尊重。在合理健康的认知环境中运作的主体如何履行这一义务?他们将通过可信赖的媒体来源、目击者报告或相关领域的专家,寻求确证和核查其案件所依赖的事实主张。他们可能会与他人进行对话(理想情况下包括各种不同的观点),以对政策或制度安排进行深思熟虑的分析。这可能包括公开辩论或向公职人员或其他人提问。对于需要技术专门知识而代理人不可能获得的专题,他们将设法找出在该领域内受到尊重并信任其指导的专家,但不排除该领域内的其他不同意见(特别是在高度有争议的问题上)。他们会在一定程度上认识到那些能够或不能够得到相关证据支持的推论和主张,并为他们的主张寻求合理的逻辑基础。他们会尊重和承认他人为知者,并相应地对待他们相关的个人证词。正如这些例子所表明的那样,即使是在信息可广泛获取并且有大量独立的专业知识和经验来源的情况下操作的有利代理人,这项义务也不是特别繁重。当然,持不同政见者通常在不太健康的认知环境中运作。即使是那些在认知上相对有利的行动者,也可能面临上述一些行为方式变得过于繁重,甚至不可能的情况。正如博伊德·米勒(Boyd Millar)所说,“对于一个影响信念的行为,要构成一种认知义务,必须是一个给定的个体在相关的情况下可以合理地被期望执行或忽略该行为。在敌对的认知环境中,行为主体承担什么样的认知义务?正如我在下一节所展示的那样,我所概述的义务对持不同政见者可能面临的认知障碍很敏感。这是一种可行的义务,当异议者受到某些认知或实用障碍时,这种义务可能会被削弱或消除。从事任何形式的政治行动的行动者,包括公民抗命,总是面临一些认知上的约束,如有限的时间和资源以及不完整的信息。并非所有这些约束都改变了行动者的认知政治义务。然而,有些人是这样做的。在敌对的认知环境中,智能体可以采取的“合理步骤”将比那些适用于更好环境的步骤更为温和。在某些情况下,代理人可以完全免除这种义务。有(至少)两种认知障碍可以产生这种效果:压迫性和紧迫性。压迫会使认知检查变得过于困难或代价高昂,以至于无法期望代理在较好的条件下达到预期的程度。在这些情况下,其他代理人对持不同政见者采取认识上的注意的要求,将被所有个人都有能力抵制严重不公正的更重要的要求所消解。如果我在信息的公开传播受到严格控制的情况下,在没有进行知识核查或证实的情况下发起公民不服从行为,或者我被阻止获取可用的信息,或者公开讨论政治话题被禁止,那么我的公民同胞就没有任何合理的抱怨。在这些条件下,按照适用于较好情况的要求采取行动的任何企图都是多余的。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
4.10
自引率
5.60%
发文量
17
期刊介绍: The Journal of Political Philosophy is an international journal devoted to the study of theoretical issues arising out of moral, legal and political life. It welcomes, and hopes to foster, work cutting across a variety of disciplinary concerns, among them philosophy, sociology, history, economics and political science. The journal encourages new approaches, including (but not limited to): feminism; environmentalism; critical theory, post-modernism and analytical Marxism; social and public choice theory; law and economics, critical legal studies and critical race studies; and game theoretic, socio-biological and anthropological approaches to politics. It also welcomes work in the history of political thought which builds to a larger philosophical point and work in the philosophy of the social sciences and applied ethics with broader political implications. Featuring a distinguished editorial board from major centres of thought from around the globe, the journal draws equally upon the work of non-philosophers and philosophers and provides a forum of debate between disparate factions who usually keep to their own separate journals.
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