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.