PGSA Conference 2025

Resisters and Endorsers: Praiseworthy moral exemplars and autonomy

Activists who resist unjust or oppressive political regimes to which they themselves are subjected are regarded as praiseworthy and indeed exemplary moral agents. Historical examples include Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, and Emmeline Pankhurst, the English political activist and suffragette. There are persuasive arguments that the oppression faced by resisters, which often includes severe restrictions on liberty, coercive psychological pressure, and the denial of social opportunities like equal citizenship, is incompatible with autonomy or free agency. However, it is also asserted that resisters must be autonomous precisely because they are actively engaged in resistance to the injustice to which they are subjected­–e.g, Paul Benson refers to “the autonomous agency of the defiant resister of oppression (even when her resistance fails to achieve many of its goals)” (2014: 112).  It is claimed that attributing non-autonomy to resisters would be tantamount to disrespecting (or even erasing) their agency or personhood. This paper resolves this dilemma by elaborating what I take to be an uncontroversial intuition: resisters are praiseworthy moral agents. People who resist direct and indirect forms of pressure to comply with unjust demands meet the minimum conditions of praiseworthiness. I employ David Shoemaker’s “quality of will” account of moral responsibility to establish that resisters are fitting subjects of different forms of positive appraisal or praise. If so, they can be assumed to have the agential capacities necessary for responsibility. Therefore, even if we attribute non-autonomy to resisters on the basis of external socio-relational conditions like oppression, this does not imply that their agency­–or personhood–is erased. I then address a parallel “agency dilemma” from the feminist literature on autonomy. It has been claimed that attributing non-autonomy to endorsers–people who actively uphold the oppression or unjust social hierarchy to which they are subjected–implies the denial of agency. I argue that, although endorsers are not typically praiseworthy agents, they do have the “qualities of will” and agential capacities necessary for moral agency. If so, attributing non-autonomy to endorsers on the basis of external conditions like oppression does not involve disrespect or denial of agency­.