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Why Riot? An Expressive Theory of the Justification of Rioting
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Free & Equal 1, no. 1 (2025): 261-297. DOI: 10.16995/fe.17733
ABSTRACT
Political rioting is a durable feature of societies across
time, space, and political structure. It is also highly morally
contentious. Among those who take rioting to be justifiable, the
dominant approach has been to appeal to the ethics of war and its
interpersonal counterpart, the framework of defensive ethics, in
order to determine which harms rioting may permissibly inflict. I
raise several novel problems for this approach and argue that in
most cases it is unlikely to succeed. I then propose and develop
an alternative analysis, according to which the expressive norms
to which rioting as a form of protest is subject may license its
characteristic harms directly.
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