Candice Delmas, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil” (Oxford UP, 2018)
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What is the overall premise of Candice Delmas’s book *A Duty to Resist*?
Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy. I'm Robert Talis. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co host the program with Carrie Figder. Carrie's associate professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. My guest today is Candice Delmas. Candice is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Northeastern University. She's a moral and political philosopher working on normative questions about political authority, citizenship, and obligation. Candice's new book is titled A Duty to Resist When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil. It's published by Oxford University Press. Now, according to a long tradition in political philosophy, there There are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by even a legitimate political authority.
That is, it's common for political philosophers to recognize the permissibility of what's come to be known as civil disobedience. even under broadly dr just political conditions. There are, of course, longstanding debates over how to distinguish civil from uncivil disobedience, what forms of civil disobedience are permissible, what forms of what what disobedience um what kinds of acts disobedience may take. Um and the difference between civil disobedience and other kinds of principled law breaking, such as, for example, conscientious refusal. Yet the consensus seems to be that whenever disobedience is permissible, it must also be enacted within the constraints of civility. Now in her book, Candice Dalmas challenges this consensus.
She develops an argument according to which the standard accounts of the general obligation to obey the law also would permit forms of principled law breaking that go beyond the standard constraints of civility. So there's a lot to talk about, but let's begin as we normally do with our guest. Hello Candice.
Hello, Bob.
Why don't you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Um sure. Uh and thanks for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here.
Well thank you for joining us.
So um I'm originally from France. I grew up right outside Nice on the French Riviera. Uh that did not prepare me very well for New England's winters, unfortunately. Um I I fell into philosophy in high school, uh first by studying literature. Uh I remember we read very philosophical texts like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, um starting in around tenth grade, and then the next year the curriculum for the French baccalaureate in literature included um the human condition by André Malraux. The Fall by uh Albert Camus and uh Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderon and I still remember vividly that year I found all these texts just fascinating and w I wanted to hear more about the philosophy that they were relying on and articulating.
I loved uh I loved poetry too, Baudelaire, Rambaud, Verlaine and uh uh uh their reflections on mortality, beauty and art. I was also a fan of um Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch whose films I found beautiful and enigmatic. And so I I just longed to appreciate and understand all that even better with philosophy. Um and by this time I started actually taking philosophy classes, which was uh in high school eight hours of it per week. Wow. Um I was I was hooked. Um I studied it as an undergrad uh in Paris and then in the US in graduate school. So that's the thread of my interest in philosophy, and it didn't uh intersect with my interest in civil disobedience until uh until uh I I I joined the PhD program.
So I I had been always fascinated by social movements and popular uprisings. I I grew up at the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of um democratic independence movements throughout the Soviet Union.
How does Delmas explain her personal journey from French literature to political philosophy?
Protest is also, you know, central uh to France. It's in France's DNA. So we we uh talk about the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and May uh nineteen sixty eight a lot. Um as a f French youth going to demonstrations is a bit of a rite of passage and uh strikes regularly uh paralyze France. And all this um had made me especially receptive to the US tradition of principal disobedience.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the overall premise of Candice Delmas’s book *A Duty to Resist*?
0:07–4:22
2
How does Delmas explain her personal journey from French literature to political philosophy?
4:22–8:53
3
What historical movements and activists shaped her interest in civil and uncivil disobedience?
8:53–15:58
4
Why does Delmas argue that the traditional duty‑to‑obey can also justify uncivil resistance?
15:58–21:45
5
How does the ‘fair‑play’ theory of political obligation support a duty to resist injustice?
21:45–27:45
6
What are the five kinds of injustice (disrespect, wrongs to non‑members, deliberative inertia, official misconduct, public ignorance) that trigger a duty to resist?
27:45–36:23
7
How does Delmas address the demandingness objection to a broad duty of resistance?
36:23–42:49
8
What future projects does Delmas plan for exploring civility, incivility, and marginal disobedience?
42:49–1:06:52
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