Candice Delmas

This paper reconsiders the role of punishment in theories of civil disobedience through three contributions. First, it shows that accepting punishment, as commonly understood, is neither essential to defining civil disobedience nor key to its success. Philosophical discussions have overlooked the complex path of civil disobedience through the political-legal system, where most cases never reach trial and outcomes depend heavily on state discretion. Second, it introduces “non-evasion,” a sequential set of civility-based demands that arise as disobedient agents confront law enforcement and courts: publicly risking arrest, submitting to arrest, cooperating with jail proceedings, appearing in court when summoned, respecting courtroom decorum, and abiding by judicial decisions. This framework clarifies what civility plausibly requires at each stage of interaction with the state. Third, it identifies conditions under which civility’s moral weight is lifted and defends “evasion”—deliberate departures from non-evasion—as sometimes morally permissible, albeit uncivil. The paper explores both instrumental and intrinsic grounds for evasion, highlighting its epistemic communicative, affective-expressive, and transformative-prefigurative value.

Hunger strikes are commonly repressed in prison and seen as disruptive, coercive, and violent. Hunger strikers and their advocates insist that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike, which protects them against repression and force-feeding. Physicians and medical ethicists generally ground this right in the right to refuse medical treatment; lawyers and legal scholars derive it from incarcerated persons’ free speech rights. Neither account adequately grounds the right to hunger strike because both misrepresent the hunger strike as noncoercive and nonviolent. I articulate an alternative, dual account of the right to hunger strike. On the remedial argument, the right to hunger strike should be legally protected as a right to petition for redress, in light of incarcerated people’s structural vulnerability to abuse and given inadequate grievance mechanisms. The constructive argument derives the right to hunger strike from the right to resist oppression and stresses the normative permissibility of the use of coercive tactics to defend one’s liberty interests in the face of carceral oppression.