## 1. Conceptual Matters



Several terms are used to denote extra-constitutional rejection of an
existing government's authority, either *tout court* or
in some particular domain: resistance, rebellion, secession,
revolution. Resistance need not be total; it can instead involve
disobeying some particular law or laws or efforts to thwart only some
of a government's policies or the government's attempt to
perform particular actions; and resistance can take a number of forms,
including acts of disobedience that are not only public but designed
to achieve maximal publicity (as in the case of civil disobedience),
as well as covert acts of noncompliance; and it may also be either
peaceful or nonviolent and disruptive or not. Rebellion, usefully
distinguished from resistance, involves a wholesale rejection of
government's authority. But the government's authority
could be rejected for quite different reasons: to do away with
government altogether (the anarchist's goal), to establish a new
government with the same domain of territorial authority, to create a
new territorial unit out of part of the territory ruled by the
existing government (secession), or to sever part of the territory of
the government and join it to another existing state (irredentist
secession).



Revolution is commonly understood to have two components: rejection of
the existing government's authority and an attempt to replace it
with another government, where both involve the use of forceful
extra-constitutional means. On this reading, revolution and rebellion
share a negative aim, the wholesale rejection of a government's
authority, but revolution includes in addition a positive aim, to
institute a new government in place of the one it has destroyed. Note
that on our use of the term, "constitution" is meant to
refer to something broader than foundational legal principles or a
foundational legal document. Rather, we understand a constitution to
exist when there is coordination among a sufficient number of members
of some group on some basic rules for collective decision-making. On
our understanding, then, a bargain struck among military elites
defining roles in a society run by a military junta counts as a
constitution, and a popular militant uprising that aimed at displacing
such a regime would thus count as a revolution.



Some important empirical work relevant to the morality of
revolutionary war is to be found in studies of civil war. The latter
is sometimes defined as a large-scale armed conflict between state
forces and one or more nonstate parties. This definition may be too
restrictive, however, since it would exclude a large-scale armed
conflict between two or more nonstate parties under conditions in
which the government had disintegrated entirely or still existed but
was not capable of fielding forces. A broader understanding of civil
war that would encompass that kind of case would be simply that of a
large-scale intrastate armed conflict.



The preceding terms are not always used in this way in actual
political discourse. For example, the government of the United States
labeled the secession of the Southern states from the Union a
rebellion, while many Confederates called their enterprise the Second
American Revolution; and the American colonists who strove to secede
from the British Empire tended to call themselves revolutionaries, not
secessionists or rebels. (It may be that the Americans avoided the
term "rebel" because they thought it had negative
connotations). Similarly, the Algerian secession from France is often
referred to as the Algerian Revolution and wars of colonial liberation
are rarely called secessionist conflicts, though their goal is
secession from a political order centered on a metropolitan state
whose territory is not adjacent to the colony. In what follows, the
term "revolution" will be reserved for
extra-constitutional attempts to destroy an existing national
government and replace it, to the full extent of its territorial
authority, with a new government. On this way of sorting out the
various terms, secessionists and revolutionaries are necessarily
rebels, while rebels need be neither secessionists nor revolutionaries
(they may be anarchists), and secessionists as such are not
revolutionaries.



Sometimes the term "revolution" is used in a stronger
sense, as denoting not just an extra-constitutional attempt to replace
one government with another, but also to effect a fundamental change
in the type of government, as in a revolution to replace an autocracy
with a democracy. Thus some scholars on the Left have contended that
the so-called American Revolution was not really a revolution, because
it did not create or even aim at anything other than a new form of the
bourgeois state--a state controlled by and in the interest of the
class that controls the means of production (Zinn 1980, Jennings
2000). Many American historians have concluded otherwise, asserting
that it was a revolution in the stronger sense because it replaced a
monarchy with a republic (Nash 2005; Wood 1993). On this stronger
understanding of revolution as involving a fundamental change in the
type of government, secessionists would also be revolutionaries, if
the new government they attempt to establish in part of the territory
of the state would be of a fundamentally different type. For the
remainder of the discussion, we will use "revolution" in
the weaker sense, with the understanding that it can also encompass
revolutions in the stronger sense. It is worth noting, however, that
the morality of revolution in the stronger sense is, if anything, more
complex than that of the weaker sense, because the former involves not
only the extra-constitutional overthrow of the existing government but
also the extra-constitutional establishment of a new type of
government.



One more distinction is needed. Revolutions may be violent or
nonviolent and may begin nonviolently and become violent. This
distinction, though obviously important, is not so crisp as one might
think, because what counts as violence may be disputed. For example,
attempts to overthrow a government by disruptive techniques (for
example conducting general strikes, disabling power grids, or blocking
main transportation routes) are not violent in the way in which
discharging firearms or detonating explosives is, but they may
nonetheless cause lethal harms. The chief topic of this entry is
violent revolution where "violence" is understood in the
most robust way and as occurring on a large scale; in other words, the
topic is revolutionary war as "war" is usually understood
(Singer & Small 1994: 5).



It is well worth noting, however, that there is a position on
revolution that obviates the need for a theory of just revolutionary
war, namely, the view that large-scale revolutionary violence is never
morally justified because the risks of such an endeavor are so great
and because nonviolent revolution is more efficacious. Some empirical
political scientists have argued that there is good evidence that
nonviolent revolution is more likely to achieve its ends than
revolutionary war (Chenoweth & Stephan 2011). Even if that is true
as a generalization, the question remains as to whether there are
exceptions--cases where nonviolence is not likely to achieve the
aims of just revolution or would only achieve them with undue costs in
terms of human well-being--and whether they can be identified
*ex ante.* If there are any such cases, there is a need for a
theory of just revolutionary war.


## 2. Some Major Figures' Views on the Morality of Revolution



No attempt can be made here to conduct a survey of views on revolution
across the history of Western Philosophy, much less one that
encompasses other traditions. Instead, it must suffice to say that the
typical attitude toward revolution of major figures in the Western
tradition prior to the modern period was to condemn it or to
acknowledge its moral permissibility only in very narrow circumstances
(Morkevicius 2014). Augustine (*City of God*) and Aquinas
(*Summa theologiae*), for example, both condemn rebellion and
hence revolution, unambiguously urging obedience to the powers that
be. Suarez (1609) held that only "lesser
magistrates" had the authority to try to overthrow an existing
government, with the implication that revolution by those who do not
already occupy official roles is never justified. Hobbes (1651),
explicitly denied that revolution could ever be justified, holding
instead that a subject could only rightly resist government authority
as a matter of self-defense and then only when the perpetration of
lethal harm against her was imminent.



Perhaps the most famous condemnation of revolutions comes from
Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, revolution is never justified,
regardless of the extent to which political power is abused. He
writes: "The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what
is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its
resistance to the highest legislator can never be regarded as other
than contrary to law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal
constitution" (Ak 6:320). Kant's unqualified rejection of
the possibility of justified revolution is based in his understanding
of individual rights as inherently relational. For Kant, the Universal
Principle of Right dictates that constraints on individual freedom are
to be such that they are compatible with the freedom of all under
universal law (Ak 6:230-1). Rights are constituted by claims
concerning the conduct of others, but individuals are not in a
position to unilaterally enforce those claims. Individual enforcement
of a rights claim amounts to an individual imposing his will and
interpretation of the situation on another, and this kind of
imposition is impermissible as a basic matter of justice.
Consequently, a juridical, omnilateral will that is not party to
rights relations is necessary to enforce rights claims in a way that
is compatible with the Universal Principle of Right. The state is such
a will. Hence, submission to the state is a necessary condition of
achieving the juridical conditions of mutual freedom that are required
on grounds of the Universal Principle of Right (for much more detailed
discussions, see: Hill 2002, Korsgaard 2008, Flikschuh 2008).
Revolution is never justified because it lacks rightful authority.



The anti-revolutionary arguments just surveyed can be summarized in
the following terms. First is the Undue Risk Argument, according to
which the prospect of violent anarchy that follows an attempted
revolution is so great that it defeats any other reasons that purport
to justify political revolution. Second is the Conceptual Argument
offered by Kant, according to which acts that instigate revolution can
never satisfy the requirement of rightful authority, and so are
necessarily unjustified.



A number of figures in the history of political thought have opposed
such anti-revolutionary positions. The monarchomachs in late
16th century France argued that their monarchy was
unjustified and advocated for revolution and tyrannicide. Francois
Hotman defended this claim by arguing that the French constitution was
fundamentally based in an assembly of the nation, and the author of
*Vindicie contra Tyrannos*, publishing under the pseudonym
Stephanus Junius Brutus, argued that subjects are never bound to obey
a prince that oversteps God's law and that subjects are entitled
to resist a King that deviates from his divine duties (for an overview
of the monarchomachs, see Dunning 1904). In his work *De Jure Regni
apud Scotos*, the Scottish thinker George Buchanan argues for an
early conception of popular sovereignty according to which the people
are entitled to resist and punish tyrants (Macmillan 2016 [1906]
provides a comprehensive biography of Buchanan's life and
summary of his political thought).



The most prominent defense of revolution in the liberal tradition was
offered by John Locke, according to which revolution is both justified
and permissible when the state breaches its duty to protect the
natural rights of persons (1689, chapter XIX). On Locke's social
contract theory, the state is formed to protect individual rights and
resolve disputes between persons concerning their rights. The state
thus acts as a trustee of the rights of individuals, and violation of
those rights amounts to a breach of trust (Simmons 1993, pp.
157-8). If the trust is breached, the rights entrusted to the
state are returned to civil society, members of which are then
entitled to defend against violations of those rights through the use
of force (Locke 1689, section 227, on rights returning to civil
society see Simmons 1993, pp. 171-2). We can thus summarize the
core of Locke's view on revolution in terms of the Self-Defense
Argument, according to which revolution is justified against some
state S when S breaches its fiduciary obligation to protect individual
natural rights, then the authority to protect these rights returns to
the people (for a discussion contrasting Kant's and
Locke's views of revolution, see Flikschuh 2008).



Locke took a more favorable stance toward revolution than Hobbes or
his medieval predecessors because he did not believe that the risks of
physical insecurity attendant upon the destruction of an existing
government were as high as those thinkers did. That more optimistic
view as grounded, in turn, in his belief that the destruction of the
political order need not entail the destruction of society--that
is, of social practices and habits that effectively control the most
serious forms of violence (Simmons 1993, p. 171). It is a mistake,
however, to conclude either that Hobbes was right and Locke was wrong
or *vice versa* about the consequences for physical security of
the destruction of government. A more reasonable view is that the
risks of the destruction of government and hence of revolution vary,
depending upon the circumstances. If that is so, and if the
justifiability of revolution depends even in part on the severity of
the risks of physical insecurity it involves, then it appears that the
content of a moral theory of revolution must be shaped by empirical
considerations. We return to this point in the subsequent section,
where we introduce a distinction between the different kinds of social
contexts within which revolutions take place.



Whereas liberal political philosophers have tended to frame the
justification for revolution in terms of natural rights and justice,
revolution in the Marxist tradition is understood quite differently.
There is one strain of Marx interpretation according to which he
rejects rights-talk altogether, either in favor of the discourse of
conflicting interests or in favor of the vocabulary of
self-realization or mankind's overcoming of alienation from its
"species being" (Buchanan 1982). On this interpretation,
Marx held that the very concept of rights is an ideological construct
that is fostered by and in turn reinforces the egoistic psychology of
bourgeois society and will be discarded once the transition to
developed communist society occurs. If the very concept of rights is
thus both tainted and fated for obsolescence, then the question arises
as to how else the justification for proletarian revolution might be
framed (Finlay 2006). One answer that is consistent at least with the
early writings of Marx is that proletarian revolution is needed to
destroy the conditions of alienation and create the conditions for the
full realization of man's nature as a creative, communal being,
the sort of being who will, through processes of scientifically
informed collective decision-making, bring the natural and social
world fully under deliberate human control for the good of all
(*Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844*, in
**MER**: 66-125).



Even if Marx thought that successful revolution could be correctly
described as the overcoming of alienation or more positively as the
realization of human "species being", it is doubtful that
he thought that proletarian revolution *needed* to be justified
in this or any other way. There is, after all, a Marx who derides
"moralistic" socialists and who seems to hold that
successful proletarian revolution is a matter of the historically
inevitable realization of the common interests of the proletariat, and
that the revolution will be effectively motivated by those interests,
not by a commitment to any moral principle (*On the Division of
Labor in Production* in **MER**: 683-717). Such
an interpretation fits well with Marx's understanding of his
theory of history as scientific and realistic. According to this
account, the question of whether revolution is justified is idle; it
will occur, because the revolution in the mode of production that
marks the transition from capitalism to communism will produce a
fundamental transformation of all social relationships that will carry
human beings beyond the state and beyond politics (*Critique of the
Gotha Programme*, Part IV, 1875 in **MER**:
525-541). On this reading, Marx does not offer a justification
of revolution so much as he offers an explanation for why a certain
kind of revolution must (on his view) occur (for a discussion
comparing Kant and Marx's views that argues against the
amoralist reading of Marx, see Ypi 2014)



By way of summary and as a broad generalization, it is fair to say
that at least since the time of Locke, the dominant view on revolution
in Western Political Philosophy, both in the Liberal and Marxist
traditions, and perhaps in popular political culture as well, has been
considerably more permissive than that of Hobbes and Kant and their
medieval predecessors. For the remainder of this entry, we will assess
various morally relevant features of revolutions, drawing on insights
developed in contemporary just war theory.


## 3. Revolutionary *Jus ad Bellum*



Contemporary just war theory provides a sophisticated framework for
assessing the morality of political revolution (see the entry on
 war).
 Just war theory is relevant because revolutions typically involve the
large-scale use of force, both by revolutionaries and by the regime
that attempts to thwart their efforts. Locke's argument in
support of revolution has already illustrated this connection between
revolution and just war because he conceives of revolution as an act
of *collective* self-defense against usurpers of legitimate
political power.



In this section, then, we will examine how the satisfaction of typical
*jus ad bellum* standards faces complications in the case of
revolutionary war. Before turning to this analysis, we must introduce
a key distinction concerning the social context of revolutions. The
social context that a revolution takes place in can lead to variation
with respect to how violent a given revolution is, a crucial parameter
for assessing whether the conditions of *jus ad bellum*
obtain.



How bloody and protracted a revolution is and whether it will be
successful will in part be a function of how well-organized and
effective revolutionary leadership is. Accordingly, we will
distinguish between what we call *Hobbesian revolutionary
contexts* and *Lockean revolutionary contexts*. In Lockean
contexts, revolutionaries have access to institutional structures,
either formal or informal, that they can rely on to solve two basic
problems: the cooperation problem (mobilizing a sufficient number of
revolutionaries) and the coordination problem (organizing the
revolutionaries in an effective manner). In Hobbesian contexts, by
contrast, such institutional resources are absent.



Hobbesian and Lockean contexts thus described are ideal types, with
most actual revolutions occurring in contexts that fall somewhere in
between the ideal types. The American Revolution took place in a
Lockean context, insofar as revolutionaries had access to colonial
legislatures, through participation in which they had developed skills
in organization and leadership. These institutional resources enabled
American revolutionaries to solve the cooperation and coordination
problems and to do so through relatively peaceful, democratic means.
The early stages of the Russian Revolution, in contrast, took place
under Hobbesian conditions, resulting in division and conflict among
revolutionary factions and uncoordinated violence by relatively small
groups (e.g. mutinying soldiers or striking laborers) acting
independently. In the Russian case, as opposed to the American one,
the process by which the cooperation and coordination problems were
solved did not provide the group that eventually took control of the
revolution, the Bolsheviks, with experience in non-coercive,
relatively democratic leadership.



Crucially, the social context of a revolution is not fixed because, as
Skopcol emphasizes, revolutions, to the extent that they are
successful, involve the creation of new state structures (Skocpol
2015). Further, the context in which a revolution occurs can also
change prior to the successful seizure of sufficient power to build a
new state structure. One example of the latter kind is found in the
Iranian Revolution. This revolution began with widespread but
uncoordinated student protests which, following some student deaths,
were transformed by Ayatollah Khomeini into an organized mass protest
movement. The institutional resource Khomeini utilized was a network
of pre-existing religious institutions.



It will be important to keep in mind the distinction between Hobbesian
and Lockean revolutionary contexts in order to avoid over generalizing
about the risks of revolution. If one assumes, if only implicitly,
that revolutions occur in predominantly Lockean conditions, one will
be predisposed to rate the risk of anarchy and extreme violence low
and consequently take a more permissive stance on the justification of
revolution. If one assumes that Hobbesian conditions are predominant,
one will infer that the risks of revolution are great and be
predisposed to regard revolutions as unjustified. Keeping in mind the
need to avoid over-generalization, we now turn to a consideration of
how standard *jus ad bellum* criteria apply to revolutions or
at least to revolutions that are, like most revolutions, likely to
involve large-scale collective violence.



Consider first the just cause requirement. Some causes for revolution
we can set aside immediately, namely, those that are patently unjust.
It is not a legitimate aim of revolution, for example, to displace a
liberal state that is reasonably effective at protecting basic human
rights in order to institute a theocracy that will violate basic human
rights. Nor would a revolution to institute or preserve slavery be
justified. More appropriate targets of revolution are Resolute Severe
Tyrannies, defined as regimes that persistently violate some of the
basic human rights of large segments of the population, are extremely
authoritarian (that is, wholly undemocratic), and are utterly
impervious to efforts to reform them (Buchanan 2013, p. 296).



The moral stakes of opposing a Resolute Severe Tyranny will depend on
which human rights are being violated. When relatively basic rights
such as rights to one's life, body, or the conditions necessary
for subsistence are being violated, then officials and agents of the
regime are plausibly liable to immediate defensive harm in the
individual cases where such violations arise and ending such
systematic violation of basic rights is a just cause for armed
resistance of the regime (Finlay 2015, pp. 78). Tyrannies can be less
severe when the human rights they violate are relatively less urgent
than these basic rights, which would include political rights or
rights against discrimination.



While there might be cause for replacing a tyrannical regime, the
justification of revolution encounters a complication when it comes to
determining what kind of government or institutional arrangement ought
to replace the regime if the revolution proves successful. This
problem is especially acute under Hobbesian conditions because
revolutionaries have repudiated or cannot avail themselves of existing
political processes for determining political aims and have not yet
developed new processes for performing that task (at least in the
earlier stages of the struggle). There may be serious disagreement
among revolutionaries as to what the goal of the revolution is, with
no nonviolent, much less legitimate process for resolving it. If
revolutionaries lack the institutional resources to determine a common
understanding of what the new political order is to be, then the task
of evaluating the justness of a revolutionary struggle becomes more
difficult. It may be a mistake to say "*X* is the aim of
the revolutionary war-makers" because there may be no one aim
and the plurality of aims may be mutually inconsistent, with some
being just and others being unjust. In certain contexts, then, the
cause of a political revolution, its justifying aim, may be
indeterminate.



Though the cause of revolution may be indeterminate or unjust, it does
not follow that joining the fight, once it has started, is necessarily
wrong or unjust (Buchanan 2013). Whether various individuals are
morally justified in joining the war effort depends upon whether they
have morally acceptable reasons for doing so, not upon the morality or
immorality of the actions others took to initiate the conflict. The
justification for initiating revolution will be different from the
justification for joining a revolution. This point is not limited to
revolutionary wars, but it may be more significant in the
revolutionary case, if generally speaking the initiation of
revolutionary wars is harder to justify than some interstate wars,
especially wars of self-defense or defense of others against
aggression.



Consider now to the proportionality criterion, applied to
revolutionary war. Proportionality is satisfied when the moral
significance of the goods achieved through revolution is greater than
the significance of the "bads" or harms or
rights-violations that will be brought about by revolutionary
conflict. As Richard Norman and David Rodin argue, the moral urgency
of political rights seems to be categorically inferior to the
significance of rights to life and limb that will be violated and
threatened by revolutionary war, thus making revolutionary war against
tyrannies that only violate political rights unjustified (Norman 1995:
128; Rodin 2002: 48). In a similar vein, Jonathan Parry argues that
revolutionaries are at a moral disadvantage when it comes to the
satisfaction of proportionality. That is because, on Parry's
view, in order for some interests to count in the proportionality
calculus, the persons to whom those interests are tied must consent to
the use of force to protect those interests. And, since
revolutionaries are generally less likely to receive consent, this
means that there will be fewer interests that count in favor of
revolutionary violence (Parry 2018).



There are a number of replies that one might offer in response to
these challenges concerning proportionality. First, one can argue that
the moral significance of the violation of relatively less urgent
rights aggregates to a cost that is great enough to be proportionate
to a relatively lesser number of harms to more urgent rights that will
be suffered as a consequence of violent revolution (McMahan 2004).
This aggregationist argument can also be bolstered by identifying
further goods advanced by revolution. The effects of revolutionary war
against "lesser tyranny" *on valid norm compliance*
might also be included. Supposing that it is a valid norm that
governments abstain from harming their citizens and respect the
political liberties of citizens. If international institutions are so
weak as to be unable to enforce this norm, then the best prospect for
enforcing a norm of good government is the threat of revolution
against governments that violate the norm. Under these conditions, it
would be problematic to restrict proportionality assessments to
immediate, direct harms, ignoring the effects on the enforcement of
important norms of justice. Second, one could argue that a regime that
violates relatively less urgent rights does so by virtue of issuing a
conditional threat, explicit or implicit, and that therefore the
regime is responsible for escalation in conflict that occurs because
of an assertion of the relatively less urgent rights by individuals,
and use of force in response to such escalation is justified (McMahan
1994; Finlay 2015: 63-76). Third, one could argue that
proportionality is sensitive to responsibility, such that when one is
responsible for some harm or rights violation then the threshold of
proportionality is lessened to some extent. So, if a regime is
responsible for violations of relatively less urgent human rights,
then this fact may make members of the regime liable to a degree of
force that would not have otherwise been proportionate (Kapelner
2019). Fourth, one could argue that revolutions respond to a
distinctive kind of wrong that changes the proportionality calculus in
favor of revolution. Mattias Iser argues that states that bring about
widespread human rights violations thereby fail to recognize the equal
basic moral status of citizens, and that this failure of recognition
is a distinctive kind of wrong that weighs in favor of forceful
replacement of prevailing regime (Iser 2017).



The preceding points concern proportionality in revolutionary war in
general. Under relatively Hobbesian conditions, there is a further
complication concerning proportionality. In such conditions, aspiring
revolutionary leaders face a serious collective action problem that
established states have already solved: they must mobilize a
sufficient portion of the population to make war effectively, in spite
of the fact that it will often be rational for any given individual to
refrain from participating. As we shall discuss in the context of
*jus in bello* criteria of just war, revolutionaries will often
need to resort to coercing other members of the population in order to
motivate cooperation in revolutionary activity. The regime is likely
to respond in kind to such coercive tactics, producing an escalating
spiral of violence.



The discussion so far helps explain a general feature of revolutions,
namely, that they are often more violent than interstate wars,
especially when undertaken in Hobbesian conditions. Revolutionary wars
present a greater risk of literal anarchy, with all of the threats to
human rights and well-being that this usually entails, because
revolutionaries, even when they succeed in defeating the regime, may
not yet have (and in some cases may never develop) the capacity to
impose order. In that sense, the stakes are often higher in
revolutionary wars and the traditional likelihood of success
requirement of just war theory may be harder to satisfy. Revolutionary
conflicts, like other intrastate wars, are often especially brutal,
because the lines between combatants and noncombatants tend to be
blurred, because of the spiral of coercion stemming from strategic
interaction regarding revolutionary mobilization mentioned above, and
because individuals and groups often use the general context of
violence to settle private conflicts that have little or no connection
to the issues for which revolution is supposedly undertaken (Kalyvas
2006: 14).



Similar complications to those encountered in the case of just cause
also arise regarding satisfaction of the rightful authority
requirement, especially under Hobbesian revolutionary contexts. It is
typically held that in order for some agent to have the rightful
authority to wage just war, she must in some significant way represent
the persons whose interests the war is meant to protect or promote
(Finlay 2015 ch. 6; Parry 2018). If "represents" means
what it does in the context of ordinary democratic politics, namely, A
represents B if and only if A is authorized to act on B's behalf
through some appropriate public political process (such as an
election), then this is a non-starter, since an oppressive regime is
unlikely to allow any such process.



This standard, institutionally-based understanding of representation
would work as a criterion of rightful authority to initiate
revolutionary war only if one of two conditions were satisfied. First,
those who initiate revolutionary war were duly chosen as
representatives prior to the advent of an oppressive regime (as when
an authoritarian coup usurps an elected government). Second, the
constitutional order included pre-authorization for revolution under
certain specified conditions. It is worth noting that the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen explicitly included a
right (and indeed a duty) to resist tyranny and that the Inner Service
Act of the Turkish Armed Forces (articles 35 and 85) goes farther,
designating an agent of revolution by pre-authorizing the military to
depose the government if it violates the constitutional requirement of
secular government. Just as an advance directive for medical care
enables a competent patient to pre-authorize agent to act on her
behalf in the event of her losing the capacity to act, so a
constitutional provision of this sort would enable a people under
conditions of political freedom to pre-authorize some agent to
initiate revolution on its behalf should the abuse of government
authority undermine its ability to perform an act of authorization.
Whereas under Lockean conditions there may be some residual
institutional structures that can be relied on to choose genuinely
representative revolutionary leaders, when facing a Resolute Severe
Tyranny or occupying Hobbesian contexts it is far less likely that
either conditions of representation can obtain. A Resolute Severe
Tyranny is not likely to allow any institutional process for
representation by those who may oppose it.



Here it is important to note that revolutionary conflict in such
conditions typically begins when a relatively small minority
undertakes armed struggle against the government and claims to do so
in the name of the people. The problem is that it is difficult to see
how, in Hobbesian contexts, they could be authorized to act on behalf
of the people.



Another problem concerning rightful authority in Hobbesian contexts is
that there are often two or more parties engaging in revolutionary
violence that contend with one another (often violently) to be
acknowledged, by the people and by other states and international
organizations, as the sole legitimate revolutionary war-maker.
Revolutions frequently are characterized by violent struggles for
leadership, under conditions in which no contender for leadership can
claim exclusive legitimacy if any legitimacy at all. So, in addition
to the fact that Hobbesian conditions are characterized by a lack of
social or institutional resources for the determination of rightful
authority, there is the fact that rival revolutionary groups may
resort to violence among themselves in a bid to claim such
authority.



In the absence of any institutional provisions for choosing
representatives during the struggle or for pre-authorizing some group
to serve as representatives prior to it, one might offer a different
understanding of representation that is easier to satisfy in contexts
where political revolutions have some appeal. An agent represents the
people, in a fashion that morally empowers her to initiate and lead
revolutionary war, if she is committed to and acts appropriately to
realize their shared interest or common good (Biggar 2013). It is
worth noting just how distant this view is from any widely accepted
notion of rightful authority to make war in other contexts or for that
matter of rightful authority in any context, whether private or
public. The fact that Jones is committed to Smith's good and
able to promote it effectively does nothing whatsoever to establish
that Jones has rightful authority over Jones, much less that he has
rightful authority to undertake actions supposedly on Jones's
behalf that pose a danger to Jones or others. This understanding of
rightful authority is subject to all of the objections to paternalism
toward competent adults.



At this point one might make a radical move: simply deny the rightful
authority requirement applies to revolutionary wars or at least to
revolutionary wars that occur in a Hobbesian context. This move could
be qualified with the proviso that although a group attempting to
exercise leadership in the revolutionary struggle lacks rightful
authority, it is justified in assuming the leadership role only if it
acts in such a way as to bring about conditions in which rightful
authority can exist. Similarly, one might argue that rightful
authority is not required in the case of a group that can help create
the conditions for legitimacy out of a situation of violently anarchic
state-breakdown, so long as that group acts in ways that facilitate
the establishment of legitimacy. This response to the problem of
rightful authority calls into question the assumption that a just
recourse to war developed for application to interstate wars also
applies *in toto* to revolutionary wars. Similarly, as we shall
see in the next section, there is also the question of whether
traditional *jus in bello* requirements apply without exception
to the conduct of revolutionary wars.



Let us turn to the last criterion of *jus ad bellum*,
necessity. The standard of necessity is satisfied when there is no
less harmful means of achieving the cause for violence. For a
revolution to be necessary, it must be the case that existing
institutions are both so deeply morally flawed and recalcitrant to
reform that nothing short of displacing them and starting anew would
suffice to improve upon the existing state of affairs. This is why
discussions about revolution generally take for granted that the
target of revolution is something like a Resolute Severe
Tyranny--only such regimes pose such a significant enough threat
to the basic rights of persons while barring all prospects for
reforming political institutions. Plausible candidates for revolution,
then, are states that are so organized as to foreclose internal
channels for reform. These channels need not be exclusively legal or
constitutional. Even states that bar significant portions of the
population from access to legal or political mechanisms for change
might not make revolution necessary. Citizens of such states may still
have access to options like protest, general strikes, civil
disobedience, and uncivil disobedience as a means of forcing the
relevant kind of changes, thus making revolution unnecessary. Hence,
our discussion has followed most discussions of political revolution
by focusing on the case of extremely repressive regimes like Resolute
Severe Tyranny, because only under such conditions of complete and
unrelenting oppression is it plausible that revolution is necessary to
bring about change.


## 4. Revolutionary *Jus in Bello*



Principles of *jus in bello* specify what kinds of particular
actions are permissible in making war. Two standards feature
prominently in discussions of *jus in bello*. First is
proportionality, which holds that the specific acts or tactics
employed in war must promote the good to such a degree that it
outweighs the "bads" or harms or rights-infringements of
the act or tactic. Second is discrimination, which is typically
understood in terms of non-combatant immunity--innocents are not
liable to harms and so it is impermissible to target them. A much
disputed question is whether all and only civilians qualify as
innocents. Here it is worth noting that the original meaning of
"innocent" is one who is incapable of inflicting harm.
Some military personnel, namely those who lack access to weapons or
have become incapable of using them may fit this description and some
civilians, namely those who supply resources to the military, may
not.



A key issue that a theory of the morality of revolutionary war ought
to address is whether these widely accepted *jus in bello*
norms apply without exception or modification to war-making by
revolutionaries or whether, instead, revolutionaries are morally
permitted to undertake acts of war that the military personnel of
states are usually prohibited from performing. This is not a merely
theoretical issue: revolutionary warriors have often engaged in
various morally problematic forms of "irregular" warfare.
They have assassinated civilian leaders and other civilians such as
government bureaucrats and judges, attacked regime forces while
wearing civilian attire (not wearing uniforms or insignia as required
by the laws of war and not carrying weapons openly), and engaged in
terrorism, deliberately killing individuals who had no discernible
connection with the regime by detonating bombs in public places.
Furthermore, in order to mobilize people to join the revolution or to
deter them from aiding the regime in suppressing it, they have engaged
in acts of terrorism against the oppressed.



These examples of irregular tactics fall into four different
categories (Finlay 2015, pp. 206-8). First is *civilian
camouflage*, which involves combatants retaining the appearance of
civilians for the sole purpose of avoiding elimination prior to
combat. Second is *civilian disguise*, which, like civilian
camouflage, involves combatants appearing as civilians, but, unlike
camouflage, this misleading appearance is used to mislead the enemy
during combat. In an example of civilian disguise discussed by Michael
Walzer, French partisans resisted German occupation by dressing as
peasants and launching an ambush (Walzer 1977 p. 183). Third is
*human shields*, a tactic where combatants deliberately locate
military targets near civilians in order to deter attack (Schmitt
2009). Fourth, combatants can engage in *non-combatant
targeting*, a tactic that deliberately places non-combatants, e.g.
civilians, in harm's way for the sake of some advantage.
Examples of non-combatant targeting include: the concealment of
civilians in a position close to military targets in the hopes that
the enemy harms them with collateral damage, provocation of the regime
with the intent of producing harms to civilians, or, of course,
deliberate targeting of locations predominantly used or occupied by
civilians. The aims of non-combatant targeting can range from
motivating the populace to join the revolutionary effort, to coercing
the populace into supporting the revolution, to instigating terror and
disorder. These irregular tactics are clearly in tension if not
outright contradiction with *jus in bello* standards of
proportionality and discrimination as they expose civilians to greater
risks of suffering collateral harm either by making it more difficult
for the enemy to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants,
or by directly exposing non-combatants to greater harms on account of
using them as shields or deliberate targeting.



Revolutionaries are often under powerful incentives to employ such
irregular tactics, because they are disadvantaged relative to their
adversaries. First, they will generally have less military training
and less disciplined organization than regime combatants, they will be
fewer in number, will generally have lower quality arms, and will have
inferior logistical and intelligence capacities. Secondly,
revolutionaries face the challenge of mobilizing a people that has
suffered oppression under an unjust regime. Entrenched tyrannical
regimes typically use their control over education and the media to
instill propaganda designed to prevent the people from recognizing
just how rotten the regime is, how poorly the economy is performing,
how inferior the quality of life is compared with that in better
governed countries, and how widespread dissatisfaction with the regime
actually is. Hence, effective revolutionary action may require the
dissipation of false consciousness on the part of the people. The
aspiring revolutionary leadership thus may be faced with the task of
trying to dismantle the false consciousness of those they hope to
enlist in the revolutionary struggle. In actual cases, aspiring
leaders have often used violence and sometimes terrorism in an effort
to overcome the epistemic obstacles to widespread participation in
revolution. For example, they have attacked "soft
targets"--policemen or government officials--to
demonstrate to the people that "*we* have the power to
hurt *them*". Another tactic often used by
revolutionaries to overcome epistemic obstacles is to provoke the
regime to undertake brutal responses to relatively peaceful
demonstrations, in order to reveal to all just how ruthless the regime
is. Such actions, which are condemned by mainstream *jus in
bello* thinking, are said to be necessary to instill the sense of
agency that false consciousness has undermined.



While such "irregular" tactics are understandably
attractive to revolutionaries, the claim that they are justified is
generally regarded with a good deal of skepticism. We start by
examining the use of civilian camouflage and civilian disguise. These
tactics are clearly at odds with standard requirements of
discrimination, according to which combatants must wear uniforms and
openly carry their arms so that the enemy can distinguish them from
non-combatants. The intuitive appeal of the standard account of
discrimination thus leads some thinkers to argue that civilian
camouflage and civilian disguise are impermissible because such
tactics expose non-combatants to unjust and disproportionate risk of
collateral harm (Meisels 2008; Chiu 2010).



Those who argue that civilian camouflage or disguise are permissible
typically appeal to fairness. The idea is that, at least in the early
stages of their struggle, revolutionaries are at a great disadvantage
*vis a vis* government forces, that this disadvantage is
something for which they are not responsible, and that the
revolutionaries should not be expected to let it render unsuccessful
their struggle against a seriously unjust regime (Gross 2010:
153-4). As noted earlier, revolutionaries typically have
inferior arms and logistical capacities, they have no safe rear areas
behind which they can regroup and resupply because there are no battle
lines as in conventional wars. Finlay argues that for these reasons,
civilian camouflage, but not disguise, is a tactic that
revolutionaries may permissibly employ (Finlay 2015, pp.
211-12). Civilian camouflage is justified, according to Finlay,
because this tactic serves only to enable revolutionaries to withdraw
temporarily from fighting and enabling this both restores fairness to
the distribution of rights and duties concerning warfare in asymmetric
contexts and is not inconsistent with standard laws of war. The use of
civilian disguise, on the other hand, is not permissible, because that
tactic is not meant to restore fairness with respect to an ability
normally protected by the laws of war (i.e. the ability to withdraw
from combat), but rather to diminish the ability of regular combatants
to defend themselves (*Ibid*., p. 213).



Whereas civilian camouflage and civilian disguise are tactics that
only indirectly contribute to the risk of collateral harm for
civilians by making discrimination between combatants and
non-combatants more difficult, tactics like the use of human shields
or non-combatant targeting directly expose non-combatants to
significant risks of harm for the sake of some military advantage and
so necessarily violate the principle of non-combatant immunity. Many
theorists who study irregular conflicts like revolutionary war
generally view such tactics as strictly impermissible.



It is important to note that critics of such irregular tactics do not
generally claim that as a matter of principle irregular tactics can
never be justified. In the face of a "supreme emergency,"
where failure to displace the prevailing regime would be a moral
catastrophe, such theorists often grant that irregular tactics that
would facilitate resolving the emergency may in fact be justified as a
lesser evil. The problem lies in allowing persons waging war to judge
for themselves whether they occupy an exceptional, supreme emergency
situation. The worry is that if participants in war know that such
exceptions are in principle available to them, then there is a serious
risk that their fallible judgments (perhaps shaped by various biases
or motivated reasoning) lead them to make a wrongful exception and
employ tactics that are not in fact justified and which come at a
disproportionate harm to innocents and bystanders (Nathanson 2010, pp.
201-8; Nagel 1972; Coady 2002; Coady 2004). Relatedly, one might
worry that once one belligerent has violated the principle of
non-combatant immunity, opposing sides might respond by no longer
complying with the norm in turn, leading to total breakdown of the
rules of war (Waldron 2010: pp. 88-90).



Whether the tactics in question are at risk of being abused will
naturally depend on the specific way in which they are employed, so it
will be helpful to distinguish the different kinds of non-combatant
targeting. First, and most extreme, is terrorism, by which we mean
deliberate targeting of non-combatants (for a more detailed and
extensive discussion of terrorism, see the entry on
 terrorism).
 An example is the targeting of public places where combat is not
occurring. The aims of such acts can include those of instilling
terror in the populace, weakening support for the regime, or sending a
message to the regime or international actors.



Revolutionaries can employ tactics that target non-combatants which
need not be indiscriminate. Rather, they can employ a second sort of
irregular tactic which we will call *expansive discriminate
targeting*. This tactic involves the deliberate targeting of
non-combatants who are taken to be morally liable to suffer harms from
revolutionary war. We will discuss the grounds of such liability
shortly when we survey arguments given in defensive of irregular
targeting.



Third, revolutionaries can rely on provocation of the enemy. The aim
of this tactic is to provoke agents of the regime to harm
non-combatants with the aim of securing greater popular support for
the revolutionary movement. Provocation is distinct from the use of
human shields in that the former is offensive whereas the latter is
defensive. Combatants employ human shields in the hope that the
presence of non-combatants dissuades the enemy from launching an
attack, whereas the intent of provoking the enemy is to have them harm
innocents. Fourth and last, combatants can employ coercion against
non-combatants with the aim of forcing them to join the revolutionary
effort.



The argument from risk of abuse and the risk of breakdown of the rules
of war applies to some, but not all, of these irregular tactics. These
arguments against irregular tactics are weaker when there are
naturally occurring incentives in place that would motivate against
abusing the irregular tactics or against reciprocating their use and
when the dominant regime does not already engage in the abuse of the
relevant sort of tactic. Such a situation is likely to obtain with
regard to relatively less extreme forms of non-combatant targeting,
namely, expansive discriminate targeting and coercing support. In all
likelihood, a regime that can be the target of legitimate
revolutionary war is likely already employing some kind of coercion to
bolster its ranks, which makes worries about further abuse of the
tactic moot. Expansive discriminate targeting is also unlikely to be
worthwhile for a dominant regime to employ because of its asymmetric
power vis a vis the revolutionaries.



Revolutionaries are unlikely to have access to established
institutional structures that they can rely on to advance their war
effort. The enemy of the regime consists of the specific members of
the revolutionary movement that threatens it, whereas the enemy of
revolutionaries is the regime as such, which is comprised not only of
political officials and the combatants following orders issued by the
officials, but also the institutions and structures that keep the
regime operating, and this makes an expansive understanding of
legitimate targets appealing for revolutionaries but not for the
regime. By contrast, the arguments from risk of abuse and risk of
breakdown of the rules of war seem to hold in the case of terrorism
and the use of human shields. Dominant regimes have some interest in
employing either of these tactics as the use of indiscriminate
targeting would counteract the likely use of civilian camouflage and
disguise that revolutionaries will by necessity employ, and the use of
human shields would presumably be a deterrent against revolutionary
attack (though, for a qualified defense of the use of human shields,
see Fabre 2012, pp. 256-67).



Even if the arguments from risk of abuse and risk of breakdown of the
rules of war do not hold in the case of coercing support and
employment of an expansive understanding of legitimate targets, this
does not mean that revolutionaries are justified in deploying such
irregular tactics. The principle of non-combatant immunity still seems
to offer a compelling prima facie reason for holding such tactics to
be impermissible, and so some positive reason in support of their use
must be offered.



In defense of coercing support, Buchanan 2013 argues that some forms
of coercion may be permissible, as when revolutionary fighters are
conscripted through the threat of penalties such as expropriation of
property or even perhaps confinement or lesser restrictions on
liberty. The most plausible justification for such methods of coerced
mobilization would characterize the goals of the revolution as public
goods of extraordinary moral importance and present coercion as a
solution to the collective action problem. For such coercion to be
justified, it must be the case that the cause of revolution is just,
that the good gained by exercising coercion is proportionate to the
bad of such coercion (i.e., one cannot use coercion to force persons
to join a futile cause), the recruitment of further persons that can
only be achieved by coercion must be necessary for success, and the
exercise of coercion must satisfy further standard principles
concerning the use of coercion to secure a morally significant public
good, namely the costs of coercion and contributing to the revolution
must be distributed fairly.



What if anything can justify the deliberate targeting of
non-combatants by revolutionary forces? According to Fabre, "the
act of killing an innocent person--which infringes his right not
to be killed and thereby extinguishes all his other
rights--cannot be justified unless as a way to avert the greater
evil of far greater numbers of individuals suffering a similar loss,
or a violation, of all rights. By implication, violations of the right
to collective self-determination alone do not justify deliberately
targeting innocent non-combatants" (Fabre 2012, p. 253).



Notice that Fabre's conclusion takes for granted that
non-combatants are also innocent. In defense of a more expansive
ground for the deliberate targeting of non-combatants, Finlay argues
that some non-combatants are not innocent and that because of this
fact it can be fair to distribute some of the harms of war to them.
Key to Finlay's argument is the claim that there will be some,
perhaps many, civilians whose conduct contributes to maintaining the
oppressive regime such that they are to some extent responsible for,
or at least complicit in allowing, the harms of oppression to obtain.
On Finlay's view, then, supposing that targeting non-combatants
is necessary for advancing a just revolutionary war and that doing so
is the most proportionate means available, then targeting
non-combatants can be justified when the targets are to some extent
complicit or responsible for oppression, which thereby grounds some
degree of liability to harm (Finlay 2015, pp. 261-83).
Complications face this kind of argument as what counts as significant
contribution is both unclear and disputed. For example, a farmer who
supplies food for a tyranny's secret police or repairs the
vehicles that they use to hunt down dissidents clearly makes a
contribution to their depredations, but it is unclear whether that
sort of contribution makes her liable to deliberate targeting in war
(Fabre 2009, Frowe 2014).


## 5. Intervention



Whether intervention in revolution can be justified is a question of
great significance for the morality of political revolution. We will
use the term "intervention" in a broad sense to refer to
deliberate military contributions made by foreign actors. Intervention
is thus understood to include acts like contributing combatants or
weapons, as well as acts like instituting a no-fly zone, or providing
intelligence or logistical support or training in the use of weapons.
Given the asymmetrical nature of revolutionary war, military
assistance from foreign actors may be crucial, perhaps even necessary,
to the success of revolutionaries.



Though intervention may be of urgent importance for the success of a
revolution, the justification of military intervention by foreign
actors is subject to important moral limitations. Michael Walzer has
famously argued that the right of collective self-determination sets
stringent constraints on what foreign actors may do. On Walzer's
view, foreign actors can only initiate unrequested intervention when a
people faces a supreme humanitarian emergency, such as genocide
(Walzer 1977; Walzer 1980). Walzer's argument results in an
asymmetry between the justification of revolution and the
justification of intervention; whereas the former can be justified in
response to oppression that does not reach the threshold of supreme
humanitarian emergency, the latter cannot (for discussion of the
asymmetry position, see Dobos 2011).



Buchanan has argued that respect for self-determination entails quite
different conclusions (Buchanan 2013). Buchanan rejects two common
principles offered as constraints on intervention based in respect for
self-determination. The first is Mill's principle, which holds
that popular support for revolution is necessary for intervention to
be justified. The second is the consent principle, according to which
the beneficiaries of intervention must consent to the intervention for
it to be justified. Buchanan rejects both these principles because a
populace that is oppressed by a Resolute Severe Tyranny faces
considerable obstacles to expression of popular support for revolution
and consent to intervention.



Without such constraints on intervention, Buchanan has offered two
distinctive kinds of grounds for intervention in revolutions. First,
he has argued on the basis of considerations of proportionality that
foreign actors can justifiably intervene in revolutions that may not
have even been instigated rightfully when such intervention serves to
either a) preempt wrongdoing and the escalation of violence and
coercion that tends to take place in revolutionary wars, or b)
establish the conditions under which the oppressed are able to
meaningfully convey their support for (or opposition to) revolution or
consent (or lack thereof) to intervention (Buchanan 2013). Second,
Buchanan has argued that considerations of self-determination may in
fact weigh in favor of the justification of intervention (Buchanan
2016). He argues that respecting a peoples' right to
self-determination requires taking measures to protect the conditions
of the exercise of a group's self-determination and to promote
the conditions under which the group is capable of being
self-determining. Consequently, on Buchanan's view respect for
self-determination, considered by itself, entails a permission to
intervene in revolutionary wars when doing so will protect or promote
the people's self-determination. This permission extends to
considerations of future generations, such that foreign actors may
also intervene in the formation of post-revolutionary government if
the post-revolutionary regime was going to be such that the conditions
of self-determination would not obtain for future persons. It is
important to note that Buchanan's argument is directed only
against the view that respect for self-determination rules out
intervention. He does not hold that the fact that an intervention
would promote self-determination entails that intervention is
permissible all things considered. There can be counter-vailing
considerations.



Massimo Renzo offers the following critical reply to Buchanan's
argument (Renzo 2018). Renzo first argues that even if a person is
temporarily incapable of exercising a right, this does not mean that
others cannot violate the right. Accordingly, the fact that some group
is unable to exercise its right to self-determination does not imply
that others may act as though the group had no right to
self-determination at all. Constraints based in self-determination may
still obtain on the grounds of a) past exercises of
self-determination, and b) available reasons concerning how the group
would exercise their right to self-determination if they were able to
do so (for a critical reply to Renzo, see Weltman 2019). Buchanan
might reply that he acknowledges that the right of self-determination
continues to exist under conditions in which the right-holders are
incapable of exercising it but the right is violated only when it
could be exercised, not by measures that enable its exercise. The idea
would be that under conditions in which a tyranny prevents the people
from developing the capacity for self-determination, the right is,
latent or in reserve and that respecting self-determination can in
some circumstances mean doing what is necessary to make the exercise
of the right possible.



The exchange reviewed so far takes for granted that self-determination
is relevant to some extent in determining the justification of
intervention. A number of authors, however, deny that
self-determination is of any import at all. On such views, if *jus
ad bellum* principles are satisfied, then intervention is
justified regardless of whether it is supported by beneficiaries
(McMahan 2010; Altman and Wellman 2011: ch. 5; Teson 2017 ch. 3).
Because these arguments reject that respect for self-determination
sets constraints on intervention, they consequently entail a rejection
of Walzer's asymmetrical position, resulting in a symmetry
between permissions to engage in revolutionary war and permissions for
foreign actors to engage in military intervention.



Replying to such views, Renzo has argued that self-determination is
indeed a value that sets constraints on the justification of
intervention (Renzo 2020). Key to Renzo's argument is the claim
that self-determination is an independent value. In support of this
claim, Renzo argues that appeal to self-determination is necessary to
explain the wrongness of a certain kind of colonialism. Renzo holds
that colonialism that does not involve the violation of the basic
human rights of colonized is nevertheless wrong because it violates a
people's right to self-determination. Having established that
self-determination is indeed an independent value, Renzo goes on to
argue that respect for the value of self-determination sets a *pro
tanto* constraint on the justification of intervention. This
*pro tanto* constraint requires taking into consideration how a
community would have exercised its right to self-determination if it
were able to do so, and how it has exercised its self-determination in
the past in order to determine whether the intervention would be
accepted by the community. Renzo does not, however, conclude that on
his account there is an asymmetry between revolution and intervention.
Rather, he argues that there is a symmetry, because revolutions will
tend to be instigated by a vanguard group that in effect bears the
same relationship to the people as does a foreign actor. Accordingly,
he argues that there is symmetry between the justification of
intervention and the justification of revolution because both must
take into consideration the right to self-determination of the
people.



An alternative account of the relationship between revolution and
intervention is offered by Christopher J. Finlay (Finlay 2020). Finlay
argues that revolution and intervention are complementary. He holds
that intervention is a supplement for revolution, such that the
justification of intervention is a function of the justification of
revolution. In order for intervention to be justified on
Finlay's view, it must be that, first, the beneficiaries of
intervention are unable to secure their own rights, and second, that
domestic leaders of a revolution would be unable to succeed on their
own.


## 6. Implications for Further Research in the Philosophy of Revolution



Both the ethics of revolution and the ethics of intervention in
revolution are heavily fact-dependent, because both are shaped by
consideration of the likely consequences of engaging in revolution.
More specifically, whether individuals or groups ought to or may
permissibly attempt to overthrow the existing political order and
replace it with a new one depends, inter alia, on whether the
prospects for significant improvement are good, relative to the likely
costs of trying to achieving it. And for third parties considering
whether to intervene either in support of or in opposition to a
revolution an estimate of the risks and benefits is also essential. We
have seen that, except in the case of Kant's Conceptual
Argument, the division between philosophers who opt for a blanket
prohibition on revolution (and by implication, on intervention in
support of revolution) and those who hold that revolution is sometimes
justified is best explained by the hypothesis that the opposing groups
rely on different estimates of the risks of revolution. But we have
also seen that the risks vary depending upon the context in which a
revolution occurs. Consequently, a sound philosophical theory of
revolution will be particularistic, in this sense: it will acknowledge
that there is no correct answer to the question "Is revolution
justified," unless the context is specified and a defensible
account of the relationship between different contexts and different
likely outcomes of revolution is provided. Doing that requires an
empirically grounded account of the relationship between particular
contexts and outcomes. So far, no moral theory of revolution satisfies
this requirement.



We conclude, accordingly, that a defensible theory of the morality of
revolution must rely on a descriptive-explanatory theory of how
large-scale political change is likely to occur, a theory that is
context-sensitive. Further, since the question is when, if ever,
revolutions are likely to produce a morally better political order,
what is needed is nothing short of a descriptive-explanatory theory of
morally progressive large-scale political change.



Another way to put this fundamental point is that theorizing the
morality of revolution should be "naturalized," not in the
sense that normative issues should be reduced to factual ones, but
rather in the sense that theorists should recognize the relevance of
the facts about what actually happens in revolutions. Until they do
so, perennial debates about whether revolution or reform is the best
path to moral progress, debates of great importance for the
justification of revolution, will remain unresolvable. That means that
the normative theorizing about revolution, if it is to be concrete
enough to be action-guiding, requires not just the traditional skills
of the philosopher, but also recourse to relevant social scientific
theories of how large-scale changes come about (a factual question),
in combination with principled assessments of whether the likely
outcomes of revolution in various contexts will be morally
progressive.