Attacking the Things that Consume Our Planet: Civil Disobedience, Direct Action and Climate Change
2025-05-29
This article considers the moral limits on uncivil climate protest. It does so by examining Andreas Malm’s influential claim that the climate movement should engage in the targeted sabotage of property associated with high emissions. Although Malm’s criticisms of civilly disobedient climate protest are forceful, I show that there are problems with his positive arguments. First, we need not view sabotage as necessarily violent, and more clarity is needed on the relationship between the violence/nonviolence distinction and property damage. Second, the norms of defensive harm are too permissive: they seem inconsistent with the principle of nonviolence to persons Malm and other climate activists want to endorse. Finally, an ethic of resistibility to the climate movement is underspecified in both its content and grounds. The conclusion of the article is that Malm’s important challenge is incomplete, and that more work is required to understand the norms of uncivil climate protest.