Audacious Integrity: On the Value of Imperfect Resistance

Abstract

Sometimes oppressed people resist their oppression through actions that are themselves morally fraught, such as theft, deception, or violence. This article considers what might be said in favor of such actions, which I call imperfect resistance, from the point of view of ethics. Against the expectation that oppressed people must remain “perfect victims” for their resistance to be admirable, I argue that oppression often constrains agency in ways that leave people with no wholly unproblematic options. Resisting oppression well under these conditions requires the capacity to navigate moral risks with practical wisdom—to discern which moral risks are worth taking and how best to negotiate the limited and morally fraught options available. Some acts of imperfect resistance can express a virtue I call audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks in order to defend one’s values for good reasons. It occupies a middle ground between moral purism, which treats moral considerations as decisive, and moral nihilism, which rejects them altogether. Those exhibiting audacious integrity take moral considerations seriously but are willing to stretch the limits of morality to maintain their agency and pose formidable challenges to their oppression. It is a virtue exercised when agents retain the capacity to resist but cannot do so without moral compromise.