Querying Leonard Harris’ Insurrectionist Standards

In this paper, I question whether Leonard Harris’ insurrectionist standard, in his article, “Insurrectionist Ethics,” is adequate for evaluating a fairly well documented form of U.S. Black women’s insurrectionist resistance to oppression in slavery: infanticide. I show that though Harris’ proposed standards could track insurrectionist acts that follow from certain kinds of social identification, they cannot track well insurrectionist acts that invoke internally generated ambivalence, like infanticide. Internally generated ambivalence refers to negative affective responses to deep inconsistencies in real or imagined causal links between one’s actions and one’s motives for acting. Since Harris clearly wants to include infanticide as a manifestation of an insurrectionist act that any pragmatist moral theory should render dutiful, I claim that Harris’ insurrectionist standard requires an additional standard that issues an epistemic demand to situate oppression if it is to account for infanticide.