Introduction

Introduction

This symposium examines insurrectionist ethics, the brainchild of Leonard Harris. The position does not stem from one key source; it was born out of Harris’s philosophical interaction with various philosophers over an extended period, including thinkers as diverse as David Walker, Karl Marx, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alain Locke, and Angela Davis. The driving questions are: What counts as justified protest? Do slaves have a moral duty to insurrect? What character traits and modes to resistance are most conducive to liberation and the amelioration of oppressive material conditions? Insurrectionist ethics is meant to address such questions.

This symposium attempts to locate insurrectionist ethics in the work of representative practitioners. To this end, each of the contributors focuses on some historical figure in the American intellectual tradition with hopes of tracing, substantiating, questioning, clarifying, or extending Harris’s claims. The first paper, written by Lee Mc-Bride, articulates the basic features of Harris’s insurrectionist ethics and makes the case that Henry David Thoreau should be counted as among the representative practitioners of insurrectionist ethics. McBride suggests that recognition of the insurrectionist ethos will broaden and complicate the American philosophical tradition. John Kaag’s paper focuses on the subversive philosophy evinced in Lydia Maria Child’s earlier work Hobomok. Kaag argues that there is a significant distinction to be drawn between subversion and insurrection, yet outlines how Child’s surreptitious subversive protest creates space for the insurrectionist philosophy that is found in Child’s later works. The third paper, penned by Jacoby Carter, offers a restatement of the insurrectionist challenge Harris leveled at pragmatism a decade ago. Carter argues that a feminist insurrectionist ethics, like that established in the work of Maria W. Stewart, is better equipped to meet Harris’s challenge. Kristie Dotson’s paper questions whether Harris’s insurrectionist ethics provides an adequate standard for evaluating insurrectionist acts that often trigger ambivalence or cognitive dissonance, such as infanticide. Taking the case of Margaret Garner as a paradigm case, Dotson ultimately finds Harris’s set of insurrectionist standards lacking, requiring an additional standard, which she provides. Leonard Harris’s contribution to this symposium focuses on David Walker and the slave’s moral duty to insurrect. Harris offers compelling criticism of Walker’s view that all human beings have a natural disposition to seek freedom, yet ultimately provides Walkerite descriptions of slavery to warrant the slave’s imperfect duty to struggle for freedom, for escaping servitude is a necessary condition for basic living.