Protest as holding others accountable

Abstract

It is common to describe protests as attempts to ‘hold others accountable’, but that claim has received little direct philosophical attention. This paper aims to answer two questions. First, is there something that makes accountability-seeking protest different from other kinds of protest? Second, if so, then under what conditions is accountability-seeking protest justified? To the first question, I answer that accountability-seeking protest is different from other kinds of protest because it aims to communicate a moral message to its target by subjecting the target to symbolic adverse treatment. To the second question, I answer that accountability-seeking protest is justified when accountability-seeking protest is a fitting response to a wrong. In turn, this requires that the protest respond to a wrong, that it is well-formed as an act of reproof, and that it is done in good faith. This account allows us to discern a morally distinctive kind of protest, to see why alternative accounts overlook the distinctive features of this kind of protest, and to make sense of our moral intuitions about it.