Strange as it may seem, Dustin Ells Howes’ project and mine share an important goal. Both of us are troubled by the use of violence in pursuit of political ideals. And both of our books seek theoretical equipment with which to challenge agents who claim on dubious grounds to have had moral justification for it. Where we differ is in our choice of means.

Howes thinks the best way to do so is to reject violence as such, restricting his inquiry to the alternatives to arms. I doubt that this approach can succeed because it runs up against the problem that it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively that violence can never be necessary as a means of resistance. Many people will continue to believe that it must be justifiable in at least some cases, however rare and peculiar the circumstances giving rise to them might be. Given the impossibility of defeating such beliefs, I therefore think the best way to criticise violence is to specify precisely what it would take to justify it in hypothetical cases. Doing so then provides appropriate standards by which to make principled, critical comparisons.

Crucial to hypothetical justifications is the idea of necessity, which is why I spend a good deal of time in the book analysing its demands. That I set to one side in doing so the many creative ways in which nonviolent methods might be deployed does not, of course, mean that I believe they will always fail or that I think them uninteresting. It is simply that my aim was to specify the exceptional circumstances in which the naturally more troubling question of violence might legitimately arise.

So, on the one hand, my book offers an account of the criteria by which cases of violent rebellion might be evaluated, keeping one’s mind open to the possibility that they might sometimes be justified. But equally it helps explain why probably the vast majority of real cases are unlikely to prove morally defensible. In this sense, specifying the exception helps prove the rules: it clarifies and thereby reinforces them.

So I think a just war approach offers a more robust way of condemning wrongful violence than one which takes the wrongfulness of violence as axiomatic. But while I remain unconvinced by Howes’ attempt to debunk as a western myth the idea that liberty may render a resort to violence necessary, I am strongly persuaded of the value of his commitment to thinking creatively about the alternatives to violence and their transformative potential when deployed in more auspicious circumstances. However, the idea that this should lead us to reimagine the conscientious rebel as someone whose signature trait is ‘a willingness to put lives at risk and defy overwhelming odds’ while adopting strategies that sometimes harness the violence of others strikes me as troubling for reasons I explore in Terrorism and the Right to Resist. I believe these too can best be addressed by a theory of ethically guided violence.