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Death by a Thousand Cuts: Insurrectionist Ethics in a Present less Oppressive than the Past

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Insurrectionist Ethics

Part of the book series: African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora ((AAPAD))

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Abstract

This chapter is intended to provide a new definition of insurrectionist ethics that cuts in many ways against the grain of positions already engraved in the literature. That is done by considering the various elements of a novel definition of insurrectionist ethics. One that treats fundamental, structural, and systemic oppression as the conditions that give warrant to an insurrectionist response. A notion of necro-depictions is articulated as an essential conceptual tool to understanding the duty to insurrect or resist oppression. It is here argued that insurrectionists ethics is an anti-ethical position that operates from an understanding of the severe ethical constraints under which oppressed people are forced to deliberate about the appropriate ends to seek through voluntary action. Insurrectionist ethics requires the transvaluation of existing values, and radical reformulation of conceptions of personhood, humanity, and liberation, among others, to render comprehensible its radical aims of social transformation, and abolition of present conditions of oppression.

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Correspondence to Jacoby Adeshei Carter .

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Carter, J.A. (2023). Death by a Thousand Cuts: Insurrectionist Ethics in a Present less Oppressive than the Past. In: Carter, J.A., Scriven, D. (eds) Insurrectionist Ethics. African American Philosophy and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16741-6_12

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