This is a new blog about the ethics of vigilantism. I have no idea how often I’ll post. The term “Jeddart Justice,” taken literally, is a reference to the practice of carrying out execution prior to trial. It’s a reference to the town of Jedburgh, located near Edinburgh, Scotland, and an anecdote or anecdotes about a gang of thieves, or maybe several, summarily executed there.

Vigilantism is ethically interesting, and under-explored by philosophers who work on ethics. Most of the scholarly work on vigilantism has been done by social scientists including criminologists, anthropologists, and historians. The number of philosophers who have written anything beyond a mention about the ethics of vigilantism can, to the best of my knowledge, be counted on one hand.

This is surprising, given that vigilantism is historically important, and ethically complex. Perhaps the dearth of philosophical attention can be attributed to the fact that, to many, vigilantism seems ethically straightforward: taking the law into your own hands, after all, is generally frowned upon. And certainly there are core cases in which vigilantism is and had been deeply problematic. However, vigilantism has also occurred in contexts in which ethical justification is much more plausible. Communities on the American frontier in the 19th century, for example, sometimes banded together to run cattle rustlers out of town — or, if need be, to hang them. Such instances of communal self-defence, in contexts in which formal mechanisms of law enforcement are lacking, should inspire a good deal of sympathy. But of course, cases vary enormously, along a significant number of dimensions, and so I argue that the ethics of vigilantism is actually pretty complicated, and interesting.

Moving some distance towards a better understanding of this complex moral phenomenon is my goal here.