Thoreau rejected cost-benefit accounts of when resistance is justified.

Evidence

Thoreau’s title, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” is a riposte to another piece he mentions, William Paley’s “Duty of Submission to Civil Government.” For Thoreau, Paley is one such basically dead man, since Paley views the occasion for resistance as “a computation of the quantity of danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Moral judgment is replaced by cost-benefit analysis; Paley’s idea sounds like the way an AI would decide when and whether resistance was necessary. But from Thoreau’s perch atop the mountain of reason, Paley looks trapped in the flatlands, where he “never appears to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 280

Categorization

• XREF: Paley’s expediency calculus prefigures the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental/calculative reason — the technical knowledge interest.
• SEED: Angle: obligations that ‘cost what it may’ — where cost-benefit analysis is structurally incapable of conceiving moral standing.