This project begins from a simple, often overlooked fact: we live within complex social systems, and we constantly make strategic moves to survive, resist, or maneuver within them. I believe many of these everyday forms of navigation remain underexplored in political, ethical, and legal philosophy. Yet they deserve careful attention: we must analyze their nature, the structures that produce them, and the ethical questions they raise.

I examine the balance between the continued political authority we grant to social systems in respects that merit our support and conformity, and where that authority reaches its limits in light of serious dysfunction, injustice, or harm. I analyze the creative strategies people use to resist and navigate rule-based systems—the motivations behind them, the ethical status of these practices, and the psychological aftermath they leave behind.

Much of the existing literature focuses on more visible and dramatic forms of resistance — civil disobedience, large-scale protest, whistleblowing, and other forms of organized or radical activism. In contrast, my project investigates a different kind of resistance: the subtle, everyday strategies people use to bend, reframe, or maneuver within social systems. These practices may appear minor in isolation, but they are widespread. And, as I argue, can be surprisingly powerful in shaping how institutions evolve over time. Their ethical status, however, is often ambiguous: the same maneuver might serve emancipatory, self-serving, or even harmful ends. By taking these less-theorized forms of strategic navigation seriously, we gain a richer understanding of how real people live with, work around, and sometimes quietly reshape the systems that structure their lives.

Some truths haunt us, not because they are enlightening, but because they are too intrusive to ignore yet too disturbing to bear. I argue that in many interpersonal contexts, individuals are shielded from such epistemic intrusions by a default right-not-to-know–an implicit entitlement to remain undisturbed by violent, disgusting, or distressing content. However, as Lackey (2022) emphasizes, victims and survivors of injustice should be recognized as possessing a right to epistemic acknowledgment: a right to tell their story, and a corresponding duty for others to bear witness. This paper examines a dilemma at the heart of epistemic reparations: when the right to turn away conflicts with the right to be known, whose claim should prevail, and on what grounds?

[To be updated soon!]