How can resistance to wrongful action be justified within ethical traditions that do not accept the intrinsic value of individual rights? This paper develops the concept of virtue-protective resistance: resistance justified, at least in part, by the aim of preventing the wrongdoer from suffering moral self-harm, damage to their own moral integrity through wrongdoing. I argue that this justificatory structure is conceptually distinct from rights-based and consequentialist alternatives. It operates on a different normative input (the wrongdoer’s moral integrity rather than the resister’s rights or aggregate consequences) and contains an irreducibly relational element grounded in the resister’s structural position within the wrong. Taking an initial cue from early Chinese philosophical texts but developing the argument independently, I defend the moral self-harm thesis and show that virtue-protective resistance scales from self-removal to power-restriction under graduated conditions of necessity and proportionality. Because the moral self-harm thesis is accepted across a wide range of independent ethical traditions, such as Aristotelian, Confucian, Stoic, Christian, Islamic, Buddhism, the framework supplies a justification for moral reform that is internal to traditions where rights-based critique lacks traction, addressing wrongdoers in a normative language they already speak.
