The main supposed justification for destruction of property would be that it helped the colonies. You could also argue that it was just inherently justified to do anything that taught Britain a lesson, but I'll stick to consequentialist ethics here, since the goal of a protest is typically to help whatever people the protestors are protesting for. The immediate effects of the Boston Tea Party were the Intolerable Acts: closing Boston Harbor, replacing Massachusetts' government, and the Quartering Act, among other things. All these immediate effects were bad for the colonies.
However, those policies also led to the Revolutionary War. So was the protest was justified because it led indirectly to American independence? This gets into a political theory called "accelerationism" which basically argues that we should try to make things get bad faster so that people will protest and overthrow the oppressive system. But I have several issues with this approach. First, it would imply that the Intolerable Acts themselves were justified because they led to revolution. Basically, anyone involved in passing the acts and violating the colonists' rights was actually doing a good thing, because it led to the American Revolution. And at best, you will get lucky with this strategy, because it's easy to predict "this will lead to punitive measures" but hard to predict "this will lead to American independence." The colonies could have easily lost the war, and most colonists didn't even want to fight it until the Intolerable Acts were passed.
So at best, the Boston Tea Party was a way of twisting the colonists' arms into fighting a war for independence (which would end up involving child soldiers), when most of the colonists had wanted to avoid war altogether. A good chunk of the colonists fighting for reforms condemned the Tea Party anyway, with Benjamin Franklin offering to pay for the tea that was destroyed. Many of the grievances with the British government might have been solved without war, and the Intolerable Acts themselves were certainly avoidable.
Now you could say that the people behind the Tea Party weren't responsible for what Britain did, but the goal of a protest is to send a message and influence behavior, so I think protestors (particularly those destroying property) have at least some responsibility not to cause needless destruction.
The most cogent defense imo is that the tea belonged to the EIC, which was granted a monopoly by the Crown, so destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly. A good moral parallel would be attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative, leveraging their druglord money to invest heavily in Shanghai real estate.
destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly
Sure, but the effects of the protests were bad for the colonists, and I don't see what positive effects they could have been anticipating. So it was still needless destruction of property.
attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative
A lot of morally questionable decisions were made by China there, like preventing the sale of food to the British, leading to the Opium Wars (which were bad for China). So I accept it as a parallel but it largely proves my point.
destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly
Sure, but the effects of the protests were bad for the colonists, and I don't see what positive effects they could have been anticipating. So it was still needless destruction of property.
attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative
A lot of morally questionable decisions were made by China there, like preventing the sale of food to the British, leading to the Opium Wars (which were bad for China). So I accept it as a parallel but it largely proves my point.
This is the trouble with consequentialist ethics - it assumes rationality. But pushed to a certain point, people behave irrationally, and it's not rational to ignore that possibility to make the way the world works fit into a nice, neat, easily understandable system. In my view, the revolt of the colonies was a predictable possible consequence of the post-French-Indian war taxation scheme. This meant that implementing this taxation scheme had a chance to result in the revolt of the colonies and a significant loss of British power on the world stage. In my view, it was the responsibility of the British to recognize that and adjust action accordingly, not to plow ahead and assume that the colonists would remain meek and acquiescent because it was 'rational'. Once the more powerful party neglects their duty as rulers and fails to comprehend or acknowledge the dangers of squeezing their own people too far, it's on them.
The same logic applied to Gaza and October 7th. It was the responsibility of the Israelis to recognize that if they kept squeezing incessantly on the Palestinians there would be a dire backlash. Any population behaves in a way which seems irrational when backed into a corner because, to the people being backed into the corner, there is no rational escape, there is only fight a hopeless battle or be destroyed. This is why in military strategy it is considered a dire error to back your enemy into a corner with no escape, what Sun Tzu called 'putting them on death-ground'. On the other side of this coin, a general who was outnumbered and was intent on holding off a superior force would intentionally back his own forces against a river or some other natural obstacle to trigger this suicidal aggression response. Not to derail the issue, but it's my personal opinion that the current hardline government of Israel is trying to put both the Palestinians locally and Jews globally on 'death ground' simultaneously, and that both eliciting the October 7 attacks as a predictable backlash and then allowing it to happen uncontested served this purpose, as does the ongoing, incredibly public genocide which is causing an absolute groundswell of global antisemitism.
Once again, the same argument also applies to the British/Sassoon alliance and China. They just kept squeezing, and the end result was the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the rise of Communist China, which solved the opium epidemic in short order - one of Mao's greatest public relation coups was framing the Nationalists as allies with drug lords and foreign powers due to their ties with opium traders in the south of China. The Opium Wars weren't about the Chinese denying food to the British any more than the American Civil War was about the Confederates firing on Fort Sumpter. The Opium wars were about the fact that you cannot survive as a country with the majority of your population addicted to narcotics, and Britian as a foreign power was putting their finger to the scale to prevent China from addressing this serious internal problem, along with bleeding silver back into British coffers. China did not have a choice to sit quietly - it was either fight or be destroyed. Most people when given that choice will choose to fight even if the chances of winning are vanishingly small.
No counter-arguments have been posted yet.
