Pacifist or not?

Great Debates
21

Refuted how? It is true that pacifists are often killed pursuing their goals, but looking back on history it is the pacifists that change this world the most. Generally speaking pacifists are believers in a higher intelligence like “God”. They also believe in an afterlife. They are what I would call spiritualists.

To name a few:

Socrates, Jesus, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and some churches like Jehovha Witnesses, Amish, and Quakers.

If all the world bought into the non-violence peace would be assured.
Pacifists often give their lives in their cause for others. Not a group of people to be ridiculed. “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for others.”

22

Socrates wasn’t a pacifist. He fought as a hoplite for Athens in the battles of Potadaea, Delium, and Amphipolis during the Peloponesian war.

23

For the individual, pure pacifism is possible. In the examples John Mace raised, it’s perfectly valid to try to defend the victim as best you can by placing your own body in harm’s way, but ultimately resigning yourself to accepting that the victim may be harmed in spite of your best efforts. A Buddhist would do that to avoid the karmic hit that violence would give him, and point out that the victim’s suffering and pain was undoubtedly due to karmic retribution for incidents from a prior life.

A society founded on those goals would ultimately be destroyed, in my view, people being what they are.

The willingness of others to fight ensures a society in which even sven can practice her attempts at pacifism.

I wonder, though, if she was confronted by a violent rapist, and the only way to avoid the violent rape was to fight back… what would she do? The Buddhist I mention above would not fight back, knowing that whatever injury suffered to the body - even death - was emphemeral and temporary; that pain and loss of dignity are merely expressions of attachments to the world, attachments which must be eschewed if the cycle of rebirth is to be ended.

I have only met one person in my entire life who I think really both believes and would act in that way, though. Coincidentally, he’s a Buddhist monk. :slight_smile:

24

I see your point. However, Hitler didn’t become a dictator by promoting an insane war and genocide. He was more subtle than that. We got a taste of it in the Vietnam era when people refused to serve as a matter of conscience. Some went to Canada, some went to prison. If enough people did that then a war is stoped in it’s tracks. In Gandhi’s case the point was to make injustice completely obvious by not resorting to violence.

See the above definition. I’m not making it up.

Um, that would be you making it up and wrong.

History shows us that mankind is not prone toward pacifism. We’d have to actually *try * pacifism to declare it self defeating. We haven’t yet.

25

Actually, Jesus did throw a number of merchants out the high temple. He also made few if any statements that soldiers were evil, or even engaged in more evil work than others. He did not even really condemn the Romans for violence. At best, and he does have a few pacifistic comments, his legacy was not wholly about condemning violence, nor is it at all clear he would have advocated total nonviolence as a response to violence.

He was also quite fortunate, and knowingly so, in having a number of violent radicals willing to fight around, who were provided a stick to his carrot, if you will.

No, he wasn’t/ From the very beginning, he sought to attain power b the use of organized and disorganized force, including public brawls in the streets. In the chaotic and half-revolutionary post WWI Germany, this gave him control.

26

I think you guys are holding pacifists to a higher degree of rigour than you yourselves are adhering to. If fighting for what is right can make the world a better place, why arn’t you on your way to some foreign countries to depose some tyrants? Would you join the resistance in Nazi Germany? I’ll give you a hint- few did. Very few of us are actually doing the absolute best we can to make the world better, and most of us would probably fail to live up to our highest standards if we were put under fire. That doesn’t mean our beliefs arn’t genuine or worthwhile.

27

I am in fact a veteran of the conflict in Yugoslavia, so it’s not like I haven’t done this, myself.

You’re right on that one. But the imperfection of individual pacifists isn’t the problem I have with pacifism.

To my mind, pacifism is of limited utility in prescribing a code of behavior most people can live with, and that fits with how society actually works. Furthermore, it depends always on a cadre of individuals who are not pacifists for its protection. Orwell pointed out this problem well.

28

Yes, Jesus was a pacifist, but you can hardly call the largest religion in the world (Christianity) a failure. If you mean Christians should be pacifists, yes, I agree, however, very few followers ever understand, or even know what Jesus was teaching. If they do know, then their struggle to match His teachings are never perfect.

The world will always have Master Teachers such as Jesus to point the way to the light. Some will understand and trod the path, most will just be confused and call the Master a lunatic.

29

Yeah, but Moto, you’re not doing it now. And the standard to which you’re holding pacifists (always behaving in such a way as to be non-violent) if applied to you means you should be out there with a knife in your teeth hunting down al qaeda members.

I’ve known a few ardent pacifists in my day…again, most of them amish and suchlike though some regular Joes who simply adopted it. It’s a hard moral stance to take. Effectively, you’re saying this:

“I refuse to participate in violent actions even at the cost of my own life.”

In other words, those people have made a value judgement that their morals are more important to them than their life. And I can’t say that’s a non-courageous stance to take. It is, instead, the pacifists who raise their fists when it’s their own ox gored who are the hypocrites.

But then again, any absolutist moral stand is going to lead to difficult choices. We’re all hypocrites in some way or the other. The shades of gray win out usually.

30

Nope. Keep in mind, this criticism I offer is of pacifism as a pholosophy, since I find it an unrealistic and limiting one.

That’s different by far from criticizing pacifists personally, which I’m not inclined to do. Most pacifists I’ve met are indeed decent folks who lead lives of considerable virtue.

That doesn’t mean I agree with the viewpoint, obviously. And debating these limits can be useful, especially to me, to help me understand the philosophy a bit better.

31

Well, fair enough. Though I did want to see you with the knife in your teeth.

But seriously, couldn’t we poke holes in any absolutist philosophy? I, as a self-identified libertarian, recognize the inapplicability to the hard-line application of same to the outer world.

32

Are you sure Christianity is the largest? I actually thought it was Islam.

33

Not all pacifist depend on someone else to defend them. Some would not want anyone to commit a violent act on their behalf.

Pacifism is most often connected with spiritual beliefs. If you believe your eternal soul lives on then the threat of physical harm or even death only tests the strength of that belief.

34

Nope. It is Christianity by a huge margin with 2.1 billion people (1/3 or the world’s population). Islam only has 1.3 billion.

35

Pre-WWII Germany was not a backwards nation. Certainly modern society has advanced some since then–but still I don’t think we could safely say that we have improved the operati of society so much as to entirely rule out the possibility of genocide and other government-ordained atrocities in a fully modern nation.

We can talk about Hitler being evil all we want, but the place where WWII is scary is that several million Germans turned a blind eye to it, against all internal-morality; not dim-witted, backwaters lunks, but well educated and creative people.

And personally looking at this, I can’t believe that even an absolute pacificist belief would be of worth. When the pack of 5 large soldiers–the soldiers of your own government, and boys of your own neighborhood–come bringing a Jewish woman into your house to rape and kill her, the only way this can be stopped is by having the conviction to kill, regardless the certain death that will come.

That isn’t a desire for war, it isn’t immoral, nor is it “worse than peace” to kill in such an instance. Simply the absolute conviction to stop atrocities when you might have the power to stop it is the only solution. And not because you’ve now got a lot of people who can go out and become soldiers: With a population who absolutely refused not only to do, but also not to allow immoral acts, you would never be able to create a country like Nazi Germany.

So while I can respect absolute pacificism, I see no solution in it. If you’ve a will strong enough to sit by, you’ve a will strong enough to fight. And more importantly is that by encouraging the idea that “there is no good killing,” it makes it harder to talk seriously about you, the individual, making individual decisions regardless of what all your peers do which may lead to the decision that you have to fight some horrendous idea spreading in your nation, and which you will have to be ready to die to prevent.

Going off to become a soldier is one thing–and I appreciate what they do. But this is far secondary to preventing ones own nation from becoming as horrendous as the nations we send our troops into today. When it comes to that, everyone has to be a soldier–indeed, possibly fighting ones own military.

Certainly I do think the odds of such happening in any of the nations we inhabit is amazingly slight. But if we’re going to discuss whether or not pacifism is actually an idea of merit–well outside of Ghandi-like protests against unfair treatment, rather than against seriously malevolent behavior–it really isn’t. It desn’t handle the scariest case. If anything it aids it–just for having a pleasing sound and making the necessity to consider life and death situations remote and easy.

36

The unspoken assumption behind this quote, and behind the arguments that many have posted in response, is that darwinian utility is the only appropriate method by which to judge an ethos.

Personally, I find that position to be ethically bankrupt.

37

You know there are other options besides sitting staring in to space while the Nazis rape and kill your poor Jewish neighbors. A pacifist can and should act in the larger political arena. Plenty of people saved Jews without shooting down Nazis. And people can bring wars to an end through non-violent means. Pacifists can and should be out there publisizing war atrocities, agitating for peace on both sides, and working to build a world where we don’t come in to these kinds of conflicts- which can mean anything from working at an Israli/Palestinian peace summer camp to working on sustainable energy. Pacifism doesn’t have to be passive.

Sage Rat, Ghandi didn’t just run a few protests against a little unfair treatment. The British were massacreing people, and to be fair I’m sure there was plenty of bad stuff going on on the other side, too. The point is that Ghandi led a country through the first non-violent revolution the world has ever seen. And he led the way for other countries to seek their independence without wars.

Just think- every day- you just wake up and don’t kill anyone. I do it every day. Billions around the world do it every day. If we cound just get everyone to do it, we’d get rid of one of the biggest and dumbest plagues mankind faces.

38

Pacifism can be one of the most hopeful of ethical positions. Even when I do not share a hope, I generally do not try to squash it in those who do.

[sub](though I have also known some pacifists who had more of a fatalistic streak. It can be a jarring combination, actually.)[/sub]

39

But that’s my point: Why did the soldiers under Reginald Dyer fire on the populace instead of refusing?
Would our modern day troops in Iraq do any different if their commander told them to open fire on a peaceful protest? Probably not.

One of the reasons there isn’t peace in the world is because people just do things when told, without doing any personal flaw checking. Saying “Just don’t kill anybody!” is only doing the opposite as saying “Just kill everyone that’s in the way!” People are only doing the thing because some important person has told them to; be it their commander, the mass media, or God.

Giving people a prepackaged moral plan (Now With 50% More Love!) allows people not to have to think for themselves. And that’s what they do. They aren’t forced to imagine scenarios like “I have a guy pointing a gun at me telling me to kill these 50 people over there that I don’t know. What do I do?”

So, using that example, some possible answers:

  1. Shoot the guy with the gun
  2. Shoot the 50 people
  3. Shoot myself dead
  4. Refuse
  5. Other

As above ^ this is a fine question and the type of thing that people should pose to themselves–if not done in grade school. But if you ask it like below >

“Killing is evil. There is no justified death, and killing brings nothing but sorrow. There is no need to kill anyone and if no one kills anyone, the world will be a better place.
Now, if you were in a position where a man with a gun told you to shoot and kill 50 unarmed people, what would you do?”

  1. Kill the guy with the gun
  2. Kill the 50 people
  3. Kill yourself so that he has to kill them himself
  4. Refuse

Well, almost unanimously everyone will answer 4. But is that the right answer? Perhaps, but that’s irrelevant. The only reason they’re giving that answer is because it’s the one you trained them to give. Subsequently their conviction to it is only that strong. Plus you’ve reinforced the idea that the person in charge gets to choose your morality.

None of the answers is wrong. You may not personally agree with it, and certainly you can share what thoughts you had that led you to your own answer, but if you’re in a position of influence it is your duty to present all options–including #2–as perfectly legitimate. Which means you have to present killing as a valid and potentially moral option. For all the teachers, actors, journalists, and whoever else to go about spouting that “killing is bad” is at heart harmful to society. People need to be brought up with the idea that “killing may be the moral solution but you’re going to have to make that choice and make sure to keep it in mind as you enter the world.” Minus that, I don’t see any reason to believe that we can trust ourselves to behave any differently than we have in the millenia until now.

40

That’s not even a good commentary let alone the best one, and Orwell himself recognised that the above position is intellectually dishonest. Orwell was waging a political feud when he wrote those words, and the “objectively pro-Fascist” smear was a convenient tactic for him to impugn his opponent. He later wrote:

From his As I please column, December 1944 which can be found here

As to pacifism personally I dont have the strength of character to be one but I will say this. If everyone turned into a devout hardcore believing Quaker the world would become overnight a better place. And if everyone turned into Eolbo or Mr Moto the world would remain exactly as it is today.