How? In all seriousness, take autz’s example of the tanks rolling in. How do you stop that non-violently?
The idea that pacifism breaks the cycle of violence is pretty silly. It may end it, but only because the people willing to use violence would have secured power, probably by killing a lot of people. I think a moral code which results in the world being enslaved to a few violent people is a pretty objectively bad code.
Frankly, since pacifism utterly fails on a large scale, its only function is to let the few people who adopt it feel superior to everyone else.
Whether or not a particular act of killing is moral depends greatly on what one bases their morality.
Let’s assume that every action can be judged by comparing the benefit it does against the harm it does. But the weight of each benefit/harm is not something that can objectively determined. That is, I think all moral systems are “chimerical”, using the OP’s sense of the word. I can’t think of a way of assigning moral weights to actions that isn’t essentially arbitrary (please provide counter-examples if this is incorrect).
A pacificist by definition weighs the harm caused by killing someone now to be greater than the potential harm that may be caused in the future by some violent person. This could be because the pacifist is “egoistical”, in the OP’s sense. But it could be because they discount the future; that is, the harm in the future isn’t worth as much because it’s only potential and not assured.
Well, there is the option of throwing yourself under them as mentioned… I’m pretty sure it would indeed be effective. But personally it seems a little extreme given the option of simply staying out of the way and speaking out against their violence in a setting where it’s more likely to be heard. It may not be satisfying, but that’s only because it’s too often seen in a short sighted view. Even if you fail to stop the tanks themselves, by refusing to resort to violence, you bring the whole world one small step closer to peace.
If you do not resort to violence, the people who are willing to use violence might secure power. But if you do… then the people who are willing to use violence definately will secure power. You or them, it makes little difference unless you choose to be better than that.
On the large scale is exactly where it is most effective. In terms of war rather than conflicts between individuals, it always takes two sides to engage in it.
And pacifism hardly lets one feel superior. I would only feel superior if I were able to actually be perfect and never harm anyone with my actions. If anything let’s people feel superior, it’s taking their failings and wrapping them up in justice or social contracts, or morality, whatever, and pretending that the harm that they have done to others is actually a good thing.
It’s very simple.
Step 1: Pick up the phone and call the Justice League. Inform them of difficultiies.
Step 2: Get popcorn and watch as Superman and the Flash dismantle tanks at superspeed, while Wonder Woman restrains soldier with Lasso of Truth, which forces them to admit that they are pawns of a corrupt regime and that violent is inherent the system.
Step 3: Profit.
Effective in applying your blood and guts to the bottom of the tank’s treads.
What in the history of the world would make you think that putting a person in front of a tank would result in anything other than the person being dead? A guy with a tank isn’t there just to say hello. There’s also not much precedent that it brings the world closer to peace. Maybe getting out of the way means the guy with the tank doesn’t have to kill anyone to get his way, but he DOES get his way. So, the bully wins, as I said before. How is that a reasonable solution? It’s ok for countries to get invaded and taken over, as long as no one gets killed? Do you think the kind of people who would invade other countries with tanks are going to sit down, talk reasonably about the issues, realize they were wrong and go home?
One party here isn’t just “willing” to use violence…they are choosing it as their MO. The other is using it as a last resort. So, you can’t eqaute the two as just violence = violence. Intent and motive is relevant to the moral issue.
Right, because if one side doesn’t engage, then the aggressor gets to come in and kill the populace if they want to.
It may not be “good,” exactly, but it may be necessary.
If only Chamberlain had thought of it. Maybe he didn’t have their number.
He would have had to call the Justice Society. And they couldn’t settle it because Hitler had the Spear of Destiny thingie, which I mention only because I enjoy typing the word “thingie.” Also, I am very saddened that no on remarked on my Monty Python joke.
I have a serious question for those advocating pacifism. Would you ever call the police to intervene in a situation? Suppose you see some people fighting on the street, would you call over a patrolman to intervene? Heck, would you get the police involved under any circumstances? It seems to me that you could not ever do so and still consider yourself a pacifist. After all, the only authority the police has is that they are allowed to use force while the citizenry are not. By involving the police, you would be invoking force via proxy which should contradict the philosophy.
Unfortunately, it is true. You seem to be assuming that the world is composed of sane people always under control. You are confirming Skald’s charge of pacifism being chimerical. Some people are sociopaths. Some people are deluded. Some people will kill for religious or political causes. Some people will kill under the influence of drugs.
I’m afraid your fantasy of there always being a non-violent solution is about on the level of b]Skald**'s Superman scenario. And violence is usually not used to prevent violence - it is used to limit already existing and ongoing violence. That is why preemptive strikes are immoral. A police sniper taking out someone in a tower shooting innocents is preventing far more violence than he is creating.
I hate to go Godwin here, but if the Nazis were not stopped there would be continued violence for the foreseeable future, as they would use violence to put down even nonviolent protests. Stopping them, with violence, led to a Europe that has been pretty much at peace for over 60 years. I don’t see how that is a worse conclusion under any moral calculus.
My wife was on of the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989. None of them believed the tanks would really roll right over them or that the soldiers would fire on them.
Twenty years on the architects of the massacre have convinced the populace that the protesters were dangerous people. No one has contested the claim, because they are afraid of being run over by tanks.
Bad guys willing to use violence vs good guys for whom peace is the end unto itself? Good guys become the slaves of the bad guys, and teach their children that they are lucky to be slaves.
It is beyond stupid to say that you should “speak out” when all you get for that is get shot by people who don’t care how many people they shoot.
I am Indian. The only reason Gandhi had any impact in India at the time was because he had a couple hundred million people who were willing to follow up his non-violence with horrific violence. Either that or the British Raj was the best government India has ever had, because neither any one before or after, would be “shamed” by a non-violent protest. The British were terrified that if Gandhiji actually starved himself to death, there would be massacres everywhere. Probably of Indian Christians rather than of the relatively small number of well guarded British citizens. Because of course, the Indian Christians wouldn’t have the means to defend themselves, and the British had shown in 1857 that for a handful of coppers, Indian troops will happily gun down Indian protestors or rioters.
The riots of 1968 did more to move along civil rights than all the freaking laws you could pass. White people got scared at all levels.
First of all I think there’s quite a few examples where a person has indeed faced down a tank and survived. But that’s beside the point, because the consequences of the choice between violence and nonviolence far surpass the life or death of the person making that choice.
There are more important things than who get’s their way in a particular conflict. There are more important things than wether a bully wins. There are even more important things than which country wins a war. Again and again you give examples of violence doing harm as a reason to do violence yourself. How can you deny the flaw in that? You ask how allowing your enemy to win is a reasonable solution. How is a never ending cycle of violence a reasonable solution? No matter how horrible the actions of a person, they are still a person and harm done to them is as bad as harm done to anyone else. It is a shame if a person chooses to harm others, but it is also a shame if you do. Only one of these is your choice. You may think your violence will cause less harm than the actions of another, but that’s what everyone thinks. That’s what every agressor thinks. MAYBE you’re violence will do less harm than others, but forcing that judgement of yours on others is harmful to everyone. Once you give yourself that permission, once you declare your judgement of right and wrong superior to someone elses, it never stops. There is always another and another because nobody will ever agree with your every judgement. Eventually someone will decide that you must be stopped. This is the mentality which leads countries to war in the first place.
Violence is NEVER the last resort. The claim “I had no other choice” is the most popular excuse for the worst crimes which you would present here as requiring violent intervention. As long as you pretend that violence is an acceptable solution, you won’t see the alternatives. Even inaction is preferable to harming others.
You can always try to dissuade them with nonviolent means. There is nothing wrong with someone being able to come in and kill the populace. The important question is why would they want to? If the best reason you can offer not to come kill you is that you’ll fight back, anyone who believes they are strong enough to defeat you has no reason not to attack. This is the problem of the world we live in. Everyone lives in fear of everyone else because right and wrong are determined by those with the power forcing their judgement on others. It can only end when we choose not to harm others, even when we expect those others to do harm themselves.
Again, it simply NEVER necessary. It’s always a choice. If violence were really the right choice, why do people cling to the lie that they have no other option? There are always other options which have some potential to resolve the conflict. Even if you can’t think of any, inaction is always a valid choice.
Garula:
Yes I would hesitate the involve police. They are still human beings, capable of reason, but the fact they believe they have athority makes them a more risky choice than any other random person. Although in many contries they are trained in, and practice, conflict resolution, in canada at least, that practice is rapidly dissapearing. Now that they are armed with so-called ‘non-lethal’ weapons, they tend to just bark orders and attack anyone who dares to defy their athority.
Voyager:
I am not assuming ‘the world is composed of sane people always under control’. Quite the contrary. The problem is that everyone has a different idea where to draw the line between sanity and insanity. And very few would accept which side of that line they are really on. Any attempt to determine such things comes down to those with power forcing their will on those without.
I’m not sure I said there was always a nonviolent solution. If I did, the word ‘solution’ may be misleading (though technically still accurate). There is always a non-violent option. It can never be known for sure wether it will solve the immediate conflict to your satisfaction, but violence is hardly a guarantee of success either. Violence may seem like a more reliable option but all too often that is exactly the delusion an agressor is operating under. The only solution for the long term is for everyone to stop pretending their violence is somehow a good thing.
Who decides when the time has come to ‘limit already existing and ongoing violence’? Who decides just how far a person is allowed to go before violence against them becomes acceptable? Any time you decide violence is acceptable, somewhere there is a person who thinks that line between sanity and insanity lies between them and you, and their decision to use violence to stop you is as justified to them as your decision is to you. In order to enforce your own judgement on this matter you must have the power to defeat those who would try to ‘limit’ your own violence. This is the system we live under now, might=right, and everybody is in a constant battle to protect their ability to make their own decisions. This is a burden under which nobody should be forced to suffer. One which drives many to acts which you would consider ‘out of control’. When the police choose violence to solve the problem, the person they shoot is not the only one they harm.
As for nazis, there is a reason people avoid brining it up. For various reasons people are simply unable to consider the matter rationally. I have no expectation that anyone will be willing to believe this but if the nazis had been allowed to do what they pleased, the world would likely be a better place today. I know you don’t get it. That’s ok, it’s just something about nazis.
TheMightyAtlas:
I am not a historian by any means. But I can say that the choices of the Tiananmen Square protestors had an impact far exceeding that of their own life or death. The choices of Gandhi and his nonviolent followers also had, and continue to have, a far reaching impact around the world. Why the british did or didn’t do anything is entirely beside the point.
There are no bad guys and good guys. Everyone tries to divide the world into good and bad but everyone puts themselves in the good catagory. It’s an illusion. We are never the good guys and ‘they’ are never the bad guys. We are them. They are us. We make mistakes, they make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. But the truth of what is right and what is wrong remains true even if everyone who knows it is killed. Eventually the truth will be rediscovered and people will learn the error of their ways. When you trust this fact, that others are as capable of good as you are, the world becomes a better place. Every time you resort to violence, every time you enforce your own judgement on others, you hold back the advancement of humanity as a whole.
There may be a fine line between sanity and insanity, but sociopathy lies nowhere near it. Am I taking you correctly that using force to prevent them from killing others is forcing the will of society on them? They of course are forcing their will upon their victims. Are you saying the will of a single lunatic should be respected over the will of hundreds of millions of members of society?
Nothing is guaranteed. Violence, if it is the only option besides being killed or seeing a loved one killed, is the more likely one to succeed. No one is saying that violence is a good thing - that is your strawman of our position. We are saying that in certain cases it is the best solution. Police, for instance, are trained when to use force and when not to, and operate under strict guidelines. Some violate it at times, but for the case of a police officer killing a sociopathic murderer to save others, the immediate problem is solved. The level of anarchy in a society where violent offenders are not controlled is not likely to be any more conducive to long range solutions than our society is. Do you think people have a right or an expectation about being safe from violence? Do you think your society would make people safer than the current one?
The answer to your question is quite simple - society as a whole, acting through democratically elected representatives, makes laws stating exactly that. I was on a jury where we had to examine the laws of California on self defense. If someone acts not according to these rules, the may be punished. That is the very fundamental reason for society existing.
The reason you don’t want to bring it up is because it serves as a perfect example of the bankruptcy of your position. Do you believe surrendering would make the world a better place. I’m Jewish - it would have made me dead or not born.
Which leads me to this - what is your metric for a better society? Is a hundred deaths by sociopaths better than one killing to prevent them? Are you trying to reduce the total number of killings, or only those by the good guys? I am having trouble thinking of any reasonable metric which doesn’t make your position totally immoral.
Because *I *am a human being, and I attach increased value to those traits that arouse empathy in me, such as sapience and other similarities. My morality is based partly on philosophical issues, and partly on emotion. Humans elicit a higher emotional response in me than, say, a lizard. Therefore I value the lives of humans higher.
Does that answer the question?
Only if you assume the only goal is to influence the actions of the attacker. I could be looking to influence the future actions of witnesses (the guy in front of the tank in Tienanmen is a big inspiration to me), or for the long-term goals I explained.
This is your strawman. I have made no such equivalence. The aggressive attacker will always be more evil than the righteous self-defender, no question.
This does not mean there is no moral weight in choosing to defend yourself with deadly force, though. But their is no equivalence.
It could also be because they assign a greater weight to an even further future, one where humanity as a whole is less violent.
Sometimes not. Although that’s the only real example (I know of) of mass nonviolent protest against the Nazis, anyway.
It depends on the situation. Sometimes cops help, sometimes they exacerbate the situation.
Yes.
Police are not mindless weapons, they are themselves moral actors, and they are enjoined by the law (here, at least) to use lethal means only as an absolute last resort in self defense. I would call the police in with the expectation that they would use non-lethal means to break up a fight, as the law dictates. If they choose to escalate that to lethality, it’s their choice.
But for historic reasons, I tend to avoid the police and only really call on their investigative arm, not their active one. Some scars don’t heal cleanly, I guess.
This is hardly the case in any state that has self-defence as a legal recourse (I.E. every one I know of).
Not really. I don’t acknowledge guilt by proxy, I’m afraid. Moral actors take the weight of their own actions. As soon as I invoke another moral actor, their own actions are on their own heads. This is the difference between, say, calling the police vs. siccing a pack of dogs onto a fight. Dogs aren’t moral actors, so I’d bear the moral weight of using them. The police, not so much.
If I may say so, you pacifists scare me more than all the Hitlers of the world. Because – depraved man of violence that I am – I know how to deal with Hitlers.
This philosophy seems to me to be predicated on a terribly shallow regard of the causes of harm: that above all else, only positive action directly resulting in violence can be considered bad, and that inaction (or positive action not directly involving violence) is always preferable.
I agree with Skald that the philosophy is chimerical; but even more than that I see it as hollow at best and at worst inconsistent. Any choice, whether to act or not to act, that can be reasonably foreseen to result in violence is not itself free from the weight of that violence. By choosing not to stop violence you aid it: thus in the worst case you could be said to be committing violence by proxy, notwithstanding that your choice did not involve positive action.
This is all the more true because the philosophy is chimerical; the purported benefits of your philosophy lack any basis in reality. It seems to me that you are completely disregarding competitive pressures. Even if you did manage to spread your pacifism to any considerable degree, you would only be creating a condition in which violence (or the threat of it) becomes extremely profitable. Selection would favor those who are willing to force themselves upon others, and I mean that in every sense.
By capitulation you might avoid more violence; but is not slavery a harm also to be avoided? Or does your philosophy hold the harm of violence to be of an unapproachably greater magnitude than all other harms, to be avoided no matter the cost? And if I may ask, how do you define “violence” in the first place? Like Skald, none of my questions are rhetorical.
I must say I have a hard time understanding this view. Violence is not a scalar but a vector quantity; it has direction as well as magnitude. By my math, if someone directs lethal force against me and I respond in kind, the sum of the two violence vectors is zero or so close as to make no odds. :dubious:
I laughed at it, FWIW. 
This, uh, sounds pretty religious to me. Do you have any reason to actually believe this, or is it just an article of faith?
I agree with this statement to the letter; however I suspect that I have a different idea of its spirit than you do. I believe that actors have responsibility for their actions, and that every choice is also an action, even if the choice is not to act. In my mind you bear the moral burden for such consequences of your choices as a reasonable person in your situation could foresee. If you feel for some reason that this responsibility attaches itself only to positive actions, then I suppose that is simply a difference between us.
I guess it seems to me that that’s the core of this philosophy: that positive action is the only thing capable of bearing moral responsibility. Is this true?
We must have completely different views on the meaning of the word “aid”, then.
I once read a short story in which an alternate-history Ghandi tried his schtick against alternate-history Nazis.
It didn’t work.
-FrL-