1/12/2024 0 Comments Free Pacifist![]() The use of force need not be violent, or do physical damage, but does imply some infringement on the free activity of an agent. Effectively both seek to confine the movement of the individual and pacifists may or may not reject the use of force in civil society. The use of force (again a complex area of study in itself) can take many forms including legal restraint as well as bodily restraint. Yet the violence meted out on, say a person s body in surgery is not something that most pacifists would accept deserving abolition.Ĭonnected to issues of violence is the use of force against another person which a pacifist must consider. For example, the martial and pugnacious sports involve a violence that the pacifist could accept, although many would decry such institutions as being part of the culture of violence that pervades aggressive nations (and hence are deemed potential causal factors in war) and which ought to be banned or severely limited. The adjective violent applies to many situations that the nominal pacifist would not necessarily oppose, from its uses to describe agitated or passionate behavior to morally legitimately violent actions against the self or another person. The next philosophical problem that pacifism has to deal with is what is meant by violence. The dilemma is captured well in a quotation from Clifford Simmons in Paskins and Dockrill s Ethics of War. While a few pacifists (especially in the religious vein) may accept the absolute ideal of peace, most have to justify their enjoyment of peace at the expense of others who actively defend the lives of their fellow citizens as well as those of the pacifists. The Mosaic command, thou shalt not kill resounds throughout much Western culture and philosophy and is the starting point for absolutist prohibitions on the killing of people in the Western philosophical tradition. Absolute pacifists deny that there can be any justification for killing. Their beliefs emphasize the sanctity of human life, according it a special moral status that necessitates strong justifications for the injuring, harming, restraining, or killing of another. Morally, the topic of killing is intricate and complex, deserving a separate consideration, however, for the purposes of examining the various possible readings of pacifism, it can be generally asserted that pacifists cannot condone killing. Others, however, deny any moral validity to war but accept the use of force or violence (and even killing) under criteria established by the rule of law some seek a purely non-violent way of life, where as other pacifists are solely nuclear pacifists in that they accept the use of conventional war but not nuclear war. The three areas of ethical investigation certainly overlap, and most pacifists hold an ethic of non-violence, which underpins both their disdain of killing and of war. First, there is the absolute prohibition of war second, the absolute prohibition of violence (or force) and third, the absolute prohibition of killing. The first issue to deal with is that while pacifism emphasizes the role that peace should play, there are three general aspects derived from the nature of peaceful relations.
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