Forum on War and Pacifism
-Allen Stairs, December 10, 2001

Chris McLaughlin, left, makes a   point while Brian Ramsay ponders

"Fighting for peace is like making love for chastity." That was the slogan back in the sixties, except the actual version was a lot more blunt. During the Viet Nam War, pacifists were plentiful -- real pacifists, who thought that war was always wrong and that it was never right to kill. That was a hard line to toe, and not everyone managed to keep their toes on track. I recall one serious, bearded sixties pacifist nodding sagely while he told a group of us that sometimes killing someone is the least violent thing you can do.

Maybe there are no atheists in foxholes, though that seems doubtful. In any case, pacifists don't seem plentiful in the midst of terrorism. But late on an unseasonably warm December afternoon, a baker's dozen of philosophers, give or take, worried the problem of pacifism while they nibbled on salsa and chips. "The Undergraduate forum last week was part of ongoing attempts to bring undergraduates and faculty together outside of the formal classroom setting," says Prof. Chip Manekin, Director of Undergraduate Studies. "We hope to have a few such forums next semester on topics in the philosophy of mind, religion, and science."

The session began with thoughts from department faculty members Sam Kerstein and Judy Lichtenberg. Kerstein offered a definition of what he called "true pacifism" -- intentional killing is always morally forbidden -- and he argued that one way of defending that view is incoherent. If the major premise is that human life is absolutely valuable and valuable beyond price, then the true pacifist's view will run aground on counterexamples -- for example, a case where the only way to save your two children's lives is to kill the person who is trying to kill them. Kerstein argued that in a case like this, even if human life is unconditionally valuable, that couldn't justify letting the attacker kill both of your children; after all, there are two of them and one of him.

That doesn't rule pacifism out, in Kerstein's view. He sketched a different approach that the pacifist might use to defend his position. If a person is responsible for what he wills, if it's morally forbidden to will someone else's death, and if we don't count forseeable but unintended consequences as something we willed, then we have a valid argument for pacifism. (The fact that your children will be killed because you don't kill the attacker is something you forsee but don't intend.) The problem is whether the premises are plausible: it it always wrong to will someone else's death? Kerstein's view is that it isn't. And is it really clear that we don't will things that we forsee but don't intend? The question didn't lead to consensus. Lichtenberg sketched a number of paths to pacifism. You might simply have a personal aversion to violence; you might think that the consequences of violence are worse than the consequences of pacifism; you might think that there is some basic moral principle that rules out using violence; or you might think that people who are capable of killing have a disastrous flaw in their characters. But while any of these approaches might make someone into a pacifist, Lichtenberg didn't find any of them convincing. Most people seemed to agree with the dim prospects for defending true pacifism, but there were plenty of philosopher's worries along the way and a fair share of imponderables. (Is it possible to do something that you expect will kill someone without willing to kill them? Are we ever in a position to know that one person's life is less valuable than another's?)

It's hard to say what a non-philosophical fly on the wall might have thought about what was going on, but for everyone else one thing seemed clear: even if some questions are hard to answer, there's satisfaction in thinking hard.