El pacifismo y el problema de la demarcación

ABAL, FEDERICO GERMAN

Cordoba

Workshop; V workshop de ética, politica y derecho; 2019

Centro de Investigaciones Jurídicas y Sociales

Violence is prima facie wrong. By saying this I mean that any time we face an act of violence a preemptively condemnatory moral stance is required. Violence is the kind of thing that it is assumed to be wrong until we have well-established reasons to think otherwise.For instance, if an innocent person A shoots at an unjust aggressor B to impede being killed, most people would accept that he is justified in doing that. Moreover, A is not merely justified but also, he did nothing wrong. It was B´s aggression that makes him liable to be shot and A is not violating any right by shooting at B. Pacifism has been considered by several philosophers as a ridiculous position that affirms that violence is not just prima facie but absolutely wrong (Narveson 1965; Regan 1972; Nielsen 1981). Hence, a pacifist would be against the defensive violence employed by A against B. Introduced in these terms, pacifism is used rhetorically to illustrate an extreme and intuitively implausible position from which more "reasonable" positions can be discussed.However, this way of understanding pacifism has little relation with pacifist activism and with the history of the term itself. The term "pacifism" is historically recent. In 1901, Émile Arnaud introduced this concept to describe the broad international political movement opposing war that had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century (Alexandra 2003: 590; Cortright 2008: 9).More recently, pacifism has been introduced by its critics as an absolutist opposition, not to any type of violence but war (McMahan 2010; Narveson 2013). To some authors, this kind of pacifism is untenable because war can be morally justified in defensive terms appealing mainly to the same principles that morally justified self-defensive violence. For others, war can be morally justified not analogously to self-defense but on its own terms. In any case, the burden of proof falls on the pacifist who says that there is something special about war that makes it always morally prohibited. Certainly, some precision about the scope of the adverb always is needed. Does the pacifist defend an opposition to war in any case, actual or hypothetical, or just in any likely or realistic case? If the former, pacifists should argue that there is something intrinsically and absolutely wrong in any war. If the latter, they should admit that there are some (maybe extremely unlikely) conditions in which war might be morally justified.Since it would be easy to construct a hypothetical example of a war that includes (or excludes) anything we want to, the first variant of pacifism seems implausible. Except for violence, there is nothing morally problematic that every instance of war necessarily includes. Given that, as we saw, absolute opposition to violence is unacceptable, pacifists should adopt a more modest stance and discuss the conditions in which a war could (or could not) be justified.Once pacifism is reduced to a conditional position about the morality of war, paraphrasing Shaw, it only remains to haggle over the price. The problem with this situation is that, in this way, pacifism seems to be indistinguishable from a theory that has specified the conditions in which a war can be morally justified: just war theory. One of the most preeminent scholars on pacifism, Cheyney Ryan has named this as the demarcation problem. It is difficult to say what is distinctive about the pacifist position, as opposed just war views that doubt if their standards are ever met (Ryan 2018: 279).In this paper, I will explore whether there is a third option for pacifism different from both the absolute rejection of violence and the adoption of just war theory. The essay proceeds as follows. In section II, I consider three possible answers to the question about what is morally wrong about war. This question serves as a guide to distinguish between different variants of pacifism. In section III, I present three lines of work followed by authors recognized as pacifists and I focus on those two that pretend to be action-guiding. In section IV, I develop the line of work suggested by authors such as Reitan and Holmes, who argue that there are reasons to oppose the act of waging war that are not reducible to the principles of just war theory. Mainly, I argue that these reasons can be formulated in terms of two plausible principles: Principle of Countable Proportionality and Principle of Permissible Precondition.