A recurrent moral struggle that I've been debating myself about for years is on the matter of pacifism as it relates to my moral principles of rule consequentialism. In particular, the area that has interested me most is the topic of revolution, and the means by which revolutionaries have, and in some ways failed to, morally justify their revolutions. Intuitively, I do not like revolution for the same reason that I don't like murder: it is necessarily a non-consensual denial of life or property of another person, and as I have previously written, autonomy is my highest-order value. As such, any and all exchanges, moral or otherwise, between two parties must be either implicitly or explicitly consensual as per a moral contract between both parties. This view is a combination of rule consequentialism and social contract theory in that it is the notion that moral rules ought to be built around what is the greatest median utility (see the following), and that these moral rules are followed and apply to individuals who are capable of a moral contract between another agent, or for whom the nature of the individual is that they are protected by another moral agent, or the property of that moral agent. Within this, it seems to me that a revolution does not meet the necessary conditions of a moral action, as it will necessarily involve the violent denial of life upon another moral agent, and to a lesser degree of severity, the destruction of another moral agent's property. This presents a problem, however, as I am American, and as an American, my existence is contingent upon a revolution--the American Revolutionary War. So, I must ask the following questions: under what, if any, conditions are is the violation of the base rule of contractual respect of autonomy justified? With this question, it is first necessary to consider if pacifism must be pure, or if concessions may be made at all. Ultimately, this essay argues that while strict pacifism is untenable, contingent pacifism grounded in rule consequentialism allows limited, defensive exceptions. However, in modern warfare, revolution is unlikely to be justified.
Within contemporary moral philosophy, there exists a relatively new concept known as contingent pacifism. This variety of traditional pacifism is one in which pacifism is not followed as a statement of principle, but instead the necessity of pacifism is considered in a case-by-case basis (May 2015, p. 4). Within this view, we may understand some violent actions are justified if and only if they meet some set of criteria under which it might be said that they are just. This idea of a Just War, as it were, suggests that some actions that violate the autonomy and moral consideration of moral agents is justified if the war is just, and we might know war to be just given some either subjective or objective criteria depending upon if the speaker is a moral realist or anti realist. In Larry May's book "Contingent Pacifism: Revisiting Just War Theory", these potential criteria and their respective value is described and assessed. In the book, May describes how theorists have argued that a just war is one in which the soldier who is killing does so from not only the side of the conflict that is morally righteous, and that the war will lead to a just peace, but that this killing is both necessary and proportional to the violence inflicted upon them (2015, p. 43). However, within this May argues, as is typical of the traditions of contingent pacifism, that modern warfare cannot be a just war, as it necessarily involves a blurring of what is a combatant and what is not (May 2015, pp. 65-86). Moreover, he analyzes the ways in which non-combatants might be drawn into conflict within the context of the asymmetrical warfare of the modern day (May 2015, pp. 110-134). In all, the book argues for the serious consideration of contingent pacifism as an alternative to the typical assumptions of the just war theory, as well as suggests that even within contingent pacifism, modern warfare does not meet the contingent criteria under which pacifism might be ignored (2015). I am inclined to agree with May to an extent, as it does seem to get past my dissatisfaction with the traditional hard-line pacifism that I have historically held, and the dissonance of accepting that certain revolutions have been justified in the past. So, a set of criteria might be derived under which we may assert that a violent conflict has sufficiently been demonstrated to be worth the cost of abandoning strict pacifism:
These criteria present some problems, namely how something may be known to be "just". Within traditional just war doctrine, as per St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, the criteria under which a war is just is that it adheres to jus ad bellum, and Jus in bello, or justice before war, and justice during war, each of these having within them their own criteria. For jus ad bellum, here must be just authority, just cause, just intention, and the war must be the last resort. Within jus in bello, the war must be proportional, discriminatory between combatant and non-combatant, and responsibility must be taken with respect to the consequences of war (1274). What it means to be "just" for Aquinas involved the adherence towards the teachings of Christ and the Bible, and thus the Bible is used as the base by which just is determined. As I am not religious, let alone Christian, the Bible as a source of moral authority is insufficient, but it does suggest that the status of "just" might be determined through one's preexisting moral principles. Thus, I suggest the following definition for "just" within my own moral framework or social contract rule consequentialism:
Something is "Just" if and only if it adheres to or seeks the adherence to a moral rule that when implemented creates a society under which the highest net utility might be produced.
Within this definition, we may return to the previous criteria as per May (2015), and thus have a set of rules under which we might determine what conflicts, if any, are just, and might meet the criteria of contingent pacifism. I will start at a basic level of contingent pacifism that most people would agree with, and work up to more complex issues of revolution. I will accomplish this with a set of thought experiments.
Consider the following: you are walking alone at night, and are carrying a weapon. A man approaches you with a knife drawn, and charges at you, screaming that he intends on stabbing you to death. You now have the option to either let him kill you, or inflict violence upon him to keep him from killing you. You draw your weapon, which for the sake of argument is a pistol, and fire at his legs to immobilize him. After falling to the ground, he removes a gun from his belt, and points it at you. In response, you fire back, killing him. Within the model of just violence, is this action just?
Consider two separate worlds, one in which it is morally justified to kill the man, and one where it is not morally justified to kill the man. In the world in which it is not justified, you are killed, and the man is still alive, able to continue killing. Even though he is violating the moral rule of pacifism, no one is able to stop him as they would then be violating the moral rule of pacifism, and thus he can never be stopped. Now consider a world in which it is justified to kill him in self defense. Doing so creates a rule under which someone who would kill you in their actions, and for whom not killing them is insufficient to protect yourself and others, might be killed. As such, this individual is unable to kill anyone else, and your life is saved. I would argue that the second world is more desirable than the first, and that people would be happier overall in the second world. Thus, violence done in self defense is justified as a violation of pacifism.
Now consider the following: You are a Jew living in Nazi Germany, and a soldier has come to kidnap you and your family and take you to a concentration camp to be tortured and killed. Although ahistorical, for the sake of argument the soldier in question is being forced to act as a soldier for the Nazi party, and does not desire to harm anyone, but if he does not harm them, the state will kill him and his family. Thus, each party of this moral conflict is at direct threat of death, either by the state if they do not participate in immorality, or by the state for being Jewish. You use a gun to kill the soldier, and flee with your family to France, and from France, to the UK. Was it morally justified to kill the German soldier? Once again, lets consider both worlds, one in which the Jewish family must accept death, and the one in which they are allowed to defend themselves, even if the person who is leading them to death is doing so outside of their own control. First, the world in which it is not justified to kill the soldier: a rule has been made that those who are victims to state violence are not allowed to protect themselves from that violence. If at any point in time, a state commits a great immorality such as the killing of innocence and/or genocide, those for whom the state is killing may not protect themselves from that state violence, as they cannot determine with certainty that the agents of the state are acting as independent moral agents from the state itself. Thus, if a state comes to power that seeks to commit a genocide against a group of people, there is no moral action that might be taken to prevent this from happening, and as such, any and all genocides that have happened thus far would not have been able to be thwarted or lessened in severity, and any and all marginalized people for whom genocide was inflicted against would, in some way or another, cease to exist. In the second world, the agents of the state fundamentally act as an extension of the state, and as such any immorality of the state is immorality of the agents involved, even if the agents themselves are unable to act any differently. Within this framework, there is a means by which genocide might be fought, and those who are at risk of genocide are able to protect themselves. Once again, I find world 2 to be more desirable, and believe that people would be happier within that world.
Now suppose that you are a person living in the United States during World War 2, and you hear of the actions of the Nazis towards the Jews, and desire to help save the Jewish people from annihilation. So, you take part in the second world war with the goal of ending the war as quickly as possible so as to protect as many Jewish lives as possible. In the process, you kill many German soldiers, and are unable to determine if the soldiers fought by their own free will as moral agents. Moreover, the war has led to the loss of life of many civilians. At the end of the war, your actions assisted in ending the war. Is this action justified? Like the above example, we can consider the ways in which genocide either is or is not facilitated or allowed per the ability for it to be stopped or thwarted, and as such I once again believe this action is justified, not only through the Aquinas model, but also my own.
Now suppose that you are a person living in the United States, and you are opposed to the actions of the United States government in its support of a genocidal regime in another country, and as such you create a militia to dismantle the United States to stop the support of this regime. In doing so, you succeed in toppling the United States Government, and stop the financial support of the genocide from the United States, however the genocide does not stop, as the funding of the United States was not the sole means under which the genocide was able to exist, as other countries also funded it. So, your new post-revolution government declares war on every country that participates in the genocide in one way or another. Throughout all of this conflict, you have caused the death of hundreds of citizens who did not fund the genocide, both nationally and abroad, but you are successful in stopping the genocide. Is this justified? Here, I am not as confident. If I imagine a world in which it is immoral to revolt against the government for this action, I have limited the means by which genocide might be stopped, but in doing so, I have supported death that is even more disconnected from the original conflict for which the revolution was made to stop. Here, the proportionality of the war is imbalanced, as the American citizens who may or may not even be aware that the genocide, and for whom the genocide is distantly related to, are killed, and their autonomy thus violated. So, it is in my mind that this action is not justified. Therefore, it seems an important consideration is not just that the action be proportional, but that it be directly relevant to the parties involved in the revolution such that the action does not harm those who are distantly related to the cause.
With this, we might have a standard by which to assess revolution, and therefore determine if it is a just war. I argue, then, that despite being a pacifist, I am contingently pacifistic upon that pacifism not preventing the violation of my own moral values of consequentialism and social contract, and I ultimately arrive in agreement with May: revolution might be justified, but only if it is done defensively against a tyrannical state that would otherwise kill you and/or kill others who are innocent, it is proportional, and the action will ultimately lead to peace. Moreover, this action must be proportional to the level of action taken by the state, thus removing from consideration states that are not taking action that would kill you or your family unjustly (i.e. you have not violated sufficiently important moral rules such as those relating to murder or rape, etc.). But like May, I argue that within the world of modern warfare, such a revolution is unlikely. In a world where a single weapon is capable of killing dozens of people in a matter of seconds, and where death may be counted in the hundreds of thousands, and is consistently inclusive of innocent civilians, the determinants of a just war are no longer possible, or at the least, exceptionally difficult to ensure. In a time where to kill another person you must use a weapon that might only kill a single person at a time, and where civilian casualties are easily avoided, a just revolution is easy to imagine. But in the modern world, I cannot presently imagine such a revolution.
Within this paper, I have assessed theories of just war and contingent pacifism for the purpose of determining the line under which pacifism ought to be abandoned for the adherence to rule consequentialism and social contract theory. In this consideration, I have arrived at the conclusion that, although revolution might be justified, or that revolution is not necessarily unjustified, it is likely to be unjustified within a modern context. Ultimately, violent actions may only be taken defensively, or to protect others who are having their right to life and autonomy violated, and that protection and defensive action must be proportional to the actions taken by the aggressor. For these reasons I assert that although I must concede that pure pacifism is not conducive to a functioning society, neither is a pacifism so contingent that it may as well not exist at all.
Aquinas, T. (1274). Summa Theologiae (Complete English ed., 5 vols.). Christian Classics.
May, L. (2015). Contingent Pacifism: Revisiting Just War Theory. Cambridge University Press.