Theme
War and peace
11 philosophers, 3 traditions
When, if ever, is it right to go to war, and how can peace be secured? Chinese thinkers of the Warring States and European philosophers from Augustine onwards took up the question.
Philosophers have long asked whether war can ever be right, and what follows if it can. In China’s Warring States period, when the larger states fought to swallow their neighbours, Mozi judged unprovoked aggression wrong for the same reasons as theft and murder, and his followers trained to defend cities under attack. The Confucians Mencius and Xunzi held that conquest by force is futile: a ruler who governs humanely, or by ritual, keeps the people’s support, which a tyrant loses.
In the Latin West Augustine traced war to sin and the lust for power, yet denied that Christians must be pacifists, and set out conditions under which a war could be relatively just. Aquinas later gave the just war tradition its most systematic medieval statement. Erasmus urged princes to settle their quarrels by arbitration. Hobbes, who lived through England’s civil war, held that people without a common power over them are in a condition of war, and that almost any government is better.
In the twentieth century Russell went to prison for opposing the First World War and later campaigned against nuclear weapons, while Simone Weil gave up her pacifism in the face of fascism. Today’s just war theory looks for a path between two extremes: the view that morality falls silent in war, and the pacifist view that nothing could justify its horrors.
Through time
5th century BCE
Mozi
Unprovoked attack on another state is wrong for the reasons that theft and murder are: it harms others for selfish gain and in the end benefits no one. The Mohists tried to talk warlike rulers out of attacking their neighbours, and some became experts in defending cities under attack.
4th century BCE
Mencius
Trying to conquer the world by force is as hopeless as climbing a tree to catch a fish. A ruler who extended his compassion to his own subjects would see how they suffer from his wars. When Qi annexed Yan, Mencius objected that he had not encouraged what Qi did there, which seems to have included killing noncombatants.
Argued against Mozi
3rd century BCE
Xunzi
A true king wins without having to fight, because people will not support a tyrant or a lord who rules by force. Strength comes from ritual: when ritual and music make the people harmonious and united, the army is firm and enemies dare not invade, and no weapons can defeat a king who honours ritual and morality.
About 700 years later
4th century CE
Augustine
War springs from sin and the lust for power. Yet Christianity does not demand an impractical pacifism: a war can be relatively just if it is defensive and properly declared, or commanded by a just authority. A truly just war, waged out of love for the enemy, is hardly possible in a fallen world.
About 1100 years later
16th century
Desiderius Erasmus
War is sweet only to those who have never known it. Princes should take their disputes to arbitration, perhaps before a committee of churchmen, instead of fighting, and even when writing on war against the Turks he recommended compromise and arbitration.
17th century
Thomas Hobbes
Where there is no common power over them, people are in a state of war. Having lived through England’s civil war, he judged that even the most oppressive government is far less of a burden than civil war, and that only absolute authority can keep it at bay.
19th century
Frederick Douglass
Douglass came to reject pacifism. A person without the power to resist lacks full dignity, and slavery, a deep and enduring injustice, could rightly be ended by force: he defended John Brown’s ideals and pressed for federal military action against slavery.
Jane Addams
From 1914 to her death Addams wrote mostly about peace and war, at first to public scorn; her pacifism, rooted in her social ethics, was eventually honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
20th century
Bertrand Russell
He opposed the First World War in print, for which he was fined, dismissed from Trinity College and later imprisoned. In the nuclear age he helped organise the Pugwash Conference of scientists, became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and opposed the Vietnam War.
Simone Weil
Long a pacifist, critical of both civil and international war, she opposed fascism during the Spanish Civil War while favouring French non-intervention. After Germany and Italy formed their military alliance in 1939 she renounced pacifism, and she later left France hoping to be more useful to its war effort.
Frantz Fanon
Colonialism is a total system of domination, leaving no part of the person untouched, and violence against it is a precondition of liberation. From the struggle itself, liberation must go on to cultural renewal and the building of a postcolonial state.
Sources
- Seth Lazar, War, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Alexander Moseley, Just War Theory, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy