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Pacism: A Comment on Beehler's Note

Jan Narveson

Dialogue / Volume 11 / Issue 04 / December 1972, pp 588 - 591

DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300029917, Published online: 09 June 2010

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How to cite this article:

Jan Narveson (1972). Pacism: A Comment on Beehler's Note. Dialogue,
11, pp 588-591 doi:10.1017/S0012217300029917

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PACIFISM: A COMMENT ON BEEHLER'S NOTE

T HE "ancient tradition" of pacifism has many facets to it. It

would be surprising if it were entirely coherent—how many
ancient traditions are? In any case, I pointed out in the article
Beehler criticizes that I focus on a "narrow band" of pacifist doctrine.
My acquaintance with pacifist literature suggests that the dominant
doctrine is one which I agree to be coherent, though I find it im-
plausible: the doctrine that violence as a reaction to violence cannot
work, is bound to be counter-productive. The defence of this idea is
not confined to "empirical" methods, of course. It is interlaced with
religious, metaphysical, and other ideas. When the going gets really
tough, however, there is a tendency to revert to the doctrine which I
do examine. Has Beehler cast any doubt on it?
It appears that Beehler has just one major argument. This argument
goes as follows. We can, of course, distinguish between my doing an
act and my (or your) preventing someone from preventing me from
doing it: ". . . the absence of any act depriving you of what you have
a right to and the prevention of acts depriving you of what you have
a right to are not the same." And then he says, "And it is only by
running the two together that Narveson has been able to make the
pacifist out to be confused." After two re-readings of the article, I am
reluctantly persuaded that Beehler really means this. He evidently
supposes that it is my inability to distinguish those two things that is
the cause of my claiming that the right to one of them cannot coherently
be distinguished from the right to the other of them. How could he
have arrived at this conclusion ? Upon rereading my article, I find no
good reason for supposing that its author just didn't know the dif-
ference between a person's simply doing something, and a person's
being protected in the doing of something. Of course, I certainly
have claimed that having a right to perform a certain act is having
the right to be defended, if need be, from interferences with it. My
claim, in other words, was that here we have different values of 'x'
and 'y' such that nevertheless, to have a right to x is to have a right
to y. Beehler evidently thinks that no proposition of the form 'z is F
to x' can be equivalent to a proposition of the form 'z is F to y' unless
x and y are identical. Why should he think that ? I take it, for example,
that a man is the father of the first of a set of twins if and only if he is
the father of the second of the set. And the trouble is, Beehler evidently

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does not see how any equivalence of that form can ever be defended
by any other argument than that x and y are, after all, really identical
with each other. This must be the reason why he ignores the arguments
which I actually do produce on this point. But you can't just say that
since one thing is different from another, therefore you can have a
right to one without having a right to another, and then settle at that.
Does Beehler produce any further reason for supposing that, in the
case of rights, we can perfectly well have a right to do something
without having any right at all to the use of force, if it is necessary,
to prevent interferences with our doing of it ?
He does say this: "It is my right (to freedom of movement) that
makes your interference wrong; it is not my right to prevent inter-
ference that makes your interference wrong." I agree. Why should it
be supposed that if to have a right to an action is to be entitled to
defense in case of interference with it, then what makes your interference
wrong is my right to defend myself? I claim that to say that your
interference is wrong (unjust) is to say that I or someone may legiti-
mately prevent you from doing it. So this attribution is unnecessary,
and in fact I don't subscribe to it.
Beehler says two other things. Citing my suggestion that if we came
upon a community which uniformly practised non-resistance as a
matter of conscience, then we should have to say that they lacked
the concept of justice, he observes that "a concept of justice is only
one among the moral concepts possible to a community. It may be
that they have, besides justice, a concept of mercy, and of charity."
Now, all I said was that they would have to be said to lack the concept
of justice, and not that they lacked those other concepts. (Curiously,
Beehler says they might have these other concepts besides that of
'justice'. But he doesn't directly address himself to my claim that they
would not have that of justice. I am, just incidentally, doubtful that
one can have concepts of charity and mercy without having the
concept of justice. Can mercy, or charity, be understood if we don't
have also the notion of that which they exceed or qualify in a given
case, namely justice ? I doubt it. But of course, a man can certainly
allow his sense of mercy to dominate his sense of justice in practice.)
Second, he says that they might suffer violence pacifically, not because
they do not have the concept of justice, but in spite of the felt in-
justice of what they suffer. This we may agree with. After all, in the
passage quoted by Beehler a few lines earlier, I pointed out that the
right to defend yourself is not the duty to defend yourself. And every-
one in the community might be like that. Of course, if they were,

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then no violence would ever occur and that would make it hard to
test claims about their attitudes and reactions if it did occur. So we
need to thicken out our description of the case.
Let us suppose, then, that the community in question had the
following characteristics. A few in it were inclined toward violence.
And a few others were occasionally inclined to resist. What, now, is
the treatment of these latter ? The former, we may suppose, regularly
get away with the most flagrant acts of violence, including murder.
Most members of the community respond to this with an increase in
spiritual intensity, and various verbal acts of what appears to be
denunciation, except that it is unaccompanied by any practical action
directed at stopping the violence. Now let us also suppose that a few
non-conformists, having had all they can take, are inclined to resist
the malefactors, and not merely to scorn them. Suppose—what is very
unlikely—that they can convince the pacifists that the only way to
prevent certain of these acts of violence was by the use of force. (As
pointed out in several places in my article, the condition that force
be necessary in the case is required to sort out the doctrine I'm dis-
cussing; if it is not necessary, all will agree that the less violent methods
should be preferred.) Now what is their reaction? My point is this.
If they not only persist in refraining from using such force on behalf
of themselves, but also continue to say that this reaction is wrong,
more especially that it was unjust, then I submit that we should have
to conclude that they had some misunderstanding about the idea of
rights, at least as a distinctive ethical category. They could not be
understood to be agreeing that the original perpetrators had no right
to inflict violence on harmless folk, and yet also claim that those who
would defend themselves against it also had no right to do that. It is
not much to the point to say that this may not be what they are doing.
They may only be expressing their preference for a way of life in
which no sort of violence was ever resorted to. I am inclined to claim
that if so, then that isn't even a moral doctrine at all. But whether or
not that is so, it does no good for them to urge on their allegedly
erring brother that he must not resist violence because, and simply
because, violence is wrong. For that is exactly why the few who are
inclined to use force are inclined to do so. The latter, I suggest, are
interpreting the allegedly moral condemnation as involving a corre-
lative notion of moral rights. Under just the circumstances depicted,
I would say that the majority's view as described could not intelligibly
be interpreted that way.
The case may be strengthened further by reminding readers of a

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 PACIFISM: A COMMENT ON BEEHLER'S NOTE

further set of cases, briefly alluded to in my original article, but made

rather more of in a further brief article in the same journal. 1 Let us
ask ourselves what we would say of a government which claimed to
grant rights to its citizens, but carefully refrained from taking any
concrete steps to enforce them. Imagine that the government, when
this apparent discrepancy is pointed out, replies a la Beehler: "Ah,
but don't you see, we are of course giving you the right to do all those
things, it's just that we are not also recognizing the other, obviously
entirely separate, right to protection against people who try to prevent
you from doing those things." This would, I suggest, be uniformly and
rightly regarded as a bit of egregious sophistry, a mere play on words.
One last remark. Beehler ignores a further set of arguments briefly
set forth at the end of the revised version of my paper, on which he
is basing his comments.2 This set of arguments is directed not only
against the specific claim that violence-to-prevent-violence is unjust,
but also against the allegedly more general claim that it is wrong.
These arguments are pertinent to the possibility that pacifism will be
defended on such grounds as the "sacredness of life". Suppose I
believe that life is sacred. Presumably this will include my own life.
Now suppose that I can prevent Killer Capone from violating the
sacredness of life, viz., by deleting mine with his machine-gun, by a
well-aimed shot which would disable him temporarily but not kill
him. If so, what does the principle of sacredness of life recommend in
this case? In particular, how do I defend my own inaction by it?
If life is the only good, then if there is a choice between a greater
reduction of it and a lesser reduction, one would suppose that we are
committed to preferring the lesser one. Yet the pacifist continues to
prefer the greater one, just because the lesser one would involve his
own action. This cannot be a moral reason, if that is all there is to it.
But otherwise, it is clear that the principle requires the non-pacific
response in that case. So pacifism, if urged on teleological grounds,
continues to be incoherent. And if not formulated in terms of rights,
it is difficult to avoid formulating it teleologically. There are issues
here which deserve discussion, but Beehler doesn't discuss them, so
I shall stop.
. JAN NARVESON
University oj Waterloo
1
"Is Pacifism Consistent?", Ethics, ig68, pp. 148-150. This article was a
reply to a criticism which amounts to a more specific application of Beehler's
general claim, by M. J. Whitman; his criticism is found in Ethics, 1966, pp.
307-8, under the title, "Is Pacifism Self-Contradictory?"
2
P. 266 of Rachels' volume, Moral Problems.

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