Cheyney Ryan, Pacifism - From Oxford Handbook On War

Pacifism
Pacifism
Cheyney Ryan
The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War
Edited by Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe
Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Subject: Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Online Publication Date: Mar 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943418.013.21
Abstract and Keywords
Pacifism is the alternative to just war theory. In its strongest form, it is fundamentally op
posed to war, unconditionally and absolutely. Because the pacifist position is undertheo
rised, a principal aim of this chapter is to review its main elements with an eye to further
discussion. Two types of pacifism, personal and political, are discussed. The first is more
religiously based and opposes war because it opposes all individual acts of killing. The
second emerges from the Enlightenment, then coalesces in the nineteenth century. It op
poses war because it opposes the war system and all acts of war as instances of that sys
tem. Some classical objections to pacifism are considered, as well as some new develop
ments, such as ‘contingent pacifism’. Ultimately, the quarrel between just war theory and
pacifism can only be resolved by expanding the discussion of war to include historical and
institutional considerations.
Keywords: Pacifism, contingent pacifism, nonviolence, self-defence, absolutism
THE term ‘pacifism’ comes from the Latin for ‘peacemaking’. It was coined a century ago
during a heyday of war glorification, when many political leaders saw war as an intrinsi
cally good thing, a theater of masculine virtue and a source of political regeneration.
Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first modern president, praised war as ‘bully fun’ and
once urged invading Canada if no other war could be found. Initially, a ‘pacifist’ was sim
ply someone who rejected such nonsense, who saw war as an intrinsically bad thing and
sought alternatives to it, like international arbitration. Self-proclaimed pacifists included
prominent politicians like William Jennings Bryan in the United States and Jean Jaurez in
France and thinkers like William James and Bertrand Russell. During World War I, paci
fism became associated with feminist figures like Jane Addams who linked militarism with
sexism and argued that women have a special interest in peace making.1
After World War I, the term was increasingly associated with what was previously termed
‘nonresistance’. This is what nineteenth-century Christians like the Quakers, and figures
like Tolstoy called the personal rejection of all killing. Finally, in the twentieth century,
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Pacifism
pacifism became associated with ‘nonviolence’, the political practice of figures like Gand
hi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez that rejects violent strategies.2
Pacifism, then, is a complex tradition.3 Any account of it is as much a proposal as a de

scription. I distinguish two types here. Both fundamentally oppose war and pursue peace
but from different perspectives.
Political pacifism opposes war as a social practice. This pacifism attacks the ‘war system’,
by which it means the practices of killing and destruction that characterise war making
and the practices of mobilising human and material resources to those ends that charac
terise war building. Political pacifists have differed on how expansive the war system is
(i.e., how much other practices like racism or sexism are included in it). I shall focus on
its core elements. Political pacifism’s solutions are institutional: they involve both peace-
making (movements to prevent or stop war) and peace-building (mechanisms to resolve
conflicts peacefully). Its sources are secular, originating in the (p. 278) Enlightenment,
specifically eighteenth-century republicanism. It coalesced in the nineteenth century, in
response to the Napoleonic Wars.
Personal pacifism opposes killing as an act, hence opposes war as involving instances of
that action. Its peace-making focus is more individual: it promotes acts of personal re
fusal to participation in war and personal transformation in developing more peaceful re
lations. Its sources are religious, originating in the West with the first Christians.
A key issue for the philosophy of pacifism is the relation between these pacifisms. They
can overlap, but they differ in their logic.
Most importantly, they differ in why they oppose war. The political pacifist is like the
death penalty opponent who objects to the kind of killing the practice involves. Death
penalty opponents object to ‘legal’ killing (death by government), political pacifists object
to ‘political’ killing (death by states). But just as those who oppose the death penalty may
permit killing in other circumstances, political pacifists may permit it as well (personal
self-defence, say). The personal pacifist is like the death penalty opponent who objects to
it because she is opposed to killing per se, whatever the context. So this type of pacifism
finds personal self-defence problematic. (Their differences around personal self-defence
do not translate into differences about war because both think that war has about as
much to do with personal self-defence as rape has to do with procreation.)
Both types of pacifism unconditionally oppose war, but in different ways. Political pacifism
opposes the practice of war in the same way that many people unconditionally oppose the
practice of torture. Its focus is the illegitimacy of the practice: individual wars, like acts of
torture, are condemned as instances of the practice, whatever justification they might
have in isolation. The thinking here is from the top down. By contrast, personal pacifism’s
is from the bottom up. It unconditionally opposes the act of killing in the same way that
people oppose the act of infanticide; hence, it opposes any endeavour involving that act.
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Pacifism
The issues raised by pacifism are of interest whatever one thinks of its response to them.
Personal pacifism, as its name suggests, approaches war as a matter of personal responsi
bility, not just public policy. It compels us to ask: how am I implicated in the warlike pro
clivities of my society, how should my opposition to it translate into my own words and
deeds? If this personalises war, political pacifism historicises it. It compels us to step back
from judging war one more time and address what Clausewitz called ‘the question of war
itself’: the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of war as a distinct human practice. My account of
pacifism will consider how it addresses both issues. At the start, though, several chal
lenges are worth noting.
Pacifism has been primarily a practical tradition whose principal audience has been the
marginalised. Its main voices have been political activists, inordinately people of color
and women. It has never had a presence in academia (for much of the twentieth century,
pacifists were barred from teaching in American public universities). So theoretical work
on it is minimal and undeveloped; hence, the problem of parochialism.4 Another challenge
comes from the opposite direction. Anyone comparing a century ago to now might say
that yesterday’s pacifism has become today’s common sense. No one thinks that war is
‘bully fun’. A candidate who urged invading Canada would (p. 279) not be elected presi
dent; they would be judged insane. John Mueller writes, ‘War is no longer regarded like
eating or sex, as something inevitable to the human condition. It is seen as something
grafted onto human existence, like duelling, which human beings can well do without’.5
Alongside what might be termed this ‘grand disillusion’ is what might be termed the
‘great defection’: the refusal of ordinary people to participate in the war enterprise. (A re
cent study of this is James J. Sheehan’s Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?6) It used to be
that the mark of a pacifist was refusing to fight in one’s country’s wars. Now, hardly any
one wants to fight in them. The upshot is that it’s increasingly difficult to say what is dis
tinctive about the pacifist position, as opposed just war views that doubt if their stan
dards are ever met.
Let’s call this the ‘demarcation problem’. For some versions of pacifism, there is no sharp
distinction: pacifism is what you get from taking just war principles seriously. This has
been called ‘just war pacifism’. But my discussion will stress the differences between the
two approaches by construing pacifism as an ‘absolutist’ position, considering what this
means, and how it can be defended.
I begin with what it means.
1. Pacifism as Fundamental Opposition to War

Pacifism (as I’ll construe it) is fundamentally opposed to war. I take this to mean two
things. Pacifism is unconditionally opposed to war. The pertains to the extent of its opposi
tion. And, it is absolutely opposed to war. This pertains to the depth of its opposition.
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Pacifism
It is its unconditional and absolute opposition that most distinguishes pacifism from more
fastidious forms of just war theory. It is also what makes people uncomfortable with it. Its
unconditional opposition reeks of dogmatism, a refusal to look at things case by case, and
its absolute opposition reeks of fanaticism, a refusal to countenance countervailing moral
claims. Something must be said about both.
1.1. Unconditional Opposition
To be unconditionally opposed to war means being opposed to every instance of war, re
gardless of what kind of war it is. Nineteenth-century political pacifism arose contempo
raneously with abolitionism, so it might be termed ‘war abolitionism’. It does not distin
guish good/just wars from bad/unjust wars any more than abolitionism distinguished
good/just instances of slavery from bad/unjust ones. Some of the objections to it are ob
jections to any position of this kind. Jeremy Waldron writes of unconditional opposition to
torture, ‘In these troubled times, it is not hard to make the idea of an absolute prohibition
on torture, or any absolute prohibition, look silly, as a matter of moral (p. 280) philosophy’.7
Much criticism of pacifism’s unconditional opposition to war has aimed to do just this. But
note that pacifism’s ‘absolutism’ does not distinguish it from just war theory insofar as
many just war theorists are equally uncompromising in their opposition to violations of
jus in bello or extreme instances of them (like poison gas). The difference between them
and pacifists is not ‘absolutism’ per se but what they are absolutists about: pacifists are
opposed to war in all its aspects—they are totally opposed to war, we might say.
Complications arise because people can be unconditionally opposed to war yet disagree
about what counts as ‘war’. The same was true of slavery: nineteenth-century abolition
ists unconditionally opposed slavery yet disagreed about what counted as
‘slavery’ (specifically, whether prisons were a form of slavery).
Two such disagreements stand out. Nineteenth-century political pacifists disagreed

whether self-defence counted as war. Given self-defence’s prominence in today’s justifica
tions of war, this may seem like fudging. But the preoccupation with self-defence is a rela
tively recent phenomenon. Indeed, prior to the twentieth century, self-defence was often
distinguished from war proper. (The U.S. Constitution distinguishes them, for example.)
More recently, pacifists have disagreed whether collective security actions count as war.
Ultimately, what counted as ‘slavery’ was determined by a larger account of slavery’s his
torical and institutional character and why it bore condemning. The same holds true for
what counts as ‘war’. I return to this in Section 3.
To say that pacifism is unconditionally opposed to war is to say that it is opposed to every
actual instance, past and present. I also construe it as opposed to every possible war. But
this a strong claim: does it mean opposing every imaginable instance of war?
The question arises because hypotheticals play such a big role in today’s philosophical
discussions of war. I think this reflects the total lack of agreement about real cases—
specifically, about which, if any, actual wars are justified. This is striking: 14,600 wars in
recorded history, 3,200 major ones—and people cannot agree on a single case of ‘just
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war’!8 Imagine if philosophers of punishment could not agree on a single case of justified
punishment. (Has any other practice has been so discredited by history, yet philosophers
still labor to justify it?) At most, people agree on one war, World War II, although they typ
ically mean one aspect of that war, the resistance to Hitler, and not others, like the 1943
Bengali Famine, in which 2–4 million perished as food was sent elsewhere for military
reasons.9
Preferring fantasy, then, pacifism’s opponents chastise it for opposing wars where no one
is hurt, or the only ones harmed are legions of criminal psychopaths, or the fate of the
universe depends on it.10 (Then they berate pacifism for not being ‘realistic’!) Pacifism
cannot withstand appeals to science fiction for the simple reason that no position can.
Pacifism is the critique of actually existing war, meaning that it concerns itself with what
is practically possible, not ‘theoretically’ possible in some unconstrained sense. Judg
ments of what is possible or not in this sense cannot be made a priori; again, they require
a serious study of war in its historical and institutional reality.
The ‘possibility’ of just wars seems to distinguish the pacifism here described from ‘con
tingent’ pacifism (CP), now much discussed.11 The term was first used by Rawls (p. 281)
as holding that ‘the possibility of a just war is conceded but not under present circum
stances’.12 There were, or could have been, just wars in the past, but current conditions,
like nuclear weapons, render them a practical impossibility. Turn-of-the-century pacifists
like William James and Jane Addams saw war as outdated. The moral and political obso
lescence of war is explored in Martin Shaw’s important writings on ‘historical pacifism’.13
A stronger version is advanced in Larry May’s championing of CP against ‘absolute’ paci

fism (AP). The former holds that war ‘as we have known it’ has not been, and seemingly
cannot be, waged in a way that is morally acceptable. He specifically cites the difficulties
of abiding by principles of jus in bello.14 But because a justly fought war is ‘hypothetical
ly’ possible, the contingent pacifist, like the just war theorist, must evaluate each war as
it comes along. The contrast between CP and AP has several meanings here: (1) CP at
tends to ‘war as we have known it’, AP does not. Remark: this may distinguish CP from
personal pacifism, insofar as the latter is only interested in killing, but political pacifists
ground their unconditional opposition in what is known of war, just as abolitionists
grounded their opposition in what was known of slavery. (2) CP grants that a just war is
possible, at least hypothetically, AP does not. Remark: this depends on what we mean by
‘possible’—political pacifists maintain that what we know of war shows that just war is a
practical impossibility. Theoretical possibilities rest on ignoring what we know of war! (3)
CP appraises each war as it comes along, AP does not. Remark: this speaks to the dogma
tism some place at the heart of ‘noncontingent’ pacifisms. In the words of Martin Ceadel,
‘absolute pacifism’ (the ‘real’ pacifist, for him) refuses to look at each war ‘on its merits’
but ‘sticks resolutely instead to [its] guess about what it will be like’.
This kind of charge could be leveled equally at an uncompromising just war theorist who
does not judge each violation of jus in bello ‘on its merits’, but sticks ‘resolutely’ to her
‘guess’ about ‘what it will be like’. Judging each case as it comes along seems like open-
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Pacifism
mindedness. But is it rational? If 14,600 wars in history have produced at most one ‘just’
war, is it rational to assess each new war as it comes along on the chance that another
one might come along sometime in the next seven thousand years? Is such open minded
ness really a virtue? In the United States, there were 6,000 lynchings from Colonial times
to the 1970s. A ‘justified’ lynching is certainly ‘possible’—but insisting that we inspect
each new lynching as it comes along is an insult to the victims of lynching.
The great virtue of CP is its insisting that we attend to ‘war as we have known it’. The
study of war is an ongoing project. Political pacifism claims that the more seriously we
study war, the more we will oppose it in all its instances.
1.2. Absolute Opposition
Pacifism is primarily a first-person view: what should I do—specifically, should I kill (in
war)? This was the question for the first Christians. By contrast, just war theory’s focal
concern has been policy: when may the state wage war, and when should it refrain?
(p. 282) The first pacifists did not concern themselves with such questions because their
marginalised status meant they were excluded from any role in policy.
The pacifist is absolutely opposed to war. I take this to mean that, for the pacifist, there is
always a compelling reason to reject war. But this can be taken in two ways: that the rea
sons for rejecting war are always as strong as any reasons to do otherwise, hence we are
never irrational in rejecting war; or, that our reasons for rejecting war are always
stronger than any reasons to act otherwise, hence we are irrational in not always reject
ing war. The first view says that the rejection of war is always a moral option. If the paci
fist regards it a moral necessity for him, a matter of personal integrity in Bernard
Williams’s sense, it is not a moral necessity for everyone.15 This is why many pacifists re
ject war but do not condemn those who act otherwise. The moral option view is less abso
lutist, but it is still incompatible with the war as practiced in the modern state, which un
til recently demanded full allegiance of a type that left no room for the claims of con
science.
But the pacifist is not just someone who opts for peace over war when the occasion aris
es, anymore than the abolitionist was someone who opted for freedom over slavery when
the occasion arose. Pacifism is a moral conviction: the pacifist cares about peace in ways
that make it not just a political position but a personal vocation. Following Harry Frank
furt, we might say pacifists choose peace ‘wholeheartedly’: their reasons are ones they
identify with in ways that inform other choices they make and compel them to make sacri
fices that the less committed avoid.16 Pacifism, then, is an uncompromising position inso
far as it does not make exceptions, and it is an unwavering position insofar as it does this
despite the personal costs. Commitments of this sort—to ending war, to ending slavery,
and the like—always seem fanatical to the mild-mannered.
Kant’s quasi-pacifism is an interesting variation. In some writings, he condemned war as

illegitimate. He likened it to duelling in that both were approaches to resolving disputes
but without the larger juridical framework to legitimate them. There was always a good
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Pacifism
reason to resist war, then, but sometimes there were equally good reasons to engage in it,
like self-defence. But the right to do so was a ‘provisional’ one insofar as it presumed tak
ing seriously our duty to work for peace; that is, to create a global legal/political frame
work that would render collective force legitimate. (He granted a provisional right to en
gage in duelling on similar grounds.) We might distinguish between regarding the prac
tice as illegitimate and regarding the practice as fundamentally illegitimate, with the lat
ter being one that we never have a reason for engaging in.
2. Personal Pacifism
Personal pacifism originated with the first Christians. Just war thinking began with
Augustine’s merging of the Gospel ethic with Roman stoicism. So the personal pacifist
tradition can be understood as rejecting that merging and the compromise with Roman
imperialism it signified.
Personal pacifism opposes killing as an individual act, hence opposes every in
(p. 283)
stance of war as involving instances of that act. It doesn’t concern itself with what counts
as war as long as there is killing. Many, if not most, people today equate ‘pacifism’ with
personal pacifism, or they say that this is what it means to be a ‘real’ pacifist or a ‘true’
pacifist. But this is like saying that one ‘really’ or ‘truly’ opposes the death penalty only if
one opposes all killing. If anything, the term ‘pacifism’ was coined a century ago as a con
trast to the rejection of all killing (termed ‘nonresistance’).
One reason for equating the two is the belief that one can only unconditionally oppose all
war if one unconditionally opposes all killing; hence, the only meaningful pacifism is per
sonal pacifism. For example, it might be argued that some wars are just agglomerations
of individual acts of self-defence, hence one can only oppose such wars if one opposes the
individual act. But no actual war fits this description. Wars have certainly involved indi
vidual acts of self-defence—any form of mob violence does. But they’ve involved a great
deal more, the moral costs of which outweigh any claims of individual self-defence. So,
the claim must be that war could be just this, and, if so, could only be opposed by oppos
ing individual self-defence. But this will depend, for starters, on what we mean by ‘war’.
We distinguish spontaneous acts of group violence like ‘riots’ from ‘war’ proper by the in
stitutionalised dimensions of the latter—for example, states and their militaries. The ques
tion is whether these institutions are intelligible as agglomerations of individuals acting
in self-defence. David Rodin has challenged this picture of state self-defence in his War
and Self-Defence. The idea that soldiers are just individual self-defenders has been con
tested since Hobbes and Locke.17 The laws of war have limited the right of noncombat
ants to defend themselves. A better question might be what collective force would look
like if it were only concerned with the defence of individuals. Thinkers like Mary Kaldor
have argued that it would bear no resemblance to war as we’ve known it throughout his
tory.18
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2.1. The Rationality of Personal Pacifism
How should personal pacifism’s opposition to all killing be understood? We can identify
two main traditions here. One is that of the first Christians and their followers today. It is
a type of virtue ethics, which holds that killing is incompatible with living a righteous life,
the model for which is the life of Jesus. The most sophisticated proponents of this view,
like John Howard Yoder, do much to explain the nature of the righteousness that Jesus ex
emplified—especially in contrast to the corrupt Roman practices of Jesus’ time—and how
those persist today. The righteous life eschews all killing. Essential to this vision is that
such a life cannot be achieved alone; it can only be achieved in the kind of community
that Jesus and his followers sought to establish. So, this is a theologically laden view, plus
it is a ‘perfectionist’ one in acknowledging that its ethic is difficult if not impossible to
achieve fully.
The other tradition is a type of deontological ethic, or what Yoder calls a ‘pacifism of prin
ciple’.19 The principle is that one must never take human life because of the sanctity
(p. 284) of human life. This is not a requirement to minimise the taking of human life, nor
is it a requirement to prevent the taking of human life any more than the Kantian require
ment to treat people as ends implies such things. The appeal to the sanctity of life is often
given theological underpinnings, but this is not the only approach to grounding it. One
approach has appealed to the experience of killing, or attempting to kill, and what is re
vealed about the ethical status of fellow creatures in the resistance to doing so. I have
sketched a view of this sort in my own writings; other variants can be found in the writ
ings of Tolstoy and Emmanuel Levinas.20
Proponents of this view recognise that, especially in today’s culture, it will seem radically
unreasonable—although it’s worth noting that proponents of it, like Martin Luther King,
Jr., have been among the most influential political figures of our time. (Andre Trocme ar
gues in Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution that it motivates people because it is unrea
sonable!21) The renunciation of all killing is not just a call to act differently but to be a dif
ferent type of person and construct a different type of community than the kind most peo
ple take for granted. But a separate question is whether it is irrational. I think a philo
sophical defence must address this, which is why it must address Jan Narveson’s well-
known critique of pacifism.22
Narveson claims that pacifism—by which he means personal pacifism—is guilty of a logi
cal contradiction. The charge that pacifism is ‘incoherent’ and its proponents ‘deeply con
fused’ is a familiar one. Narveson aims to fill it out with reference to self-defence.
His argument proceeds thus:
The pacifist’s condemnation of killing rests on the right not to be killed. But inherent in
the logic of rights is that ‘the right not to be subjected to X’ implies ‘the right to defend
oneself against X’. Hence, the right not to be killed implies the right to defend oneself
against killing, which Narveson construes as the right to do whatever is necessary to de
fend oneself—including killing the aggressor. So the pacifist’s denial of the right to kill in
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self-defence conflicts with its grounds for condemning killing in the first place; hence, its
incoherence. Now a first problem with this argument is that personal pacifism as a tradi
tion has never grounded itself in individual rights (Narveson cites no actually existing
pacifists in his characterisation of the view), nor has it ever denied the ‘right’ to self-de
fence. (Martin Luther King, Jr., termed his a “realistic pacifism” that was mindful of the
moral dilemmas involving killing that neither pacifist or the non-pacifist could escape.23) I
have said it finds self-defence ‘problematic’, but this does not mean denying we have the
‘right’ to do so. When Jesus said ‘Turn the other cheek’, he was not claiming we have no
right to do otherwise. Indeed, the moral force of ‘turning the other cheek’ may rest on its
being permissible, in a juridical sense.
But let us consider Narveson’s argument as it stands. The weakest part of his argument is
the claim that the right not to be killed implies the right to do whatever you need to do to
resist the aggressor, including killing him.24 The right not to be killed implies the right to
do some things to resist an aggressor. No pacifist has denied this. Narveson construes the
pacifist as opposing all ‘force’. But pacifists have always regarded nonviolence as a type
of force (Gandhi called it ‘truth force’) and have permitted physical force short of (p. 285)
killing.25 The question, then, is whether the right to kill implies a right to defend oneself
that includes killing. It may or may not, but it’s hard to see that this follows from the ‘log
ic of rights’ alone. There are many cases where the right to resist X does not imply the
right to do that same X in defence against it. I cannot torture someone if that is the only
way to prevent being tortured by them. Indeed, some maintain that what it means to have
a deontological prohibition against doing X is that one is prohibited from doing X oneself,
even to prevent X. (Narveson’s argument gains force from beginning with rights rather
than prohibitions.)
Still, the great virtue of Narveson’s argument is challenging personal pacifists to unpack
their view in ways that speak to a nonreligious audience and clarify its relation to things
like self-defence.
2.2. The Politics of Personal Persuasion
The first Christian pacifists did not construe their position as a political position aimed at
influencing the state because they were excluded from any role in it. Later Christian paci
fists generally ignored the political realm as one of sinfulness. Insofar as they had a social
ethic, it could be described as a politics of counterculture: the creation of communities of
nonviolence by bearing witness to an ethic of nonviolence in word and deed. This politics
of persuasion has remained central to personal pacifism. It was embodied in Leo Tolstoy,
the leading personal pacifist of the late nineteenth century.
Personal pacifism’s political turn came with the Society of Friends (the Quakers), whose
influence on reform politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and the Unit
ed States cannot be exaggerated. For them, pacifism meant commitment to a larger re
form agenda that especially included ending slavery. Hence, nineteenth-century
America’s leading abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, was also its leading pacifist. One
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of the most influential writings of American politics, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Essay on
Civil Disobedience’, exemplifies this orientation. It was written in protest of both war and
slavery, articulating a politics of personal refusal: conscience, abiding by what Thoreau
called the ‘higher law’, obliges us to refuse all connection with practices of war and slav
ery. Gandhi cited this essay as a major influence on his thinking.26
The irony of personal pacifism is that, although sceptical of political projects, it has had at
times significant if less obvious political impact. A case in point is Dorothy Day, founder of
the Catholic Worker Movement. Hers was a spiritually based pacifism, pure if not purist
in its convictions. Her opposition to any involvement with the war system extended to re
fusing to pay all taxes. But, over the years, her personal example and that of her circle
had a profound impact on the American Catholic Church, a powerful political force in
American life. She is credited with playing a major role in transforming it from a bellicose
institution into a leading advocate for peace and justice.27 Similar stories can be told of
other countries.
I have suggested that a contribution of personal pacifism is that it provokes us to regard

war as a matter of our own personal responsibility, not just impersonal public (p. 286) poli
cy. The fact that war is a structured institution, not just people fighting one at a time,
means that our personal connections to it are easily ignored; indeed, the institutions of
war aim to obscure these connections. Recent just war thinking is increasingly concerned
with the personal responsibility of soldiers in war. Personal pacifism begins with the ques
tion of the personal responsibility each of us has for war.
3. Political Pacifism
Political pacifism opposes war as a social practice.28 Let’s consider first what it means by
‘war’, then why its opposition to it is unconditional.
3.1. The War System
War is a protean phenomenon with no fixed essence any more than the family has a fixed
essence. Like the family or any other social institution, it must be approached historically
and institutionally.
Political pacifism’s characterisation of war has been strongly tied to the state or the state
system generally. (This reflects its emphasis on war-building because states are instru
ments of war-building.) But war preceded the state as a political form; indeed, the state is
largely a product of war. Does reference to the state render it parochial? When nine
teenth-century abolitionists condemned slavery, their picture of it was strongly tied to the
slavery of their day. They didn’t concern themselves with archaic forms of it in which, say,
slaves might be quite privileged. But no one thought this detracted from their basic point.
Political pacifists will say the same of their analysis. If we are now moving beyond the
state, our understanding of this must start with the state.
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War is the collective organisation of killing and being killed. It is more than this, of
course, but it is always at least this. War is a ‘political’ phenomena insofar as that organi
sation aims to transform killing into power. It is the organised nature of both war-making
and war-building that distinguishes war from spontaneous acts like rioting. It is the prior
ity of killing that distinguishes war from other violent practices, like rugby. My emphasis
on being killed marks the fact that dying, too, assumes ritualised forms in war (think of
modern war memorials). Types of war are distinguished by how the killing and dying are
organised.
In the modern state system, that organisation has an ‘internal’ dimension—how states
mobilise their own human and material resources for conflict. Throughout history, domes
tic law has always been shaped by this purpose. But states are also part of a larger state
system, itself organised; hence there is an ‘external’ dimension of state–state relations,
how they deal with each other. International law regulates these relations. A final com
plexity is that, especially since the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, Europe’s (p. 287) state sys
tem has closely interacted with a world of non-states. Indeed, the first international law
addressed how states related to each other in their combined dealing with the Americas.
This gave war a twofold character. War between European states was a finite act in which
parties recognised each other as reasonable adversaries, and victory involved reconcilia
tion. Wars between (‘civilised’) European states and (‘savage’/’barbarian’) non-European
non-states were ongoing states of hostility, where foes were regarded as irrational ene
mies and victory meant annihilation.
Just war thinking can be understood in this context. It prescribed rules for conflict be
tween ‘civilised’ states, whereas conflicts between the ‘civilised’ and
‘savages’/’barbarians’ were held to few if any rules at all. The aim of regulating conflicts
between states was to prevent ‘civilised’ war from becoming ‘savage’ war; that is, uncon
strained endless slaughter. When this failed, European wars become ‘hyper-wars’, where
Europeans treated each other the way they’d treated non-Europeans. The first such con
flict, the Thirty Years War, led to the Treaty of Westphalia; the second, the Napoleonic
Wars, led to the Concert of Europe; and the third, World Wars I and II, led to the United
Nations—all attempts to constrain war more effectively.
Political pacifists hold that attempts at constraining war will ultimately fail, that the only
solution lies in ending war itself. One reason lies in the ‘internal’ organisation of war. (Po
litical pacifism arose after the Napoleonic Wars, and here its account of the ‘war system’
parallels that of its contemporary, Clausewitz.) War as a system has two dimensions: war-
making (battle) and war-building (the mobilisation of human and material resources for
battle). The great shortcoming of received thinking is to focus on the first to the exclusion
of the second. Thus, just war thinking has focused on the rules of conflict while ignoring
the organisational conditions of that conflict. But war-building is crucial for two reasons.
First, it explains why we have states at all. The state prevailed over competing political
forms by its success at war-building, and the forms of the state have succeeded each oth
er by their success at this. Second, it explains the instability of the system as a whole. If
Page 11 of 18

Pacifism
success at war-making ultimately depends on success at war-building, the latter will in
creasingly dominate every aspect of society. This is the extremist logic that Clausewitz
perceived in modern war, leading to the ‘contradiction’: if the purpose of war-making is to
serve political ends, the nature of war-building is to serve only itself. Political pacifists
saw this confirmed in the arms races of the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth-
century’s two world wars. Where they disagreed with Clausewitz was whether society
was condemned to this logic, whether it could escape the war system. This disagreement
has involved the very nature of power: whether the power achieved by organised killing/
being killed is the only (or ultimate) political power or whether nonviolent power is a true
possibility. This puts things crudely, of course. A central issue is whether the end of the
Cold War brought an end to this extremist logic and, if so, how this impacts our account
of the ‘war system’. The writings of Jonathon Schell and Mary Kaldor on ‘new wars’ ad
dress this.29
(p. 288) 3.2. The Critique of the War System
Political pacifists have leveled two quite different charges against the war system, both
implicit in the foregoing. The first involves what I’ll term the inhumanity of the system.
Basically, this is the claim that war takes on a life of its own in ways that escape all hu
man agency and ignore, and usually negate, legitimate human ends. This is most evident
in eras of hyper-war, like World War I, when many came to see the war as a ‘Frankenstein
monster’ transcending all human control and purpose. This was a prominent theme for
political pacifists like Randolph Bourne and for soldiers-turned-pacifists whose experi
ence of combat led them to see war an uncontrollable ‘machine’, rendering all moral ap
praisal problematic.30 Political pacifists see this as an inherent tendency of war per se,
meaning that the step from war to hyper-war itself escapes human control. Hence, their
unconditional opposition to war is in part ‘pragmatic’: any tolerance of war can trigger its
extremist logic.
This helps illuminate the aforementioned disagreement among political pacifists about
what counts as ‘war’. The claim that war escapes human control is inherited from the
civic republican tradition and its critique of standing armies. Kant voiced this concern,
but he held that this extremist logic need not apply to collective self-defence if properly
conducted—by a citizens’ militia, not a standing army. Such thinking led nineteenth-cen
tury political pacifists to hold that self-defence, thus conducted, did not count as ‘war’ be
cause it escaped war’s main vice. And it led some twentieth-century political pacifists to
hold that collective security arrangements not only escaped war’s principal vice but
served to constrain it and hence fell under a different category. In the end, of course,
what matters is not the terminological issues but whether the problems identified are real
ones and how address them.
A second charge pertains to the injustices of the war system. One pacifist argument holds
that war is incapable of abiding by the just war principles of jus ad bellum and jus in
bello. This concern has become more prominent as just war theorists have formulated
these principles more precisely. Attention has focused on the proportionality requirement
Page 12 of 18

Pacifism
(the harms imposed on innocents must not exceed the evils averted by war’s aims): con
tingent pacifists have argued that, whatever the good achieved, the number of noncom
batants killed can never be justified by their role in war. Furthermore, they have argued
that the killing of many unjust soldiers cannot be justified either, given the circumstances
in which they came to fight or continue to fight. These pertain to the illicit harming oth
ers. But political pacifism stresses war as an enterprise of both killing and dying; hence, it
asks if a soldier’s ‘sacrifice’ of his own life violates an obligation to himself. The problem
is not just whether the reasons given soldiers for sacrificing their lives are false or trivial.
The logic of militaries actively discourages reflection on such matters of the sort required
for soldiers to make meaningful choices.
These pertain to the injustices of war-making. But the more important issue for political
pacifism is war-building. How do the practices of states in mobilising the human and ma
terial resources for war themselves violate fundamental human rights? Here are some ex
amples:
The state prevailed over other political forms by its superior ability at war mobili
(p. 289)
sation, especially in mobilising populations within its borders. This was achieved by the
homogenisation of its populations, involving, in the nineteenth century, their transforma
tion into ‘nations’. War-building was both a mechanism of this (conscription was key to
nation building) and a beneficiary of it; it always involved great violence and coercion.
Conflict over war mobilisation was a persistent feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-cen
tury nation states. The 1863 New York City draft was the largest civil disturbance in
American history; the so-called Easter riots of 1918 in Canada, provoked by conscription,
were among its most violent disturbances (similar events occurred in Ireland’s conscrip
tion crisis); the mass violence engendered by Russia’s World War I mobilisation led direct
ly to the Bolshevik revolution; and so on. War mobilisation has always meant massive vio
lations of civil liberties. The mass internment of Japanese Americans in World War II was,
after segregation, the most significant violation of American civil liberties in the twenti
eth century. Liberals are not indifferent to the latter, of course. But political pacifists re
gard all these problems as crucial features of the war system.
Martin Shaw’s ‘historical pacifism’ argues that the exigencies of war mobilisation are the
key to understanding modern genocide.31 The mobilisation of populations has meant the
extermination of groups identified as not ‘belonging’, as hostile to state purposes. Both
the Turkish genocide of Armenians and the German genocide of Jews and others were
war measures, construed as acts of national security. Indeed, the genocide of native peo
ples in the United States and other settler states were justified on security grounds. Shaw
extends this analysis to the late twentieth century. Again, the claim is not that nonpaci
fists ignore or minimise these problems but that they do not regard them as a feature of
war, much less intrinsic features. Arguments about social practices are often of this sort.
Supporters of slavery did not always ignore its many repugnant features; they did not re
gard them as an intrinsic of slavery, as abolitionists did.
Page 13 of 18

Pacifism
3.3. Opposing the War System
Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an ide

alistic goal; but it less idealistic than the idea that military action could be truly an
instrument of justice.
—John Howard Yoder32
John Dewey wrote, ‘How long have we been taking steps to do away with war, and why
have they accomplished nothing? Because the steps have all been taken under the war
system. It is not a step we need, it is an about-face; a facing in another direction’.33
Political pacifists agree, although they differ among themselves on what such an ‘about
face’ means.
Political pacifism’s privileging of war-building dictated its practice in the past. Strategies
were from the bottom up. If conscription was the principal means for generating soldiers,
political pacifism meant opposition to and disruption of conscription. (p. 290) If taxes were
the principal means for generating resources, political pacifism meant opposing war tax
es. But strategies have also been top down. Political pacifists have sought to influence
governments not just on particular acts of war-making but on the mechanisms of war-
making generally. A notable example in the United States was the proposal that the coun
try should only go to war after a national referendum approving it. This was first pro
posed by William Jennings Bryan in 1914, revived during the debate about America’s en
try into World War I, and then advanced as a proposed constitutional amendment by Rep.
Lewis Ludlow in the 1930s (polls consistently showed a majority of Americans supporting
it).
As the twentieth century concluded, political pacifists continued to oppose particular acts
of war-making. But the problem of war-building changed in two ways. The end of con
scription and the rise of deficit financing to pay for war meant that traditional methods of
draft resistance and tax refusal were no longer relevant. At the same time, the wide
spread disillusionment with war generally meant that the question was less ‘War, pro or
con’? and more ‘What are viable means for addressing conflict, if not war’? From the bot
tom up, political pacifists have participated in discussions of global civil society as an al
ternative to the state system and its warlike proclivities. From the top down, they have
concerned themselves with mechanisms of global governance of the type that constrain
the state system but in ways that look beyond. These are places where the difference be
tween being a political pacifist or someone deeply critical of war, although not so uncon
ditionally, blurs in importance.
4. What Is To Be Done?
The analysis of war is too important to be left to the intuitionists.
—Quincy Wright
Page 14 of 18

Pacifism
The problems posed by political pacifism are as much empirical as normative. Its opposi
tion to war generally compels us to consider what we mean by ‘war’—generally. This re
quires attention to the history of war as a practice, just as any judgment of, say, slavery,
requires attention to its history. Compounding the problem is a further fact. We live in a
time of profound rethinking of violence. This animates the renewed interest in both just
war thinking and pacifism. But both just war thinking and political pacifism emerged as
responses to the state system and to war as a feature of that system. Put simply, just war
theory has assumed the legitimacy of the state system and sought to regulate it; political
pacifism has asserted the legitimacy of war and hence sought to replace the state system
with some kind of global community. Both perspectives remain tied to the statist frame
work, though.
The quarrel between pacifism and just war theory cannot be addressed, much less re
solved, without expanding our perspective. The problem is that, whereas war has been
with us for thousands of years, the study of war is in its infancy. We need what I call a
(p. 291) critical war theory. Such a theory is historical, it is attentive to how war has de
veloped and changed over time, and how the normative frameworks for assessing war, in
cluding those of international law, have developed and changed over time. It is institution
al, insofar as war is a matter of war-building as well as war-making. It is as much a mat
ter of how societies mobilise the resources for war as how they employ them in war. Fi
nally, the approach is critical insofar as it does not prejudge the question of whether war
is justified; it is open to the pacifist alternative in the same way that a critical theory of
state is open to the anarchist alternative. In these respects, it is truly interdisciplinary, as
any valid social theory must be.
Notes:
(1.) Jane Addams, Essays and Speeches on Peace (New York: Continuum, 2005).
(2.) Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (New York: Cassell Publishing, 1894);
Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ in Stride to Freedom (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1988); Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gandhi on Nonviolence, edited by Thomas
Merton (New York: New Directions 1965/2007).
(3.) On pacifism as tradition of argument, see David Cortright, Peace: A History of Move
ments and Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 30. In general, see Martin
Ceadel, Thinking About Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter
Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972);
Brock, Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Nonresistance from the Middle Ages to the
Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism
in the 20th Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999); John Howard Yoder,
Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Ada, MI: Brazos Press, 2009).
(4.) Excellent philosophical works on pacifism include Richard Norman, Ethics, Killing
and War (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jenny Teichman, Pacifism and the Just War
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Robert Holmes, On War and Morality (Princeton, NJ:
Page 15 of 18

Pacifism
Princeton University Press, 1989); and Andrew Fiala, Practical Pacifism (Algora Publish
ing, 2004).
(5.) John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 38.
(6.) James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern
Europe (New York: Mariner Books, 2009).
(7.) Jeremy Waldron, ‘Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House’, Co
lumbia Law Review 106:6 (October 2005), 1712–1713.
(8.) Jeff McMahan notes, ‘Even the acknowledged experts—the theorists of the just war—
disagree among themselves about the justice of virtually every war’. Killing in War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 120.
(9.) See Max Hastings, All Hell Loose: The World at War 1939–1945 (New York: Harper,
2011), 422–426; Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms—A Global History of World War II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 493–496.
(10.) For example, Caedel writes (op. cit, 145–146), ‘The pacifist holds that, even if a state
fought an extraordinarily successful and costless war, it would nevertheless have commit
ted an impermissible act and would have done better to have submitted stoically to as
sured butchery and enslavement’.
(11.) Andrew Fiala, ‘Contingent Pacifism and Contingently Pacifist Conclusions’, Journal
of Social Philosophy 45:4 (2014), 463–477; Saba Bazargan, ‘Varieties of Contingent Paci
fism’, in How We Fight, edited by Helen Frowe and Gerald Lang (Oxford: Oxford Universi
ty Press, forthcoming).
(12.) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 382.
(13.) See, among his other writings, Martin Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, De
militarization and War at the End of the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple Univer
sity Press, 1991).
(14.) Larry May, ‘Contingent Pacifism and the Moral Risks of Participating in War’, Public
Affairs Quarterly, 25:2 (April 2011), 95–111.
(15.) See his ‘Critique of Utilitarianism’ in Williams and J. J. C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For
and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
(16.) Harry Frankfurt, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, in The Importance of What

We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 159–176.
(17.) David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
See my discussion of Hobbes and Locke in ‘War and the State’, in For and Against the
State: New Philosophical Readings, edited by Jan Narveson and Jack Sanders (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
Page 16 of 18

Pacifism
(18.) Mary Kaldor, Human Security (London: Polity, 2007), chapter six, ‘Just War and Just
Peace’.
(19.) John Howard Yoder, Nevertheless, Varieties of Religious Pacifism (Scottdale, PA: Her
ald Press, 1971), 32–38. Yoder’s work is the starting point for understanding personal
pacifism today. See his The Politics of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: William B Eerdmans,
1996) and subsequent writings.
(20.) See Cheyney Ryan, ‘Pacifism, Self-Defense, and the Possibility of Killing’, Ethics 93
(1983), 508–524; Tolstoy, ‘Certain Things Christians Cannot Do’, in John Yoder, What
Would You Do: If a Violent Person Threatened to Harm a Loved One? (Harrisonberg, VA:
Herald Press, 1983), 45–49; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA:
Duquesne University Press, 1961).
(21.) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Plough Publishing, 2014).
(22.) Jan Narveson, ‘Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis’, Ethics 75: 4 (1965), 259–271.
(23.) Martin Luther King, Jr., at Note 2.
(24.) See my discussion of this in ‘Pacifism, Self-Defense, and the Possibility of Killing’.
(25.) See Gandhi, at Note 2.
(26.) See George Hendrick, ‘The Influence of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi’s
Satyagraha’, New England Quarterly 29:4 (December 1956), 462–471.
(27.) Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radical
ism in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). See also my ‘The One Who
Burns Herself for Peace’, Hypatia 9:2 (Spring 1994), 21–39.
(28.) Andrew Alexandra, ‘Political Pacifism’, Social Theory and Practice, 29:4 (2003), 589–
606; David Carroll Cochran, ‘War-Pacifism’, Social Theory and Practice, 22:2 (1996), 161–
180. Also my articles, ‘Pacifism(s)’, The Philosophical Forum (Spring 2014), and ‘Pacifism,
Just War, and Self-Defense’, Philosophia, Philosophical Quarterly of Israel 41:4 (2013).
(29.) Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the
People (New York: Owl Books, 2004); Mary Kaldor, New & Old Wars: Organized Violence
in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
(30.) Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999); also Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics
and Human Development (New York, Harcourt, 1967) and The Myth of the Machine: The
Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, 1970).
(31.) Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (London: Poli
ty Press, 2003).
Page 17 of 18

Pacifism
(32.) John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State (Harrisonburg, PA: Herald
Press, 2002), 47.
(33.) Cited in Joseph Ratner, ed. Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philoso
phy (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 515.
Cheyney Ryan
Cheyney Ryan is Director of Human Rights Programs for the Oxford Institute for
Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), co-chair of the Oxford Consortium on Hu
man Rights, and a member of Merton College at University of Oxford.
Page 18 of 18

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Pacifism

Print Publication Date: Mar 2018

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: Pacifism, contingent pacifism, nonviolence, self-defence, absolutism

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Pacifism, then, is a complex tradition.3 Any account of it is as much a proposal as a de­

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

I begin with what it means.

1. Pacifism as Fundamental Opposition to War

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

1.1. Unconditional Opposition

Two such disagreements stand out. Nineteenth-century political pacifists disagreed

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

A stronger version is advanced in Larry May’s championing of CP against ‘absolute’ paci­

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

1.2. Absolute Opposition

Kant’s quasi-pacifism is an interesting variation. In some writings, he condemned war as

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

2.1. The Rationality of Personal Pacifism

His argument proceeds thus:

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

2.2. The Politics of Personal Persuasion

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

I have suggested that a contribution of personal pacifism is that it provokes us to regard

3.1. The War System

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

(p. 288) 3.2. The Critique of the War System

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

3.3. Opposing the War System

Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an ide­

—John Howard Yoder32

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

(16.) Harry Frankfurt, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, in The Importance of What

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

(23.) Martin Luther King, Jr., at Note 2.

(25.) See Gandhi, at Note 2.

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 06 April 2021

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Pacifism, then, is a complex tradition.3 Any account of it is as much a proposal as a de

A stronger version is advanced in Larry May’s championing of CP against ‘absolute’ paci

Defining effective international government in this way is of course setting an ide