Personal Pacifism

Hello again, and welcome!

I seem to be getting into a groove here, posting a couple week days in a row - I am kind of surprising myself, really! Just hope to continue using this momentum and hoping to not run out of interesting things to ponder.


So today's topic is personal pacifism, and my musings on the matter (awesome alliteration, right? I crack me up).

I was in Charlottesville the night before the 4th of July, eating dinner with a bunch of college friends from my fellowship I hadn't seen in ages - they'd flown in from as far as Seattle and Chicago, it was epic.

Anyhow, we somehow progressed down the path of philosophical discussion, and I won't feign innocence - I love those deep conversations. Somehow just babbling about the weather doesn't seem to cut it (even if the weather has been eerily wacky at times - oh wait, there I do again).

So a close friend and mentor of mine has discussed pacifism with me a handful of times, and he was one of the ones at the table.  I really admire him and over time have really started adopting (read: stealing) parts of his view, even though it was quite foreign to me at one point. And, as an aside, I hope I am always that willing to learn from a differing viewpoint and change my own - though it is quite hard at times. Pride is such an addictive drug.

Basically, the point of the discussion was whether or not he'd defend himself, and why.
He said if someone was trying to kill him, and the only option was to kill the other person, he would rather die.  After all, Jesus said to turn the other cheek (more on that later).  However, there's usually the option of running away.  This was a bit surprising to some, less so after he made the parameters so stark.

I would tend to agree, and here's why (borrowing heavily from his reasoning):

First of all, let's assume I'm single, with no children (it shouldn't need to be said that the one should presuppose the other but alas). Thus I can't use an argument that me dying would leave my wife and/or kids any worse off.

Second, let's assume the attacker is not a Christian.  I mean, if someone is trying to kill me, and you know a tree by its fruit, I'm thinking it's a bad tree.

What follows, in my line of thinking, is that if I die, I go to Heaven. If he dies, he goes to Hell (though I am not the judge, for the sake of this example I would definitely be assuming that).  However, if I die and he repents, in prison, and comes to Christ in a prison ministry a la Chuck Colson, he goes to Heaven, too!  And I really hope my last words would be something like "I forgive you... Jesus loves you" to point him in that direction, but I'm not making any promises. They'd more likely be a variant of "ouch!"

Thus I would agree, and would rather die than kill in that scenario.

The scenario gets a whole lot more complicated with more variables, however.  What if he was attacking some innocent, helpless person? Would it matter whether or not they were a Christian? I'd say no, I would defend them as the Bible is clear that helping/defending widows and orphans is always a good idea. Would I try to maim the attacker instead of killing him? Of course.  But, as was pointed out in said conversation, it is often hard in the heat of a fight to "aim at an arm" or what not, assuming you have a weapon.

What this really can boil down to, in my opinion, is philosophy.  From my last post, Kantianism and Utilitarianism both have very different things to say in scenarios like this.  For Kant, every human life is sacred. For John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism), the ends justify the means, and it's really just a numbers game - the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.  However, it gets tricky when your definition of "good" differs.

For example, the Third Reich Nazi scientists wanted the greatest good for the greatest number - their crazed experiments were not merely punitive torture - they tested on human subjects to better the human race, to create the Übermensch (Unfortunately all philosophy discussions seem to denigrate toward the holocaust in my experience).  For Kant, it's clear that that would be reprehensible - and I'm not saying this to say that every Utilitarian is a Nazi - just that if taken to the extreme it can lead to some crazed thinking.

Another classic example used in philosophy classes is the one where you must determine whether or not to kill an innocent person to save more innocent people. Your plane crashed in a jungle, and terrorists give you a gun with one bullet, in a twisted experiment. They say, shoot this one passenger, or we will kill all the rest of the 40 passengers. It's clear that Utilitarianism would find that preferable; Kant would say no - human life is sacred, no matter what is gained.  And I would agree - assuming you could even trust the terrorists; they could have you kill 19 of the passengers to save the other 21, or kill 39 of them to save the last 1, where does it stop? The only way I could see it working would be: they ask me to take my own life in exchange (yes) or the person they want you to shoot pleads with you to do it; he'd like to sacrifice himself for the rest.

Anyhow, now that we are nice and off track, pacifism. Why the 'personal'? Well, I think that it makes sense on a personal level - not an a national one.  If our country is under attack, we should defend, for the same reason that we should protect the innocent/helpless.

But when should we go on the offensive, if ever? Is Just War Theory tenable, and is it ever okay to have a pre-emptive strike?

I'm still struggling through those issues, but for now, I'm leaning towards defensive wars only, or perhaps intervening wars if humanitarian atrocities are happening (e.g. Libya, Syria, etc) - but I'm not sure about that. The US is not the world police, but I know I could not stand idly by if I had the power to stop the raping, killing, pillaging and burning of a people - genocide.  How that works out in the real world, though, is difficult to grapple with.

Lastly, that takes me to WWII, again, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I think I've probably written enough for one post, but wanted to touch on that debate I mentioned yesterday.  I do not think it was a good idea to drop those bombs on innocent people. I might dig deeper on this later, but I just don't - the alternative, land invasion would have been costly, yes. But at least our soldiers would be killing people who were actually fighting them - voluntarily. The schoolchildren who died, or were mutilated by radiation, were not at fault.

I don't think it would have been an easy decision, and were I president Truman I can't say what I would have done.  I probably have much more to think about, and don't believe criticizing our commander in chief, past or present, is ever very productive.

I hope you've enjoyed reading!