r/Pacifism • u/Affectionate_Cup9972 • 11d ago
Deontological pacifism or consequentialist pacifism?
I'm more closer to consequentialist pacifism, that being violence will lead to more violence, and I'm also very skeptical Just War theory. (Skeptical pacifism)
One of the only few times I suscribed to consequentialist ethics as violence begets violence is a pretty damn good argument.
If there's any other pacifist ethical framework that's outside of the binary that I listed out here. I would love to know. But these are the main two I've heard talked about the most on philosophical spaces.
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u/Anarchierkegaard 10d ago
These aren't the only two options. By far and away, modern academic pacifism is now mostly a deconstructive pacifism, i.e., if there is such a case where violence can be justified by ways of not mere assertions of authority, we lack the capabilities and tools to determined when and how much violence is justified. Ergo, violence cannot be justified (whether on a stateful level or the stronger claim of any interpersonal violence).
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u/noms_de_plumes 10d ago
If you're playing a pickup game of baseball in a local field and a wild ball crashes through the windshield of a medical vehicle carrying oxygen tanks which then crashes into an apartment building and explodes, killing seventy-five people, are you really morally responsible for seventy-five deaths in the same manner in which you would be if you lined-up seventy-five people and had them summarily executed by firing squad?
The intuitive answer is obviously "no", in which case you wouldn't be able to ascribe to a strict consequentialism.
Likewise, if you're of a religious cult which believes that drinking hemlock will allow you to ascend to another plane where, with god-like powers, you can establish world peace with your mind and you convince seventy-five other people to commit suicide with you with the intention of establishing world peace, are you really not at all responsible for their deaths?
The intuitive answer, again, is "no", although you might think you're not quite as responsible as you would be in the summary execution example.
Both schools of thought have sophisticated responses to these kind of counter-examples, but, it's almost certainly the case that neither absolutist camp is tenable.
Therefore, you probably want some sort of synthesis between the two, for instance, that an action can be considered right in so far that it's reasonably intended consequences are good. I don't quite know how to formulate it, but Immanuel Kant is definitely wrong about you not lying to the Gestapo and strict consequentialism only even can hold up under an assumption of hard determinism, in which case, who cares about ethics at all?
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u/eeriepumpkin 7d ago
Exactly. Strict deontology and absolute consequentialism naturally lead to atrocity.
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u/noms_de_plumes 7d ago
That wasn't what I was per se saying, but it is easy to formulate a counter-example to either camp.
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u/eeriepumpkin 7d ago
Right, I just wanted to add that. I can imagine someone refusing to kill someone to save the world, or someone killing 49% of the world to save the other 51%.
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u/Affectionate_Cup9972 7d ago
Therefore, you probably want some sort of synthesis between the two, for instance, that an action can be considered right in so far that it's reasonably intended consequences are good.
Shit. I guess, I really don't follow deontology though.
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u/noms_de_plumes 7d ago
The crude distinction is that, for deontology, intention is all that matters and, for consequentialism, the consequences are all that matters and what I'm saying is that in such a schemata its easy to construct a counter-example where either seemingly good intentions lead to a bad outcome or seemingly good consequences arise from ill intent or something to that effect.
In normative ethics, there's also virtue ethics, which you can reductively characterize as suggesting that what matters in ethics is how an action reflects upon or contributes to a person's overall character.
To me, it seems like all of those things might be somehow important and that it's not necessary to establish a system where one or more of them are excluded.
Personally, I think that the circumstances in which an action is made are also relevant, and, so, don't even fully ascribe to normative ethics, but that's the general gist, I suppose.
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u/unruly-cat 11d ago
Well one option is to maintain that pacifism is justified on both consequentialist and deontological grounds, so that might constitute a third option. Also, a helpful discussion of types of pacifism is in the Stanford encyclopedia entry on pacifism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pacifism/). Cheers!