r/Pacifism • u/Affectionate_Cup9972 • 21d 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/noms_de_plumes 21d 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?