Is pacifism a defensible moral position E-Book

Lucia Schuster

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Southampton (Politics Department), course: Political Philosophical Theory, language: English, abstract: There are plenty of ideas in international ethics which indicate how states and individuals should behave and interact. The belief that the use of violence in contact with others is wrong, represents one of those. Pacifists, fascinated by a world without war or violence, formed different moral positions according to that vision. To have a moral position means that a person or a state must have general kinds of reasons "for supposing a certain type of act to be his [or its] duty, in a moral sense" (Wasserstrom R., p. 66). Pacifism describes a duty that might range from non-resistance to any sort of physical attack, up to the attitude to use force only in case of self-defence. In the first part of this essay the debate will therefore focus on the individual and whether or not pacifism can be made a plausible moral principle for our private lives. Passive and active non-resistance and self-defence will be the main viewpoints discussed in this section. It will be followed by debatable moral standpoints for a nation as a whole in the second chapter. We will determine, if it is imaginable and desirable for a state to adopt perspectives like 'no force at all', 'no war' or 'wars only in the case of self-defence', as its righteous. To provide evidence for the moral verification of pacifist views, we firstly have to prove whether or not they can possibly be moral positions and secondly if they are defensible. However, it will be shown, that moral positions are defensible, if one has plausible reasons to believe that this specific vision is likely to be realised. [...]