Blake Hereth (Western Michigan University), "Moral Excuse to the Pacifist's Rescue"

Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence (2024)

By Blake Hereth

Pacifism is the view that physically harming people without their consent is always wrongful. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people reject pacifism. But why do they reject pacifism?

On the most basic level, most people reject pacifism because it is morally counterintuitive. For example, it clashes with our moral intuitions about self-defense. To see what I mean, consider this thought experiment:

Self-Defense. Murderer breaks into Victim’s home and attacks Victim with a knife. Unless Victim fatally shoots Murderer, Victim will be killed by Murderer.

In this case, pacifism tells us Victim shouldn’t kill Murderer in self-defense. Yet most people’s moral intuition is that Victim may kill Murderer in self-defense – that is, they think Victim is morally permitted to engage in lethal self-defense. And indeed, most professional ethicists agree with this moral intuition (e.g., Leverick 2006: 44). Let’s call this the ‘Intuitive Argument’ against pacifism.

What’s behind this intuition? Most people point to other moral intuitions for support. For example, the late philosopher Judy Thomson says it’s our intuition that Victim can’t be faulted (Thomson 1991: 283). Similarly, Kaila Draper writes that “few of us would condemn [Victim] for killing in self-defense” (Draper 1993: 73). Others appeal to the intuition that our moral obligations can’t be too demanding (McElwee 2016: 28). And so on and so forth. What all these intuitions support is the view that lethal self-defense is morally justified in cases like Self-Defense.

In the face of the Intuitive Argument, some pacifists concede that their position is counterintuitive and then try to level the playing field by providing arguments against anti-pacifism (e.g., Ryan 1982). Such arguments are sometimes called overriding arguments because they try to provide stronger (i.e., overriding) reasons to reject the critic’s position. I’ve also pursued this strategy in several papers (Hereth 2022, 2021, and 2017). However, the somewhat bolder route is not to concede the intuitive ground, and instead face the challenge head-on. Arguments following this approach are sometimes called undermining arguments because they seek to dispute whether the critic’s reasons actually support their conclusion. That’s what I aim to do in the paper I recently published in the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence.

Getting more specific, I’m unconvinced that our moral intuitions actually cut against (i.e., constitute a reason to reject) pacifism. Here’s the short explanation: Most of our moral intuitions about self-defense can be explained just as well by the view that self-defense is morally excused, and pacifism is perfectly compatible with that view. The central idea relies on the difference between moral excuse and moral justification: Moral excuse means your action was morally wrong but we shouldn’t blame you for it; moral justification means your action was morally permissible (and we shouldn’t blame you for it). There’s precedent in ethics and law for thinking about self-defense in terms of moral excuse. For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, famously remarked in Brown vs. United States, “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” What Holmes means is that we can’t blame people for their behavior under duress. Indeed, many if not most ethicists agree that duress and non-negligible ignorance are sufficient for moral excuse (e.g., Rosen 2014: 89; Frowe 2014: 77; Dressler 2011: 285; McMahan 2009: 162).

Why does this matter for self-defense? Think back to our fictional case above, Self-Defense, which is a paradigmatic example of blameless, reasonable self-defense. How can we explain the fact that Victim acts blamelessly and reasonably by killing Murderer in self-defense? One option, as we’ve seen, is to claim that Victim’s act is morally justified. But an equally good option is to claim that Victim’s act is morally excused because Victim is under duress. Victim quite literally acts in the presence of an uplifted knife, which is as clear a case of duress as it gets.

At this point, pacifism and anti-pacifism might seem to be at an impasse over how best to explain our moral intuitions about self-defense: The former favors moral excuse, whereas the latter favors moral justification. In the full paper, I identify ten moral intuitions to account for and conclude that moral justification explains at best one of them better than moral excuse. Thus, the Intuitive Argument against pacifism is roughly 90% weaker than is usually assumed. And I argue there are good reasons to be suspicious about even this tiny advantage: For instance, the intuition that Murderer is morally liable (i.e., has forfeited his rights) to be defensively killed by Victim probably depends on other intuitions about Murderer (e.g., that he’s blameworthy and acting unreasonably), but those intuitions can’t legitimately be used against pacifism because they’re explained just as well under moral excuse.

The end result is that the Intuitive Argument against pacifism is far, far weaker than is often believed. Given that the Intuitive Argument is perhaps the most significant objection to pacifism, revealing its weakness is great news for pacifism.