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University of Oklahoma Graduate College Waging Peace: a Defense of Interpersonal Pacifism a Dissertation Submitted to the Gradua UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE WAGING PEACE: A DEFENSE OF INTERPERSONAL PACIFISM A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By GUY MICHAEL CRAIN Norman, Oklahoma 2016 WAGING PEACE: A DEFENSE OF INTERPERSONAL PACIFISM A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY BY ______________________________ Dr. Linda Zagzebski, Chair ______________________________ Dr. Steve Ellis ______________________________ Dr. Sherri Irvin ______________________________ Dr. Zev Trachtenberg ______________________________ Dr. David Vishanoff © Copyright by GUY MICHAEL CRAIN 2016 All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgements I owe tremendous gratitude to many people. Many of my fellow graduate students were integral to my success. Several conversations with Rob Byer were very encouraging if not borderline psychotherapeutic. Those conversations meant more to me than I think Rob realizes—especially one that convinced me not to quit the graduate program after the first year. I should also thank Andrew Russo for several conversations; this upper-classman’s encouragement mattered a great deal. My own classmates formed quite a cohort. I am grateful to Dan Cheon, Max Parish, and Patrick Epley for their support. Dan always reminded me to relax and enjoy the ride. Max’s quiet, smiling steadfastness and helpfulness meant a lot. And I owe endless thanks to Pat. I cannot believe the number of times Pat allowed me to monopolize his time with conversation after conversation as I struggled to understand course material and make sense of my own research. I must also thank Jonathan Rutledge who has been such an important friend and colleague throughout my grad school experience. So many faculty members helped along the way. Hugh Benson, Rei Elugardo, and Sherri Irvin were so encouraging and supportive. I learned priceless lessons about professionalism, initiative, and self-discipline from Zev Trachtenberg. I really need to thank Wayne Riggs for my one and only bad grade in graduate school; it crushed me at the time, but I learned more from that “C” than from any other grade I ever received. Neal Judisch has been such an inspiration throughout my academic career; a part of me still wants to be Neal Judisch when I grow up. I will never be able to repay Steve Ellis for countless lunches, email discussions, faculty lounge chats, and pep talks. And iv to my advisor, Linda Zagzebski, I owe many thanks. Her philosophical prowess is intimidating, her humility is inspiring, her light-hearted demeanor is so calming, and her apparent steadfast tendency to take for granted that I am utterly capable of serious academic work really helped me start to believe it myself. So many of my friends and family helped me succeed. Several friends started calling me “doctor” as soon as I got into grad school as a jovial way of holding me accountable for seeing this through. It worked. I am very grateful to my brother, Joey Crain, and to my parents, Pat and Sherilyn Crain, for their material and emotional support throughout multiple ups and downs along this academic trek. Even when I was full of doubt, all my siblings and family spoke as if there was no doubt whatsoever that I could and would get here. From a very young age, my own son, Devon Crain, put up with sitting through lectures, study sessions, and long library visits so I could get my work done, and he never hesitated to tell me he was proud of me and glad to have me as a dad. I am proud and grateful to have him as a son. I will never be able to give sufficient thanks to my wife, Kara Crain. From the time we started dating, she was immensely supportive of my academic endeavor. She believes so strongly in the value of educational pursuits, she convinced me to quit one of my part time jobs so I could dedicate myself to grad school. She has never hesitated to brag about my work and achievements to her friends and family. She never once doubted that my goals were worth working for (despite my own occasional doubts). And she never ceased to shower me with love, support, confidence, and the reassurance that we would see this happen together. v To all of you (and to anyone else I may have regrettably forgotten), I dedicate the following dissertation. Guy Crain September 2016 vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv List of Tables viii Abstract ix Chapter 1: Pacifism and its Varieties 1 Chapter 2: Deweyan Normativity and Morality as Analogous to Health 26 Chapter 3: Moral Health Pacifism 78 Chapter 4: Objection & Replies 155 Bibliography 222 vii List of Tables Typology of Pacifism 21 viii Abstract In this dissertation, I argue for a universal, absolutist form of pacifism. In chapter 1, I note the various ways people have used and abused the terms “pacifism” and “violence,” and I argue that while “violence” should not be construed as broadly as many philosophers would like, “pacifism” (and therefore typologies of pacifism) ought to be construed broadly enough to allow for strictly interpersonal forms of pacifism— that is, moral opposition to violence at the personal but not necessarily the political level. In chapter 2, I argue against unitary conceptions of moral judgment; there are at least three distinct conceptions of how moral value applies to objects under evaluation (deontological, hypological, and evaluative). I introduce the term “moral health” as a placeholder for any normative ethical theory the evaluative judgments of which function analogously to biological health in important ways. In chapter 3, based on the moral health model, I posit and defend four evaluative moral judgments which jointly constitute a universal, absolutist form of pacifism which I call “moral health pacifism”—namely that violence is bad for everyone, there are alternatives to violence even in situations that appear to call for violence, becoming a person who can perform those alternatives well is very morally demanding, and there ought to be persons who can perform those alternatives. In chapter 4, I present seven common objections to pacifism and argue that each fails to refute moral health pacifism (as well as other forms of pacifism). ix CHAPTER 1: Pacifism and Its Varieties I took two of the men and went around the flank…to outflank them and take them out. Well, I got around to the side and pointed my M16 at them and this person turned around and just stared, and I froze, ‘cos it was a boy, I would say between the ages of twelve and fourteen. When he turned at me and looked, all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me, I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried. (Keegan & Holmes, 257) Then I cautiously raised the upper half of my body into the tunnel until I was lying flat on my stomach. When I felt comfortable, I placed my Smith Wesson .38-caliber snub-nose (sent to me by my father for tunnel work) beside the flashlight and switched on the light, illuminating the tunnel. There, not more than 15 feet away, was a Viet Cong eating a handful of rice from a pouch on his lap. We looked at each other for what seemed to be an eternity, but in fact, was probably only a few seconds. Maybe it was the surprise of actually finding someone else there, or maybe it was just the absolute innocence of the situation, but neither of us reacted. After a moment, he put his pouch of rice on the floor of the tunnel beside him, turned his back to me and slowly started crawling away. I, in turn, switched off my flashlight, before slipping back into the lower tunnel and making my way back to the entrance. About 20 minutes later, we received word that another squad had killed a VC emerging from a tunnel 500 meters away. I never doubted who that VC was. To this day, I firmly believe that grunt and I could have ended the war sooner over a beer in Saigon than Henry Kissinger ever could by attending the peace talks. –Michael Kathman ‘Triangle Tunnel Rat’ (Grossman, 2) 1.1 Introduction Violence is messy. Unfortunately, so is pacifism. Some disagree. Jenny Teichman points out that the term “pacifism” was coined in 1902 by a Frenchman attending an international peace conference who explained that he meant to refer to antiwarism (Teichman 1986, 1). On this basis, Teichman insists the term refers solely 1 to antiwarist positions and not to positions morally opposed to all violence (Teichman 1986, 3-4). Richard Norman defines the term more narrowly as “the unconditional rejection of war” (Norman, 197). Duane Cady, too, posits that pacifism is essentially antiwarist (Cady 2010, 17), though he includes opposition to all violence as a version of pacifism (Cady 2010, 64). The historian Peter Brock also insists that pacifism is essentially antiwarism, arguing that pacifism should be kept distinct from concepts like nonviolence (Brock 2000, 54). Elsewhere he considers Gandhi’s nonviolence and nonviolent resistance “a version of pacifism” (Brock 1998, 2). The apparent discrepancy among those who insist on a restricted meaning of the term is telling. The ideas underpinning pacifism are far older than the term itself, as Teichman admits (Teichman 1986, 10). As Peter Brock notes, the pre-history of pacifism likely begins at least two-and-a-half millennia ago with the Jain religion (Brock 1998, 1).1 Jain leaders advocated ahimsa (a Sanskrit word meaning non-injury) to a radical degree; persons should avoid killing even the tiniest insects.
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