text
stringlengths 0
1.71k
|
---|
of violence that is in practice, if not in principle, as allencompassing
|
as that of the absolute pacifist? One might attempt
|
to do so by emphasising the hardening effect that the use
|
of violence has, how committing one murder, no matter how
|
'necessary' or 'justified' it may seem, lessens the resistance to
|
committing further murders. Is it likely that people who have
|
become inured to acting violently will be able to create a better
|
society? This is a question on which the historical record is
|
relevant. The course taken by the Russian Revolution must
|
shake the belief that a burning desire for social justice provides
|
immunity to the corrupting effects of violence. There are, admittedly,
|
other examples that may be read the other way; but
|
it would take a considerable number of examples to outweigh
|
the legacy of Lenin and Stalin.
|
The consequentialist pacifist can use another argument - the
|
argument I urged against the suggestion that we should allow
|
starvation to reduce the populations of the poorest nations to
|
the level at which they could feed themselves. Like this policy,
|
violence involves certain harm, said to be justified by the prospects
|
of future benefits. But the future benefits can never be
|
certain, and even in the few cases where violence does bring
|
310
|
Ends and Means
|
about desirable ends, we can rarely be sure that the ends could
|
not have been achieved equally soon by non-violent means.
|
What, for instance, has been achieved by the thousands of
|
deaths and injuries caused by more than twenty years of the
|
Irish Republican Army bombings in Northern Ireland? Only
|
counter-terrorism by extremist Protestant groups. Or think of
|
the wasted death and suffering caused by the Baader-Meinhoff
|
gang in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. What did the
|
Palestinian Liberation Organization gain from terrorism, other
|
than a less compromising, more ruthless Israel than the one
|
against which they began their struggle? One may sympathize
|
with the ends some of these groups are fighting for, but the
|
means they are using hold no promise of gaining their ends.
|
Using these means therefore indicates callous disregard of the
|
interests of their victims. These consequentialist arguments add
|
up to a strong case against the use of violence as a means,
|
particularly when the violence is indiscriminately directed
|
against ordinary members of the public, as terrorist violence
|
often is. In practical terms, that kind of violence would seem
|
never justified.
|
There are other kinds of violence that cannot be ruled out so
|
convincingly. There is, for instance, the assassination of a murderous
|
tyrant. Here, provided the murderous policies are an
|
expression of the tyrant's personality rather than part of the
|
institutions he commands, the violence is strictly limited, the
|
aim is the end of much greater violence, success from a single
|
violent act may be highly probable, and there may be no other
|
way of ending the tyrant's rule. It would be implausible for a
|
consequentialist to maintain that committing violence in these
|
circumstances would have a corrupting effect, or that more,
|
rather than less, violence would result from the assassination.
|
Violence may be limited in a different way. The cases we have
|
been considering have involved violence against people. These
|
are the standard cases that come to mind when we discuss
|
violence, but there are other kinds of violence. Animal Liber-
|
311
|
Practical Ethics
|
ation Front members have damaged laboratories, cages, and
|
equipment used to confine, hurt, or kill animals, but they avoid
|
violent acts against any animaL human or non-human. (Other
|
organizations claiming to be acting on behalf of animals have,
|
however, injured at least two people by explosive devices. These
|
actions have been condemned by every well-known animal
|
liberation organization, including the Animal Liberation Front.)
|
Earth First!, a radical American environmentalist organization,
|
advocates 'monkeywrenching' or 'ecotage' - secret acts designed
|
to stop or slow down processes that are harmful to the
|
environment. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood of Earth First!
|
have co-edited Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, a
|
book that describes techniques for disabling computers, wrecking
|
machinery, and blocking sewerage systems. In their view:
|
Monkeywrenching is a non-violent resistance to the destruction
|
of natural diversity and wildemess. It is not aimed toward harming
|
human beings or other forms of life. ft is aimed at inanimate
|
machines and tools .... Monkeywrenchers are very conscious of
|
the gravity of what they do. They are deliberate about taking
|
such a serious step .... They remember that they are engaged in
|
the most moral of all actions: protecting life, defending the Earth.
|
A more controversial technique is 'spiking' trees in forests that
|
are to be logged. Putting metal spikes in a few trees in a forest
|
makes it dangerous to saw timber from the forest, because the
|
workers at the sawmill can never know when the saw might
|
hit a spike, breaking the saw and sending sharp pieces of metal
|
flying around the working area. Ecological activists who support
|
spiking say that they warn the tiniber companies that trees in
|
a certain area have been spiked, and if they go ahead and log
|
the forests, any injuries that occur are the responsibility of the
|
timber company managers who made that decision. But it is
|
the workers who will be hurt, not the managers. Can the activists
|
really shed their responsibility in this way? More orthodox
|
environmental activists reject such tactics.
|
Damage to property is not as serious a matter as injuring or
|
312
|
Ends and Means
|
killing; hence it may be justified on grounds that would not
|
justify anything that caused harm to sentient beings. This does
|
not mean that violence to property is of no significance. Property
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.