For some, pacifism is a dirty word, shorthand for an unwillingness to fight on behalf of your country. However, pacifism is not just about being anti-war or anti-fighting. It is also about how not to get into a war. It is this latter meaning of pacifism that I draw on in this essay to discuss ethical issues in security strategy, not to undermine the willingness to fight but to consider the pragmatic tools that pacifism provides to prevent the need to fight. I am an amateur boxer, so I understand the inclination to fight and the desire to confront an adversary with force. But the military is not a pugilist, and war is a fight that always involves destruction so strategies to secure peace are always better than going to war.
In relation to security thinking, the strongest criticism of pacifism is that it is an unrealistic position from which to deal with the world of concrete security reality. Pacifism, in this rebuke of it, is treated as a withdrawal from the world into a set of nonviolent principles we might like to live by, but which can’t, in any meaningful sense, be drawn on to deal with circumstances that look like requiring a military response for the maintenance of geopolitical order. This essay sets aside what may be legitimate and strongly held views that pacifism weakens a person’s commitment to defend their loved ones and societal values through military service, and demonstrates that rather than being a simple antithesis to war and violence, pacifism provides more robust approaches to the assurance of security interests than is apparent at first glance.
Australia has been militarily involved in nine wars and 37 peacekeeping/humanitarian operations across the world since 1947.[1] While the reasons for commitment to each differ, these numbers indicate that for close to 70 years the Australian military has been used more for overseas peacekeeping purposes than belligerent military ones which have terrain or enemy focused objectives. This tradition of war and peacekeeping is arguably maintained in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update —the Commonwealth appraisal of the current security environment, the challenges ahead and the strategies needed to meet them.
The Strategic Update states that military power will be used in support of three security objectives (Australia, Department of Defence 2020: 24-25). These are: to shape Australia’s strategic environment; to deter actions against Australia’s interests; and to respond with credible military force, when required. Of the shape, deter and respond triad, the first and the second (shape and deter), raise the question of whether Australia’s preference for international relationships, deterrence and contribution to global stability constitute a pacifist approach to the use of military power and whether pacifism and nonviolence provide defensible and achievable principles to underwrite security strategy. The rest of this essay elaborates on these questions by applying a pacifist lens to each of the three security objectives. Before turning to the shape and deter objectives, I will first address the most combative of the objectives, the use of military force.
Broadly understood, pacifism is an ethical position that expresses opposition to violence and war and commits itself to peacebuilding as a nonviolent means for the development of society and the conduct of politics. At its heart, pacifism asks the question, ‘Is war ever morally permissible?’, to which the answer is a categorical ‘no’. Just war thinkers, asking the same question, respond with ‘maybe’ followed by the question, ‘How do we distinguish just from unjust wars?’ The jus ad bellum (justifiable initiation of war) and jus in bello (justifiable conduct in the waging of war) distinctions these questions raise between pacifists and just war thinkers have moved just war thinking closer to the pacifist question by focusing on the rights-based conditions that a commitment to conflict must satisfy. Those jus in bello rights would include the impact of war on non-combatants and consideration of the scenarios that would limit or rule out killing non-combatants, minimise non-combatant death, or justify non-combatant death in exchange for a greater societal protection. However, it may be that any particular war cannot meet the protection of these rights and so fail to meet the rights base criteria for a just war. This would then lead to a rejection of war in favour of a pacifism contingent on the protection of rights.
Contingent pacifism of this kind is distinct to an absolute pacifism that regards war as inherently morally wrong, and therefore and always impermissible, even if military action aims to protect people against human-rights violations. Michael Allen Fox, a contemporary proponent of absolute pacifism, recognises that this poses a significant dilemma for a pacifist, but responds with the question, ‘Should immoral actions be used to stop other (perhaps gravely more) immoral actions?’—a version of ‘do two wrongs make a right? (Fox 2014: 127)’. Fox answers ‘no’ and goes on to argue that mechanisms other than military action need to be used to solve political and social problems.
If Australia were to build a national defence position based on pacifist principles, it would seem that of the two forms of pacifism, absolute and contingent, contingent pacifism would provide the more justifiable basis for a response to attack. Where it is contemplated that citizens might have to be killed in military conflict, the contingent position would have to meet strident criteria that would, in the first instance, seek full protection of citizen non-combatants under attack and then justification for minimal non-combatant death, or death in exchange for greater societal protection.
When considering the first and second of Australia’s security objectives, to shape and deter, the fuller pacifism, absolute pacifism, could provide greater grounds for security protection than the contingent variant. Starting from the premise that all people have ‘moral status’ (as difficult as it is to fully explain why), philosopher Seth Lazar (2017) argues that this amounts to soldiers and non-combatants having the same duty to uphold basic human dignity and soldiers having the duty of avoiding killing wherever possible. Using a ‘revisionist’ just war lens, Lazar goes on to say that the immunity of non-combatants can be lost if they pose an unjustified threat to others. Going further, if a person poses a lethal threat to others, killing may be permissible to protect those others. However, even if killing a person were justified in this way, the dignity and rights of the person that derives from their inherent moral status is still violated.
This sort of moral dilemma is what Michael Walzer (1973) refers to as ‘the problem of dirty hands’ and it lies at the heart of the ethical dilemma underlying a political or military decision to undertake armed attacks, particularly in circumstances where ethical principles are violated to achieve a greater good. Walzer cites the British decision to target German civilians through a bombing campaign early in World War II to avoid suffering defeat to the Nazis, an enemy of a particularly horrific kind, as an example of such a justified immoral action (Walzer 1977: 267-680). The bar is necessarily high though, as only communal death or a dire risk to the continuity of the community warrants such a justification (Walzer 2004: 46). From this vantage, the pacifist opposition to war and violence, as expressed through the question ‘is war ever morally permissible’, pushes pacifism towards a moral obligation to avoid war and reduce killing so as to avoid the negation of natural justice that derives from a person’s rights and dignity that killing involves.
From this vantage it is possible to see that a commitment to peace could guide regional and global security and provide a substantive alternative to just war theory. The moral dilemma of killing, as I have outlined it above, is not removed by the ethical commitment to just war even if both approaches share a commitment to peace. As Gregory Reichberg (2010) has argued, the just war principle of charity that Thomas Aquinas (from Augustine) establishes as the purpose of war—that is, war should only be waged as a means to secure peace (an expression of charity)—ignores the reality that war is often pursued as a form of punishment. Following this line of thinking, the natural law (sometimes called ‘deontological’) appeal to war as a means to achieve good, such as civil defence or deterrence, happens all too rarely.[2] We might regard Australia’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of punishment by war. Even further, it may be that the long 21st century wars in these two countries have escalated, rather than alleviated, oppression of their populations. If this is so, this bolsters the distinctiveness of absolute pacifism from just war theory, and justifies its viability as a security theory that informs the peacebuilding impetus underlying the first element of Australia’s security objectives—shaping Australia’s strategic environment.
The second element of Australia’s security objectives— to deter threats which may threaten Australia and its interests—would seem to mix peacebuilding and war as roads to security. I would argue here that where Australia’s security interests are thought to need an application of force, a pacifist commitment to nonviolence and ending war would be legitimately expressed through a commitment to counter-insurgency strategies. Contemporary counter-insurgency theory places emphasis on good governance that leads to stable societies. As Micheal Fitsimmons puts it, ‘effective and efficient administration of government and public services … is the key to “winning hearts and minds” (Fitzsimmons 2008: 338)’. Furthermore, state building, whether at a local or national level, builds stable peace and is the best means to alleviate suffering. As a form of nonviolence, the making of good governance in volatile overseas locations can ensure Australian security; it is a form of nonviolent deterrence.
As an ethic of security, pacifism, in both its contingent and absolute forms, does not immediately reveal itself to provide active principles that would guide the use of military forces in the defence of Australia. In this brief opinion piece, I have attempted to sketch a series of positions that show that it is possible to incorporate pacifist ideas into security planning. Far from the idea that pacifism is largely about personal virtue and modesty, or that a strategic commitment to nonviolence inevitably weakens national security, we can see that some versions of pacifism have direct relevance to contemporary security goals.
Bibliography
Australia, Department of Defence, 2020. 2020 Defence Strategic Update. Commonwealth of Australia.
Fitzsimmons, Micheal, 2008. Hard Hearts and Open Minds? Governance Identity and the Intellectual Foundations of Counterinsurgency Strategy, Journal of Strategic Studies vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 337-365.
Fox, Michael Allen, 2014. Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction, New York/London: Routledge.
Lazar, Seth, 2017. 'Evaluating the Revisionist Critique of Just War Theory', Daedalus, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 113-124.
Reichberg, Gregory, 2010. ‘Thomas Aquinas between just war and pacifism’, Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 219 - 241
Walzer, Michael, 1973, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 160–180.
Walzer, Michael, 1977, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, New York: Basic Books.
Walzer, Michael, 2004, ‘Emergency Ethics’, in Arguing About War, New Haven: Yale University Press (first published as a pamphlet for the US Air Force in 1988), pp. 33-50.
[1] https://www.anzacportal.dva.gov.au/wars-and-missions/peacekeeping
[2] Natural law theory is one of the major ethical tenets informing the Australian Defence Force Philosophical Doctrine on Military Ethics. Available at https://theforge.defence.gov.au/ethics.
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Dr Richard Davis
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Dr Richard Davis has over three decades of experience as an anthropologist and is currently working in the Centre for Defence Leadership & Ethics to integrate and enhance cross-cultural capability across Defence. His major research areas have included Indigenous Australian societies, gender (with a focus on masculinity), frontier theory, construction of knowledge, non-western concepts of war and more recently, military anthropology.
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