Relation to others· Power and justicedifficulty
Violence
Can violence be legitimate?
In the face of aggression, injustice, and oppression, resort to force always ends up presenting itself, as a temptation or a necessity. Refusing all violence on principle, admitting it as a last resort under strict rules, treating it as the ordinary instrument of politics, or seeing in it the oppressed's path to liberation: each answer commits a conception of morality, power, and history.
Pacifism
0No cause justifies shedding blood: violence degrades the one who wields it, calls forth violence in return, and corrupts the very ends it claims to serve. Nonviolence is not passivity but a force: resisting evil without reproducing it, disarming the adversary rather than striking them down.
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Just war
Common view2Violence is an evil, but sometimes a necessary one, to prevent a greater evil: defending the innocent, repelling aggression. It can only ever be the exception, hedged in by strict conditions: just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionate means, protection of non-combatants.
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Thomas Aquinasexplicit
The Summa systematizes just war under three conditions: the authority of the sovereign (no private person may declare war), a just cause (punishing a fault, repelling injustice), and a rightful intention (aiming at the good and at peace, not vengeance or greed). Force is not evil in itself: it is an instrument of justice when these conditions are met, like the sword entrusted to public power.
Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 40 · Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 7 (self-defense, double effect)
Odysseusinferable
Violence, in Odysseus, always claims to be commanded by an end and legitimated by a wrong: the wooden horse wins a war he holds to be just; his return confronts suitors who have violated , squandered his goods and courted his wife. He does not exalt force for its own sake, in the manner of a : he uses it as an instrument, when cunning no longer suffices, in the service of a right he judges trampled. Yet the pitiless severity of his vengeance exceeds the measure of a mere right restored, and the poem lets the difficulty of a justice that tips into violence come to the surface.
Odyssey, VIII (the wooden horse) · Odyssey, XXII (the final confrontation with the suitors)
Force as an instrument of politics
2Politics cannot be moralized: every order rests, in the last resort, on coercion, and the state is defined by its monopoly on legitimate violence. The question is not whether force is good, but whether it is used aptly: whoever governs must know how to wield it, sparingly and lucidly, or surrender the city to chaos or to someone more violent.
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Cruelty is not praised in itself: it is judged by its use. Well used are those inflicted all at once, out of the necessity of securing oneself, and then turned to the greatest benefit of the subjects; badly used, those that grow with time. Injuries are done all together, benefits are meted out slowly; and since love hangs on a bond that men break to their advantage, whereas fear hangs on the dread of punishment, it is safer to be feared than loved, provided one avoids being hated.
The Prince, ch. VIII (Agathocles) · The Prince, ch. VII (Cesare Borgia, Remirro de Orco) · The Prince, ch. XVII (to be feared or loved)
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Calliclesinferable
Since nature gives the strong the right to take, coercion and conquest are not an evil to be contained but the normal expression of order: Pindar's line and the example of Xerxes marching on Greece serve him to legitimate force as the ground of right. The violence of the powerful need not justify itself before a morality: it is justice itself.
Plato, Gorgias, 483d-484b
Emancipatory violence
1Where domination is itself an entrenched violence, exploitation, colonization, an iniquitous order upheld by force, the violence of the oppressed is not an evil but a reply: the means of breaking a system that will never yield of its own accord, and, for the oppressed, a way of reclaiming their denied humanity.
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Marxexplicit
The ruling class never yields of its own accord: the emancipation of the proletariat requires the revolutionary conquest of power, and violence there plays the role of the midwife of history, a means in the service of a new order rather than a value in itself. Yet Marx concedes that in certain countries with open institutions a peaceful transition is not ruled out: violence is an instrument of emancipation, not its essence.
Capital, vol. I, ch. 31 · Manifesto of the Communist Party, IV · Amsterdam speech (1872)
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptivePolitical & legal SituationThe limits of speech
Speech that demeans without striking a blow: must a free society protect it in the name of freedom itself, or restrain it in the name of the freedom of those it targets?
public speechPolitical liberty - PrescriptivePolitical & legalHow far may one resist?
From the strike to sabotage, from tax refusal to armed struggle: does just disobedience have internal limits, publicity, nonviolence, or does extreme oppression lift every bound?
the means of resistanceLaw and conscience
Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.Marx · Capital, vol. I, ch. 31
For a war to be just, three things are necessary: the authority of the sovereign, a just cause, and a rightful intention.Thomas Aquinas · Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 40, a. 1