Relation to others· Power and justice
Pacifism
Axis: Violence — Can violence be legitimate?
No 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.
Philosophers 1
Russellexplicit
Russell does not condemn war as intrinsically evil, which would already be to admit an absolute rule; he condemns it because the reckoning is almost always disastrous, for the victor included. He therefore sorts wars by type — colonisation, prestige, principle, self-defence — and shows that only a very few pass the test of the calculation. This structure explains his apparent reversals: he went to prison in 1918 for opposing a war he judged to be about nothing, and supported the war of 1939 because a victory for Hitler seemed to him the only worse evil; the same calculation led him around 1948 to remarks contemplating a threat of war against the USSR to force international control of the atomic bomb upon it, remarks whose exact import remains disputed, and which he first denied before acknowledging and regretting them.
"The Ethics of War" (1915) · Justice in War-Time (1916) · The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969), vols. II-III