Mild deontology has to come with exception clauses for situations where no feasible action meets the requirements that mild deontology typically demands. Self-defense wars seem like an obvious case of that.
If you refuse to go to war for self-defense. then many of your own people will be subjugated or die. Yet, at least the government (and probably most citizens) has an active duty to protect your own people. So, you'd be violating a duty of mild deontology by refusing to go to war.
Thus, refusing to go to war would only normally be justified if the consequences of refusing were well-established to be many times better (over 5x) than the duty-violating bad that results. Yet, good consequences for refusing to go to war are never that well-established, either.
So, whether you go to war or not you are violating the typical demands of mild deontology by violating a prima facie duty that hasn"t been defeated. In such a scenario, you are left to choose the best you can (despite unforeseen consequences) among bad options.
The Quakers were a pretty good demonstration of the value of absolute pacifism. It worked very well for over a century, even on the rough frontier, including excellent relations with the indigenous and broad overall prosperity. It finally broke when an armed gang, the Paxton Boys, decided to take deliberate, systematic advantage of the pacifism.
Eventually, the Quakers had to form a militia to fight. After, they voted money to maintain a militia. The breach of absolute pacifism was such that a little more than a decade later they were fine with joining armed rebellion against the British on theoretic grievances far remote from the actual depredations of the Paxton Boys.
Yeah, so the world is a complex and difficult to navigate place, especially in these sorts of contexts. All of the following are true, in my view:
1) Having a standing army (or something like it) is necessary to avoid the bad consequences of aggressive war against you
2) Once you have a standing army, it is easier to justify all military actions, because those actions no longer come with the moral costs of forming a standing army, including costs like taking taxes but also costs like the moral risks involved in justifying the horrors of war to ourselves
3) All standing armies and all military plans are especially prone to abuse as people end up justifying the unjustified to themselves and there is little incentive for accountability
All three of these.factors seem present to me in the situation you described. There are also just plain bad actors who abuse the power of the military or the fog of war to do obviously bad things (e.g. sexual coercion of subordinates or enemies).
Later (by three days) edit. I should perhaps have said something a bit more analytical. Here's a bit, unrelated to the observation I made.
1) A society that is insufficiently martial--and often one that is sufficiently martial, but unlucky--is sooner or later conquered, not uncommonly with great loss of life, limb, freedom, and prosperity; sometimes (especially if you lose to a non-Western power) with something approaching genocide.
2) Therefore there are no persisting pacifist societies. War is bad, but the alternative is sometimes worse; and if you wait until the last minute when you know it's absolutely necessary, you have already lost.
3) Of course, there are pacifist individuals. They are free riders. Free riders, like other rent seekers, can live very pleasant lives. However, they sometimes suffer, and more often deserve, a certain degree of opprobrium.
War is abhorrent; war is the epitome of immoral human action. The consequences of war are so horrific that people who have not experienced the consequences cannot imagine them.
Notions of putting dollar values on costs and benefits of war seem absurd. People who have not experienced directly and personally the costs of war do well to avoid speaking of them.
It was Bryan that made me more acutely aware of the costs of war. Among the questions I now ask: how many innocent lives is it worth killing? I never see this seriously considered.
Among the practices of the ancient world regarding war: you could enslave people on the losing side. Think of the Roman emperor Valerian being made a footstool when captured by the Persians. This seems appropriate when the aggressor in the war loses. As an experiment, I'd like to see this practiced to some degree (with political leaders and soldiers) to see if it has any effect on the amount of war initiated.
The steelman response would go something like this. Russia historically feels vulnerable to invasion and without a deep water port to an ocean it feels like its destiny is either disappear as a people, or conquer neighbors to inherit the mountains they have of protection or their ports to be a maritime power. They have what they consider an unfalsifiable need to expand. How is pacifism going to protect those neighbors of Russia?
While Russian leaders may have a desire to expand their territory, they are not completely ignorant of the costs involved, which reduces the danger to Russia's neighbors. Since the fall of the USSR, the only neighbors Russia has attacked have been Ukraine and Georgia, both of which had already been destabilized by violent revolution and/or separatism. Russia's other neighbors have avoided this date, either chosing "appeasement" by cooperating with Russia in the realm of security (e.g. Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine before 2014) or deterring Russia by joining NATO (the Baltics, Poland), while being stable enough that Russia did not see an opportunity for an "easy" military intervention. Both of these approaches fit within the envelope of pacifism as defined by Bryan here.
Bryan, your stance here is either unclear or pretty uncontroversial (I doubt many people would disagree that peace is good, and ideally, disagreements should be resolved without war). It'd be more interesting to get your thoughts on something like a war of of self-defense (i.e. another country invading despite you presenting no real threat or even considering them an enemy), or, to better parameterize, Catholic just war theory. If you disagree with war in those cases, then I'd agree you're a pacifist.
Bryan, I’m glad you distinguish pacifism about war from pacifism about all forms of self-defense. A society where almost everyone refuses to defend themselves would be vulnerable to domination by the few who don’t share that restraint. By contrast, a society where almost everyone respects the non-aggression principle and does not initiate coercion but uses it only defensively is stable, because coercive minorities can’t impose their will on the majority.
I agree with the intuition that war is morally dangerous, but I think the deeper issue is structural rather than empirical. Self-defense is the minimal necessary force to prevent a rights violation against a specific moral patient. War, by contrast, imposes large, probabilistic risks on uninvolved moral patients who have not violated anyone’s rights. That structural difference — not uncertainty about long-run consequences — is what makes war morally distinct from self-defense. Pacifism captures part of this intuition, but a rights-based framework makes the distinction clearer.
There are possible solutions to the problem of war without violating the NAP, one of which is arming peace-loving dissidents in a nation with war-mongering government agents. Aggressive state actors would think twice before initiating a war if they thought they themselves would not survive it, but would die along with their thousands of victims. I'm confident readers can think of other examples.
Mild deontology has to come with exception clauses for situations where no feasible action meets the requirements that mild deontology typically demands. Self-defense wars seem like an obvious case of that.
If you refuse to go to war for self-defense. then many of your own people will be subjugated or die. Yet, at least the government (and probably most citizens) has an active duty to protect your own people. So, you'd be violating a duty of mild deontology by refusing to go to war.
Thus, refusing to go to war would only normally be justified if the consequences of refusing were well-established to be many times better (over 5x) than the duty-violating bad that results. Yet, good consequences for refusing to go to war are never that well-established, either.
So, whether you go to war or not you are violating the typical demands of mild deontology by violating a prima facie duty that hasn"t been defeated. In such a scenario, you are left to choose the best you can (despite unforeseen consequences) among bad options.
The Quakers were a pretty good demonstration of the value of absolute pacifism. It worked very well for over a century, even on the rough frontier, including excellent relations with the indigenous and broad overall prosperity. It finally broke when an armed gang, the Paxton Boys, decided to take deliberate, systematic advantage of the pacifism.
Eventually, the Quakers had to form a militia to fight. After, they voted money to maintain a militia. The breach of absolute pacifism was such that a little more than a decade later they were fine with joining armed rebellion against the British on theoretic grievances far remote from the actual depredations of the Paxton Boys.
Yeah, so the world is a complex and difficult to navigate place, especially in these sorts of contexts. All of the following are true, in my view:
1) Having a standing army (or something like it) is necessary to avoid the bad consequences of aggressive war against you
2) Once you have a standing army, it is easier to justify all military actions, because those actions no longer come with the moral costs of forming a standing army, including costs like taking taxes but also costs like the moral risks involved in justifying the horrors of war to ourselves
3) All standing armies and all military plans are especially prone to abuse as people end up justifying the unjustified to themselves and there is little incentive for accountability
All three of these.factors seem present to me in the situation you described. There are also just plain bad actors who abuse the power of the military or the fog of war to do obviously bad things (e.g. sexual coercion of subordinates or enemies).
Pacifists go to the gas chambers too.
Later (by three days) edit. I should perhaps have said something a bit more analytical. Here's a bit, unrelated to the observation I made.
1) A society that is insufficiently martial--and often one that is sufficiently martial, but unlucky--is sooner or later conquered, not uncommonly with great loss of life, limb, freedom, and prosperity; sometimes (especially if you lose to a non-Western power) with something approaching genocide.
2) Therefore there are no persisting pacifist societies. War is bad, but the alternative is sometimes worse; and if you wait until the last minute when you know it's absolutely necessary, you have already lost.
3) Of course, there are pacifist individuals. They are free riders. Free riders, like other rent seekers, can live very pleasant lives. However, they sometimes suffer, and more often deserve, a certain degree of opprobrium.
War is abhorrent; war is the epitome of immoral human action. The consequences of war are so horrific that people who have not experienced the consequences cannot imagine them.
Notions of putting dollar values on costs and benefits of war seem absurd. People who have not experienced directly and personally the costs of war do well to avoid speaking of them.
It was Bryan that made me more acutely aware of the costs of war. Among the questions I now ask: how many innocent lives is it worth killing? I never see this seriously considered.
Among the practices of the ancient world regarding war: you could enslave people on the losing side. Think of the Roman emperor Valerian being made a footstool when captured by the Persians. This seems appropriate when the aggressor in the war loses. As an experiment, I'd like to see this practiced to some degree (with political leaders and soldiers) to see if it has any effect on the amount of war initiated.
The steelman response would go something like this. Russia historically feels vulnerable to invasion and without a deep water port to an ocean it feels like its destiny is either disappear as a people, or conquer neighbors to inherit the mountains they have of protection or their ports to be a maritime power. They have what they consider an unfalsifiable need to expand. How is pacifism going to protect those neighbors of Russia?
While Russian leaders may have a desire to expand their territory, they are not completely ignorant of the costs involved, which reduces the danger to Russia's neighbors. Since the fall of the USSR, the only neighbors Russia has attacked have been Ukraine and Georgia, both of which had already been destabilized by violent revolution and/or separatism. Russia's other neighbors have avoided this date, either chosing "appeasement" by cooperating with Russia in the realm of security (e.g. Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine before 2014) or deterring Russia by joining NATO (the Baltics, Poland), while being stable enough that Russia did not see an opportunity for an "easy" military intervention. Both of these approaches fit within the envelope of pacifism as defined by Bryan here.
Why is it that otherwise intelligent economists like the OP, suddenly forget everything they know about game theory when the subject of war comes up?
Bryan, your stance here is either unclear or pretty uncontroversial (I doubt many people would disagree that peace is good, and ideally, disagreements should be resolved without war). It'd be more interesting to get your thoughts on something like a war of of self-defense (i.e. another country invading despite you presenting no real threat or even considering them an enemy), or, to better parameterize, Catholic just war theory. If you disagree with war in those cases, then I'd agree you're a pacifist.
Bryan, I’m glad you distinguish pacifism about war from pacifism about all forms of self-defense. A society where almost everyone refuses to defend themselves would be vulnerable to domination by the few who don’t share that restraint. By contrast, a society where almost everyone respects the non-aggression principle and does not initiate coercion but uses it only defensively is stable, because coercive minorities can’t impose their will on the majority.
I agree with the intuition that war is morally dangerous, but I think the deeper issue is structural rather than empirical. Self-defense is the minimal necessary force to prevent a rights violation against a specific moral patient. War, by contrast, imposes large, probabilistic risks on uninvolved moral patients who have not violated anyone’s rights. That structural difference — not uncertainty about long-run consequences — is what makes war morally distinct from self-defense. Pacifism captures part of this intuition, but a rights-based framework makes the distinction clearer.
There are possible solutions to the problem of war without violating the NAP, one of which is arming peace-loving dissidents in a nation with war-mongering government agents. Aggressive state actors would think twice before initiating a war if they thought they themselves would not survive it, but would die along with their thousands of victims. I'm confident readers can think of other examples.
I bet even that old Marxist John Lennon, who I have always loved, would enjoy this economic case for pacifism.