Guy Crain

To defend the view that people sometimes ought to commit violence, some philosophers present cases in which a person is, or witnesses others, under threat such that there is an apparent need to commit violence. The cases are presented as though the person has no alternative options morally comparable to or better than violence. In this paper, I argue there are such alternatives, which I call pacifist alternatives. Pacifist alternatives are better than violence for three reasons: they are acts of a type against which there is not a moral presumption that must be overcome to justify committing them; they do not legitimise the violent perpetrator's role in dictating the terms of the scenario; and they weaponise civility to de‐escalate threat in a way that violence cannot. Ultimately, I reveal a weakness in the case against pacifism and in the methodology used in the ethics of violence more broadly.

Many anti-pacifist arguments take the form of what Blake Hereth calls “bottom-up intuitive arguments” (2023, p. 2). Cases of interpersonal threat are presented where it seems intuitive that an agent ought to commit violence, and that intuitive force implies that pacifism is too counterintuitive. While Hereth argues that bottom-up intuitive arguments, in fact, do not have the degree of intuitive force their proponents claim, I am interested in what causes proponents of bottom-up intuitive arguments to take them to be so intuitively decisive in favor of violence. I suspect their apparent intuitive force stems at least in part from a general bias in favor of violence—a bias I will refer to as violentism. In this paper, I develop the concept of violentism. My primary goal is expository—presenting some of violentism’s conceptual components as well as potential examples of violentism. I argue that violentism can manifest in ways analogous to what Liao and Hansen call “expressions condemning oppression” (2023, p. 74), such as racism and sexism; and I argue that, like racism and sexism, violentism can lead to serious social harm.

Rowland Stout argues that a disposition toward violence in certain circumstances counts as a virtue in Aristotle’s sense. In this paper, I will offer three reasons to reject Stout’s position. First, I will present Stout’s position. I will then argue that the plausibility of Stout’s position capitalizes on a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, what has been called the “faux anonymization of agents,” without which his position is less plausible. Next, I will argue that Stout’s own method supports conclusions which Aristotle explicitly rejects—namely, that adultery, theft, and murder could also count as virtuous. Finally, I will argue that Stout fails to account for the fact that human flourishing limits the types of environments that can be used as hypothetical tools by which to discover what counts as a virtue.

In this paper I argue that the trolley method of moral philosophy has three shortcomings not yet adequately addressed in the literature. First, trolley problems highlight high stakes ethical decisions. These decisions do not represent the majority of ethical decisions made by most people, and thus, the trolley method ignores most of moral life. Second, the trolley method operates by way of a faux-anonymization of moral agents. This process leads to descriptions of moral agents being unwittingly supplied by those to whom the problems are presented and thereby the formation of a paradigmatic moral agent which excludes a considerable number of real world moral persons. Lastly, the trolley method mischaracterizes what most moral decision-making is like by presenting a moral agent's decision as isolated, uninfluenced, and made with full self-awareness.