A non-violent position drawn from the Anabaptist tradition (‘two-kingdom dualism’) is contrasted with the Christian pacifism with which that position is commonly conflated. It is argued that two-kingdom dualism more effectively leverages the philosophical and practical features of its particularly Christian character than does Christian pacifism – and that these features may have implications beyond the philosophy of religion.

Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which ‘cyber war’ is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic force. In this (...) paper, I shift the focus away from ‘war’ as such in order to ask whether some cyber threats might justifiably be characterized as a form of ‘violence.’ Some theorists argue that the term violence ought to be defined so as to encompass things like ‘structural’ harm or harm by neglect and thereby question implicitly the focus of just war theorists on armed force. This paper draws on a theory of violence I developed elsewhere as a defence of just war theory’s narrow understanding of violence. According to the ‘Double-Intent’ theory, a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category of violence while partly accounting for the peculiar moral connotations of the term. Here, I argue that the resulting definition of violence reshapes the category in a way that includes some forms of cyber-attack. This may help us to see where cyber might fit in relation to just war theory and the ethics of kinetic attack. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Violence is a central idea for political theory but there is very little agreement about how it should be understood. This paper examines some fashionable approaches to the concept and argues against ‘wide’ definitions, particularly those of the ‘structuralist’ variety of which that offered by the sociologist, Johan Galtung, is taken as typical. A critique is also given of ‘legitimist’ definitions which incorporate some strong notion of illegitimacy into the very meaning of violence. Structuralist definitions are much favoured by (...) the political left whereas legitimist accounts are more common on the right but these connections, though psychologically understandable, are not logically tight. Both structuralist and legitimist analyses are criticised on conceptual and practical grounds and a defence of a more restricted definition is presented. The paper concludes with some remarks about the point of having a concept of violence of the type delineated. (shrink)

Trusting relationships are both valuable and risky. Where the risks are high and the fears of betrayal are also high, it might seem rational to try to mitigate the risks, while still enjoying the benefits of the trusting relationship, by forming a contingency plan. A contingency plan—in the sense I am interested in—involves contingent punishments for defection, which are primarily meant to encourage the trusted partner to act trustworthily. I argue, however, that such contingency plans suffer from an internal tension (...) wherein the contingency planner both seeks and undermines a particular level (or kind) of trust. There are two problems in particular, either of which is sufficient to undermine trusting relationships: one, the planner fails to see the trusted partner as sincerely engaged in the trusting relationship, and two, the planner separates herself out from the trusting relationship by seeing her flourishing as separate from her partner’s (or, even worse, as dependent on her partner’s harm). Continency plans, then, are not just about the future; they cast a moral shadow on what we are doing now. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThere is a wide consensus that violence in schools is something so morally wrong that it must not be tolerated. Therefore, the intolerance shown by a teacher towards students’ violent behaviour in school could be understood as a virtue and his moral obligation and legal duty. On the other hand, extreme toleration towards an evil such as violence becomes a vice, for example, when a teacher makes it possible for an innocent student to become a victim of other students’ physical (...) or verbal violence. It seems, therefore, that the idea of ‘zero tolerance’ policies is the right one, although the results of its application in practice have been many times problematic, inefficient and unjust. (shrink)

In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town, South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to the systematic injustice...

With reference to examples of violence during Apartheid, I argue that the socio-political contexts in which violence occurs significantly shape agents ideas about and responses to violence. As such, philosophers can only make sense of why perpetrators and bystanders alike may have judged violent acts morally justifiable or failed to challenge instances of violence against the backdrop of the particular characteristics of the socio-political context in which it occurs.

I discuss the justification of political violence even within democracies. I define ?violence? and indicate how its evaluative force sometimes has conceptually distorting effects. Though acts of violence are at least prima facie wrong, circumstances can arise where, even in democracies, some of them are morally justified. To establish this, three paradigm cases of non?revolutionary political violence are examined. The question is then discussed whether revolutionary violence is ever justified as a means of establishing or promoting human freedom and happiness. (...) I state the conditions which must be satisfied for such violence to be justified and argue that sometimes these conditions have been satisfied. Finally I argue that discussions of violence are frequently confused by ideological mystification and attempt to go some way towards revealing the sources of that mystification. (shrink)

In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town, South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to the systematic injustice of their social context. Drawing on archival evidence, this article examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe, a prominent white Afrikaner sociologist, activist, and Quaker. I argue that van der Merwe developed an unusual account of Quaker pacifism that cast nonviolence in terms of engaged mediation rather than (...) civil resistance or critique, and I demonstrate how this ethical and political position required a specific conceptualization of “violence” as an idea in order for its account of peacemaking to be intelligible as an interpretation of that Quaker tradition. The study of the development of van der Merwe's ideas has a twofold significance: it uncovers a form of anti-violence politics that has been widely neglected within political theories of nonviolence and pacifism, and it illuminates the concrete political stakes of ongoing debates about “narrow” and “wide” definitions of violence. (shrink)

James Rachels has argued that a morally autonomous person (in Kant’s sense) could not consistently accept the authority of divine commands. Against Rachels, this essay argues (a) that the Kantian concept of moral autonomy is to be analyzed in terms of an agent’sresponsiveness to the best available moral reasons and (b) that it is simply question-begging against divine command theory to assume that such commands could not count as the best moral reasons available to an agent.