Monday, October 5, 2009

I Am Excited About This

7 comments:

Aric Clark said...

Yeah, Michael does good stuff over there.

Michael Westmoreland-White said...

Thanks very much, guys. Aric, can you send me a password to your blog now that it is restricted. My email is on my blog.

Michael Westmoreland-White said...

The 2nd post is up.

Aric Clark said...

Michael,

My old blog is not active. It is restricted purely because I haven't reconciled myself with obliterating all that writing yet, but no blogging is going on there. This is where I write now when I have time. I'm cheering your series every step of the way!

Michael Westmoreland-White said...

Cool. Aric, I hope some of that writing is translated into pdf form and become book chapters, articles, etc.

3rd installment is up.

BTW, not to be picky, but Levellers has 3 "ls," because I use the 17th C. spelling of the Leveller movement.

Anonymous said...

Absolute pacifism is not viable in this world because situations do arise when self-defense is entirely justified.

That having been said please check out this reference on Rightness and Justice.

www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm

It is an essay taken from this remarkable book.

www.dabase.org/not2.htm

Douglas Underhill said...

@ Anonymous

With all due respect, I think you put forth a potentially poisonous piece of thinking there, that just because there are some situations we can imagine where we might need to resort to violence to protect ourselves, pacifism is not viable. What you mean is that pacifism is viable for 99.999% of situations, except for the very unusual situation of self defense, and even then, there are thousands of examples of nonviolent self-defense to draw inspiration from.

So what I tend to say is that pacifism is totally viable and absolutely morally necessary, and that in the unusual case where one must violently defend their own lives (soldiers don't count because when you go to war you buy into radical violence necessarily) then in those extremely rare cases, it is understandable to perhaps fail to be peaceful. Though situations where there is no peaceful defense possible exist primarily in ethics classrooms in my experience, and there are plenty of cases where violent defense escalated a situation out of control - meaning that violence is not a viable option either most of the time.