5 20 144 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/47290a949d35cf80426b62ad11ea2f02.pdf 4bf0c098455f06e841302b4c0e11fc65 PDF Text Text ABSTRACT OF PROBLEMS and SOLUTIONS in DEEP ECOPOLITICAL THEORY A reshaping of social and political institutions, which are often outmoded or suboptimal and certainly commonly anti-environmental is now prominent on theoretical agendas, at least in Australia. One such project is the multi-million dollar “Reshaping Australian Institutions” project at the Australian National University. At the same time there is widespread disenchantment with prevailing politics in Australia. Accordingly there is an opportunity to put radical green themes on agendas for real political and institutional change. A deep change, however, which is what deep green theories require, encounters several problems. For one, there appears to be a contradiction between demands for, on the one side, increasing environmental regulations and welfare arrangements, characteristically dependent upon bureaurcratic centralisation and economic growth, and on the other, decentralized lower impact organisation, which halts Anti-environmentally industry and economic growth. A functional resolution, partially dissolving a central state, is outlined, along with a theory of an encephaletic organisation. Further problems to surmount include human chauvinism and present-time bias, even in present best-practice democratic institutions. Deep demarchoidal resolutions of these problems are sketched and defended. R. Sylvan RMB 683 Bungendore Australia 2621 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ABSTRACT OF PROBLEMS and SOLUTIONS in DEEP ECOPOLITICAL THEORY A reshaping of social and political institutions, which are often outmoded or suboptimal and certainly commonly anti-environmental is now prominent on theoretical agendas, at least in Australia. One such project is the multi-million dollar “Reshaping Australian Institutions” project at the Australian National University. At the same time there is widespread disenchantment with prevailing politics in Australia. Accordingly there is an opportunity to put radical green themes on agendas for real political and institutional change. A deep change, however, which is what deep green theories require, encounters several problems. For one, there appears to be a contradiction between demands for, on the one side, increasing environmental regulations and welfare arrangements, characteristically dependent upon bureaurcratic centralisation and economic growth, and on the other, decentralized lower impact organisation, which halts Anti-environmentally industry and economic growth. A functional resolution, partially dissolving a central state, is outlined, along with a theory of an encephaletic organisation. Further problems to surmount include human chauvinism and present-time bias, even in present best-practice democratic institutions. Deep demarchoidal resolutions of these problems are sketched and defended. R. Sylvan RMB 683 Bungendore Australia 2621  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 17, Item 984: Abstract of Problems and solutions in deep ecopolitical theory Subject The topic of the resource Typescript Description An account of the resource Note, one item digitised from item 984. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 17, Item 984 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [1] leaf. 539.65 KB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:1281ef1">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:1281ef1</a> Box 17: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Floor > Pile 7 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/ead82de895e579a8e06b9cd889bf5470.pdf 33e8c3b195bf1de721f623ec3ef5dab1 PDF Text Text <L^ 80993 �o/ Methods reZ#Z:ons carrot <- -> stick Back-up possibly Transparent BENIGN PaciEst opposition T ^2---------------------------- --- 4, opaque Enlightenment opposition Liberal \ opposition ��PREFACE. A roc/ </'<:/' This text is written in deep anger, anger not just at what humans have done to so much of the face of the Earth, but still more at what they continue to do. ar Much of the Earth is now a mess.,) Mess is due to humans, some humans. Worse, much of the Earth's environment continues to be destroyed or seriously degraded. Again the main direct or indirect cause is human activity. Humans continue to foul, degrade, or destroy not only their own habitats but the environments of most other forms of life as well. That did not need to happen. It does not have to go on happening. There were paths not taken. There were significant options not even properly considered. In some cases, there still are such options, not being seriously considered, not being taken. 1 ( That should be changed. But present socio-political arrangements, throughout entire complex or states that covers the Earth, depend upon, are premiss^ upon, features that lead to precisely such destruction^ and degradation^. For many states such resully are both ^4 occurring in their own territories, and spilling over into those of others. Present socio­ political arrangements accordingly have to be changed, changed radically. But here we encounter an evident obstacle. It is unlikely that those in power, or with privilege, will go qui^ly, will let their class subside from its materially advantages position, or wither away environmentally. An appropriate revolution may be needed in certain key places to affect due changes. But that is a very controversial idea. There is no need to recite yet again the litany of environmental disasters that have ^co­ occurred or the even more calamitous stack thafare already activated. Almost every day there A is something new or still news. Another oil spill, wiping out the lives ojf present habitats of birds and fish. Through deforestation,^landslides here, flooding there. More whales taken by the Japanese, Ozone holes grow. And so it goes on, with much more in store. But now nearly every sizeable introductory textbook in biology or geography includes a large and largely depressing section on environmental "problems" (at least too some of the devastation and depredation is at last seen as constituting a "problem"). So do many other books; an excellent easy high ted introduction is Ear?Asropg. And more and more popular periodicals and newspapers^/e on environmental disasters and problems or run feature articles.' With new threats to the collective human future the environment has become highly fashionable. , Now, with some appreciation of the inconvenience to business and businessmen of a nuclear winter, runaway greenhouse, or like catastrophe even cautious conservatives are beginning 1 The intellectual who does most to bring this out, the arbitrariness even of present institutional arrangements, is no doubt I^acault. /<M J? �^7/ ^7W/ , 7 ^*/ , ., 7^ ^,/ , „ y^j. ^7 /. -^M_ y.-y </? ^7' '"^ , r.A-/^-. ^. ^1 /<A—, , l-"^- '—^-/^7 ��2 to recognise that there may be ^ome problems, that }a major nuclear exchange will have among its plausible efforts, the greatest biological and physical disruptions of this planet in the last 65 million years'. But the apparent fact is that the very course we are 3a, any further catastrophe, without a nuclear exchange, will cause the greatest biological Z) 6 Ar. disruption of the planet in the last 65 million years. It is enough to and compare data for species loss. It is now a relatively easy matter to .... the considerable array of environmental problems and outrages that we so far know something about. It is another, much more difficult, matter to do something worthwhile about them. While many environmental problems may now be sufficiently clear, and stark, how to react to them, what to do, what practice and theory to pursue are seldom so clear. [Nor is there any very grave difficulty about some of what needs to be done in order to avert or reduce some of the worst problems, and some of the major disasters in store. What is lacking is sufficient motivation, or opportunity among main power brokers (political will, .<............... ..... ................................................ .................... .................................................................... ——— ----------------------- - — political blockages,<etc)] Th& text aims to develop the assemble requisite theory and indicate resultant practices Ensuing political theory^ which will lead to relevant change. But) There is much theoretical work to be accomplished, both critical and constructive. Critical work criticizing present and prevailing assumptions and practices, and the acclaimed justification and alleged reasonableness of these practices. Constructive activity outlining ernative idea-< idea-e^clicism, alternative practices and way of reaching alternative structures, alternative ' . The present exercise aims to be a part of that endeavors. It is a them from where we—— are. .. ______________ —— -------------- A/ philosophical, theoretical book^ It concentrates on the theory, especially the theory, of / .. ...................................................................................................... I..... ....... . ^4—environmentalisin.\ While it offers a purework for environmental action, it says little directly Ar no c . on such action. Those are one practical details zmd recipes for saving a forest froim . _ eismAiSSUfi / hen? destructive logging interests, for example, ways to proceed abouTihal are forever become increasingly appreciated. What is still lacking is the wider p^lifactory structure which explains and justifies opposition and resistance. The run of environmental ethics text do little of what is required. They contain insufficient criticism, little analysis of depth, no vision or elaboration of alternatives. They are so sweetly, eminently reasonable^ fiddling while environmental Rome bums. Too many seek "blame" and all that sort of crap. Or, where they would shake " with ........ - development r r near ihA present predatory arrangements, it is only in one respect, and that not getting to bottom of the troubles, reat^ meat eating. For, while some problems work be ^t-&ough^(^ ----- other generals thereby), it is evident that the rape of most of the Earth could construe vegetarian way. ace in a , . �Environmental ethics texts have no anger, no outrage at what is Being being done to the Earth. Put crudely, they lack guts. Indeed some suggest that things are proceeding rather well, as it not so well, as well as could be expected. (If the latter it coop very little for managing humans competent as managers/organisers). Al! is vary/ivr from well. There is cause not merely for concern, but for deep anger. (Such anger may be un-American.) The dominant way, re^our^ism, if not successfully opposed, will ultimately destroy the ecosphere and then humans among other species Intellectuals, philosophers especially, lately economists even more,2 deal to answer for, socially and environmentally. They encouraged permit of present damaging practices; they proceeded to provide the intellectual and attitudinal underpinnings that helped motivate and continue^ to justify the practices. Nor, with the evidence of environmental crisis so manifest, have things changed much. Most intellectuals continue as if nothing had happened apart from the beneficial advancement of science and technology. Most economists continue to produce or partificate upon various growth (or maximal equilibrium) pmf^tonals. Most philosophers - most are AngloAmerican in background - continue in their hopeless efforts to prop up or impede upon what is fundamentally anfhdi d awedy^basicaiiyv Humean empiricism (thus recently in the on-going display of Humean fashions, evolutionary epistemology, belief as reduced to desire, causal reductions, etc). Most have said, or done, very little about the^..^./ environmental situations; those who have, like Naess, are often ridiculed by the comfortable professionals. 4 This book tries to retell, in a more organised and coherent way what deep-green theory, an environmental theory that has emerged in a sporadic and scattered way over the last couple of decades, is all about. But not everything is told; only the predominantly ethical pa^ts. Later parts of this series on deep-green theory will cover political and economics theory and social theory more generally. Untila century ago philosophy and economics were not separate disciplines. The significant economists were almost invariably philosophers (neeerds may be the one main^,...). �X\^7c-vr/ ?^7<!k^< /7,^ -7^ . r^/ 7^r^7 c)/-^^ //^A^-. ; / C/ A A' �Deep-green theory aims eventually to supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy. While it stands on its own, it is alternative because it stands in radical ideological opposition to dominant ways, nowadays predominantly industrial. It offers a philosophy both in the contemporary narrower sense, and in the older sense of an intellectually informed and critical way of life. That philosophy is centred on an ethical theory (upon which this issue concentrates), which is in form centred upon a value theory. But the ethic' issues, in a fashion broadly associated since Aristotle, in a politics and political economy. But the output of the value theory in fact reaches much further, into practical decision making in a range of environmentally impacting areas such as fishing, forestry and agriculture. The value theory is also intertwined with philosophical issues which are often considered more fundamental, those of astophyism and epistemology. Indeed there is no part of philosophy that remains untouched. Therein lies part of the claim to comprehensiveness. The particular form of deep-green theory elaborated is by no means independent of (acclaimed) advances recently made elsewhere in philosophy (those in object-theory and relevant and paraconsistent logics especially). But though the theory given is influenced and „--------- -—-sometimes in fact shaped through these developments, deep-green theory moBe^gen^ahy can A avoid them„ (The type of theory given could easily enough be recast m a more classical Platonistic form - undoubtedly a much less plausible form^ Nor will these background advances intrude, it is hoped, in the given elaboration of deep-green theory; the background will remain, fairly directly in the background, and not come to dominate proceedings or proceedings depend upon special new controversial features of it. Where more technical agreements are required, they will be relegated to appendices. LA^to d^ep theory-— Deep-green theory is the environmental branch of a much larger affair, deep theory. There is a point, in fact a real expository need, to place deep-green theory in the larger setting of deep theory. For deep theory influences several of the choices made in deciding upon the way deep-green theory goes, the shape it takes. Although the influence will become evident, particularly with the intertwining of truth and value t&at it is worth giving an example. Too much of the Anglo-American discussion of intrinsic value and of obligations to future generations is taken up with - hung up upon - ontological questions, about universal items in the first case, and as how there can be obligations regarding future items which do not (yet) e �exist in "suitable" determinate form in the second. Deep object-theory slices straight through these issues, removing the problem-generating ontological assumptions. is a grander theory lying in the background, which significantly influences the philosophical approach taken in deep-green theory, as well as being influenced by it. There is no reason why that grand backdrop should remain hidden; there is no hidden agenda. The background theory, of which deep-green theory is a part, is called simply For it represents the confluence of several deep positions with deep-green theory: deep pluralism, depth relevant theory, deep item-theory, and so on. As a theoretical endeavor, deep theory aims to pull together, into a unified coherent theory these various deep positions. It thus draws together and integrates as well, several other interrelated efforts (on dialethism, process theory, anakyrie, etc.) With deep theory I aim to supply eventually a fairly comprehensive philosophical package. I used to imagine that with moderate comprehensiveness as regards present philosophical problems would come a certain completeness; but I've come to thinkjhat a total philosophy is an illusion, like at it Deep theory is no doubt a presumptuous title (there are worse about, e.g. Total philosophy", 'ecosophy'^, ^o( it is altogether satisfactory, given the problems and obscurities, .to be encountered, lacking in the notion of depth. My main excuse is that I did not exactly good to refuse. It emerged from a terminological confluence of several e&eas in which I'd thought, or environmental philosophy^with a revised deep ecology), deep relevant theory, deep pluralism (which deepened radical pluralism), and deep item-theory (which deepens object-theory). To give a picture of deep theory, it suffices for present purposes to indicate some main features of deep positions, some of their integrating interrelations, and some of their revolutionary potential. Deep theory overturns or subverts very much of what has been assumed or presupposed in Western philosophy, and particularly in Enlightenmented contemporary philosophy. For example, it overturns the following widespread assumptions:* the Ontological Assumption, that truth, and also/ meaning, are functions of reference, and thereby presuppose existence. On the contrary according to (deep) item theory, we can perfectlv well talk and think trulv aboutS items that do not exist, and' also about items that are impossible. ^Therewith repudiated also then is an occasionally favoured full-back from enttcalism, namely possibilism, which assumes �* the Possibilist Reduction, of everything that counts in discourse to possible individuals# there are no other genuine subjects, all else can be analysed (or thrown) away. Bound up with possibilism are * the assumptions of modalism, of the correctness of classical logic, and of the absolute Under more throughgoing transconsistency (or paraconsistency) these connected assumptions are one and all repudiated. The transconsistent connection assumes an important role in the straightforward treatment of moral and other dilemmas, in showing for example how an agent may coherently operate requirement of consistency. under inconsistent obligations or with incompatible needs. Important special cases of modalism are such theories as that * entailment is strict implication (or its metalinguistic analogical) and that conditionality amounts to a modal function of material implication^. The rejection of such themes and their jeourses is part of what motivates deep relevant logic. While the parts of deep theory are integrated and are intended to be materially reinforcing, nothing prevents their fairly independent elaborations. The holism conceded does not exclude separation or analysis. In particular, deep-green theory is amenable to ependent development and analysis. //yyy- 1 Material implication is the implication defined in terms of truth-functions thus: A materially implies B iff not last A and not B, or equivalently, iff either not A or B. Strict implication is the necessitation of material obligatory i.e. A strictly implies B iff necessarily A materially implies B, or equivalently, iff it is not possible that not A and not B. ,. A, �/ re/ �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document <L^ 80993 o/ Methods reZ#Z:ons carrot <- -> stick Back-up possibly Transparent BENIGN PaciEst opposition T ^2---------------------------- --- 4, opaque Enlightenment opposition Liberal \ opposition PREFACE. A roc/ </'<:/' This text is written in deep anger, anger not just at what humans have done to so much of the face of the Earth, but still more at what they continue to do. ar Much of the Earth is now a mess.,) Mess is due to humans, some humans. Worse, much of the Earth's environment continues to be destroyed or seriously degraded. Again the main direct or indirect cause is human activity. Humans continue to foul, degrade, or destroy not only their own habitats but the environments of most other forms of life as well. That did not need to happen. It does not have to go on happening. There were paths not taken. There were significant options not even properly considered. In some cases, there still are such options, not being seriously considered, not being taken. 1 ( That should be changed. But present socio-political arrangements, throughout entire complex or states that covers the Earth, depend upon, are premiss^ upon, features that lead to precisely such destruction^ and degradation^. For many states such resully are both ^4 occurring in their own territories, and spilling over into those of others. Present socio­ political arrangements accordingly have to be changed, changed radically. But here we encounter an evident obstacle. It is unlikely that those in power, or with privilege, will go qui^ly, will let their class subside from its materially advantages position, or wither away environmentally. An appropriate revolution may be needed in certain key places to affect due changes. But that is a very controversial idea. There is no need to recite yet again the litany of environmental disasters that have ^co­ occurred or the even more calamitous stack thafare already activated. Almost every day there A is something new or still news. Another oil spill, wiping out the lives ojf present habitats of birds and fish. Through deforestation,^landslides here, flooding there. More whales taken by the Japanese, Ozone holes grow. And so it goes on, with much more in store. But now nearly every sizeable introductory textbook in biology or geography includes a large and largely depressing section on environmental "problems" (at least too some of the devastation and depredation is at last seen as constituting a "problem"). So do many other books; an excellent easy high ted introduction is Ear?Asropg. And more and more popular periodicals and newspapers^/e on environmental disasters and problems or run feature articles.' With new threats to the collective human future the environment has become highly fashionable. , Now, with some appreciation of the inconvenience to business and businessmen of a nuclear winter, runaway greenhouse, or like catastrophe even cautious conservatives are beginning 1 The intellectual who does most to bring this out, the arbitrariness even of present institutional arrangements, is no doubt I^acault. /<M J? ^7/ ^7W/ , 7 ^*/ , ., 7^ ^,/ , „ y^j. ^7 /. -^M_ y.-y </? ^7' '"^ , r.A-/^-. ^. ^1 /<A—, , l-"^- '—^-/^7 2 to recognise that there may be ^ome problems, that }a major nuclear exchange will have among its plausible efforts, the greatest biological and physical disruptions of this planet in the last 65 million years'. But the apparent fact is that the very course we are 3a, any further catastrophe, without a nuclear exchange, will cause the greatest biological Z) 6 Ar. disruption of the planet in the last 65 million years. It is enough to and compare data for species loss. It is now a relatively easy matter to .... the considerable array of environmental problems and outrages that we so far know something about. It is another, much more difficult, matter to do something worthwhile about them. While many environmental problems may now be sufficiently clear, and stark, how to react to them, what to do, what practice and theory to pursue are seldom so clear. [Nor is there any very grave difficulty about some of what needs to be done in order to avert or reduce some of the worst problems, and some of the major disasters in store. What is lacking is sufficient motivation, or opportunity among main power brokers (political will, .<............... ..... ................................................ .................... .................................................................... ——— ----------------------- - — political blockages,<etc)] Th& text aims to develop the assemble requisite theory and indicate resultant practices Ensuing political theory^ which will lead to relevant change. But) There is much theoretical work to be accomplished, both critical and constructive. Critical work criticizing present and prevailing assumptions and practices, and the acclaimed justification and alleged reasonableness of these practices. Constructive activity outlining ernative idea-< idea-e^clicism, alternative practices and way of reaching alternative structures, alternative ' . The present exercise aims to be a part of that endeavors. It is a them from where we—— are. .. ______________ —— -------------- A/ philosophical, theoretical book^ It concentrates on the theory, especially the theory, of / .. ...................................................................................................... I..... ....... . ^4—environmentalisin.\ While it offers a purework for environmental action, it says little directly Ar no c . on such action. Those are one practical details zmd recipes for saving a forest froim . _ eismAiSSUfi / hen? destructive logging interests, for example, ways to proceed abouTihal are forever become increasingly appreciated. What is still lacking is the wider p^lifactory structure which explains and justifies opposition and resistance. The run of environmental ethics text do little of what is required. They contain insufficient criticism, little analysis of depth, no vision or elaboration of alternatives. They are so sweetly, eminently reasonable^ fiddling while environmental Rome bums. Too many seek "blame" and all that sort of crap. Or, where they would shake " with ........ - development r r near ihA present predatory arrangements, it is only in one respect, and that not getting to bottom of the troubles, reat^ meat eating. For, while some problems work be ^t-&ough^(^ ----- other generals thereby), it is evident that the rape of most of the Earth could construe vegetarian way. ace in a , . Environmental ethics texts have no anger, no outrage at what is Being being done to the Earth. Put crudely, they lack guts. Indeed some suggest that things are proceeding rather well, as it not so well, as well as could be expected. (If the latter it coop very little for managing humans competent as managers/organisers). Al! is vary/ivr from well. There is cause not merely for concern, but for deep anger. (Such anger may be un-American.) The dominant way, re^our^ism, if not successfully opposed, will ultimately destroy the ecosphere and then humans among other species Intellectuals, philosophers especially, lately economists even more,2 deal to answer for, socially and environmentally. They encouraged permit of present damaging practices; they proceeded to provide the intellectual and attitudinal underpinnings that helped motivate and continue^ to justify the practices. Nor, with the evidence of environmental crisis so manifest, have things changed much. Most intellectuals continue as if nothing had happened apart from the beneficial advancement of science and technology. Most economists continue to produce or partificate upon various growth (or maximal equilibrium) pmf^tonals. Most philosophers - most are AngloAmerican in background - continue in their hopeless efforts to prop up or impede upon what is fundamentally anfhdi d awedy^basicaiiyv Humean empiricism (thus recently in the on-going display of Humean fashions, evolutionary epistemology, belief as reduced to desire, causal reductions, etc). Most have said, or done, very little about the^..^./ environmental situations; those who have, like Naess, are often ridiculed by the comfortable professionals. 4 This book tries to retell, in a more organised and coherent way what deep-green theory, an environmental theory that has emerged in a sporadic and scattered way over the last couple of decades, is all about. But not everything is told; only the predominantly ethical pa^ts. Later parts of this series on deep-green theory will cover political and economics theory and social theory more generally. Untila century ago philosophy and economics were not separate disciplines. The significant economists were almost invariably philosophers (neeerds may be the one main^,...). X\^7c-vr/ ?^7<!k^< /7,^ -7^ . r^/ 7^r^7 c)/-^^ //^A^-. ; / C/ A A' Deep-green theory aims eventually to supply a comprehensive alternative environmental philosophy. While it stands on its own, it is alternative because it stands in radical ideological opposition to dominant ways, nowadays predominantly industrial. It offers a philosophy both in the contemporary narrower sense, and in the older sense of an intellectually informed and critical way of life. That philosophy is centred on an ethical theory (upon which this issue concentrates), which is in form centred upon a value theory. But the ethic' issues, in a fashion broadly associated since Aristotle, in a politics and political economy. But the output of the value theory in fact reaches much further, into practical decision making in a range of environmentally impacting areas such as fishing, forestry and agriculture. The value theory is also intertwined with philosophical issues which are often considered more fundamental, those of astophyism and epistemology. Indeed there is no part of philosophy that remains untouched. Therein lies part of the claim to comprehensiveness. The particular form of deep-green theory elaborated is by no means independent of (acclaimed) advances recently made elsewhere in philosophy (those in object-theory and relevant and paraconsistent logics especially). But though the theory given is influenced and „--------- -—-sometimes in fact shaped through these developments, deep-green theory moBe^gen^ahy can A avoid them„ (The type of theory given could easily enough be recast m a more classical Platonistic form - undoubtedly a much less plausible form^ Nor will these background advances intrude, it is hoped, in the given elaboration of deep-green theory; the background will remain, fairly directly in the background, and not come to dominate proceedings or proceedings depend upon special new controversial features of it. Where more technical agreements are required, they will be relegated to appendices. LA^to d^ep theory-— Deep-green theory is the environmental branch of a much larger affair, deep theory. There is a point, in fact a real expository need, to place deep-green theory in the larger setting of deep theory. For deep theory influences several of the choices made in deciding upon the way deep-green theory goes, the shape it takes. Although the influence will become evident, particularly with the intertwining of truth and value t&at it is worth giving an example. Too much of the Anglo-American discussion of intrinsic value and of obligations to future generations is taken up with - hung up upon - ontological questions, about universal items in the first case, and as how there can be obligations regarding future items which do not (yet) e exist in "suitable" determinate form in the second. Deep object-theory slices straight through these issues, removing the problem-generating ontological assumptions. is a grander theory lying in the background, which significantly influences the philosophical approach taken in deep-green theory, as well as being influenced by it. There is no reason why that grand backdrop should remain hidden; there is no hidden agenda. The background theory, of which deep-green theory is a part, is called simply For it represents the confluence of several deep positions with deep-green theory: deep pluralism, depth relevant theory, deep item-theory, and so on. As a theoretical endeavor, deep theory aims to pull together, into a unified coherent theory these various deep positions. It thus draws together and integrates as well, several other interrelated efforts (on dialethism, process theory, anakyrie, etc.) With deep theory I aim to supply eventually a fairly comprehensive philosophical package. I used to imagine that with moderate comprehensiveness as regards present philosophical problems would come a certain completeness; but I've come to thinkjhat a total philosophy is an illusion, like at it Deep theory is no doubt a presumptuous title (there are worse about, e.g. Total philosophy", 'ecosophy'^, ^o( it is altogether satisfactory, given the problems and obscurities, .to be encountered, lacking in the notion of depth. My main excuse is that I did not exactly good to refuse. It emerged from a terminological confluence of several e&eas in which I'd thought, or environmental philosophy^with a revised deep ecology), deep relevant theory, deep pluralism (which deepened radical pluralism), and deep item-theory (which deepens object-theory). To give a picture of deep theory, it suffices for present purposes to indicate some main features of deep positions, some of their integrating interrelations, and some of their revolutionary potential. Deep theory overturns or subverts very much of what has been assumed or presupposed in Western philosophy, and particularly in Enlightenmented contemporary philosophy. For example, it overturns the following widespread assumptions:* the Ontological Assumption, that truth, and also/ meaning, are functions of reference, and thereby presuppose existence. On the contrary according to (deep) item theory, we can perfectlv well talk and think trulv aboutS items that do not exist, and' also about items that are impossible. ^Therewith repudiated also then is an occasionally favoured full-back from enttcalism, namely possibilism, which assumes * the Possibilist Reduction, of everything that counts in discourse to possible individuals# there are no other genuine subjects, all else can be analysed (or thrown) away. Bound up with possibilism are * the assumptions of modalism, of the correctness of classical logic, and of the absolute Under more throughgoing transconsistency (or paraconsistency) these connected assumptions are one and all repudiated. The transconsistent connection assumes an important role in the straightforward treatment of moral and other dilemmas, in showing for example how an agent may coherently operate requirement of consistency. under inconsistent obligations or with incompatible needs. Important special cases of modalism are such theories as that * entailment is strict implication (or its metalinguistic analogical) and that conditionality amounts to a modal function of material implication^. The rejection of such themes and their jeourses is part of what motivates deep relevant logic. While the parts of deep theory are integrated and are intended to be materially reinforcing, nothing prevents their fairly independent elaborations. The holism conceded does not exclude separation or analysis. In particular, deep-green theory is amenable to ependent development and analysis. //yyy- 1 Material implication is the implication defined in terms of truth-functions thus: A materially implies B iff not last A and not B, or equivalently, iff either not A or B. Strict implication is the necessitation of material obligatory i.e. A strictly implies B iff necessarily A materially implies B, or equivalently, iff it is not possible that not A and not B. ,. A, / re/  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 17, Item 993: Revision of Green anarkism, notes, possibilities Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten and typescript drafts, with handwritten emendations, and handwritten notes. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 17, Item 993 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [14] leaves. 28.28 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a82519e">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a82519e</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lake George - Floor - Pile 7 Box 17: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Floor > Pile 7 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/cee3998747324ca8cfafd9916c99b05c.pdf 694d7c85ceace8f227cc36d1f9729f33 PDF Text Text �J ��SHORT CONTENTS OF TOWARDS GREEN ANARKISM: EUCRATIC POLITICAL INVESTIGATION? ? 0. PROLOGUE 1. EXPLICATIONS 2. ELABORATIONS 3. ARGUMENTS I 4. ARGUMENTS II 5. VARIETIES AND OPTIONS TAKEN 6. ECONOMIC ELEMENTS: PROPERTY, CAPITAL, MARKETS, TAX 7. POLITICAL ELEMENTS: ORGANISATION, DEMOCRACY, BUREAUCRACY 8. SOCIAL THEORY ELEMENTS: NATURE, CULTURE 8A LEGAL ELEMENTS 9. ECOREGIONAL STRUCTURES, EUTOPIAN MODELLING 10. ROUTES, TRANSITION 11. FURTHER CRITICISMS FOILED 12. PROBLEM RESOLUTION 13. EPILOGUE. BIBLIOGRAPHY (INCLUDING RESOURCES) by a minor marginaZi-s^J p/iiZo-yop/^r writing in 7. ? Richard Sylvan, Za^ At^nri^f/i c^nfary. ��PROLOGUE WHY GREEN ANARKISM? Green anarchism is not merely an intellectually attractive intersection of anarchism with genuine environmentalism; it is also a rational imperative. Modem states are not merely without justification; they are a major force driving and facilitating degradation and destruction of global environments, to points of no return for many natural species and environments, and even seriously threatening future human viability. Anarchism would, with full justification, remove these major problem sources. Green anarchism derives from anarchism coloured by a deeper environmentalism. Anarchism itself is said to be essentially a modem ideology, arising after, and in opposition to, the modem state. Though there may be significant anticipations of anarchism in earlier philosophy, and though there are many worthwhile examples of early anarchistic societies, the main intellectual work begins only in the late eighteenth century (with the eruption of the French Revolution). Since then there have been waves of anarchistic output of varying strength, the most recent initiated in Paris again in 1968^(immediately following a series of academic texts pronouncing that anarchism was dead)L In important respects this received picture, ever so lightly sketched, is misleading. Anarchist ideas were already advanced in those similar ancient ideologies, Taoism and Stoicism,** in opposition to ancient empires. Lao Tzu, shadowy founder of Taoism, was not merely a trenchant critic of the Empire, but advocated a society in which the ruler, the Prince, disappeared into a do-nothing exemplary and merely legendary figure. What Taoism asserted is virtually tantamount to Thoreau's small but crucial anarchist amendment to Jefferson, that the best government is the one that does not govern at all. In a similar vein, "Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, advocated a society without government. Laws should be abolished[!], since virtue and morality would only be achieved in liberty'.2 That common ancient tradition, spanning East and West, though often submerged, has never been lost. The Taoist tradition persisted (if often in degenerate form) in China, and heavily influenced west Asian adaptations of Buddhism. Stoicism survived, as (often degenerate) internal critic, for the duration of the western Roman Empire, and was directly incorporated into early Christianity. Although anti­ authoritarian features were subsequently suppressed in the Stoic-Christian tradition, elements survived even in the increasingly authoritarian climate of that religion, and the positive ideas have resurfaced again and again in religious freer-thinkers. 1 For details see Marshall pxi. Amusingly anarchism in Australia has more recently also been * Taoism and Stoicism can almost be seen as variants upon one another, back to the very names. It is tempting to conjecture that they may have both arisen from a proto-Toi-ism. Lehner, H of I, p.71. On Taoism as anarchist, see Clark, ch7, Marchall, ch4, and UT. 2 �2 The term * anarchism' was however introduced into English in a highly perjorative sense, signifying disorder, chaos, lawlessness and the likeA It is regularly displayed in this negative connotation, in politically unstable times in England, long before much theoretical work on anarchism began (nonetheless there were tracts, like that of Winstanley). As a result, the term 'anarchy' got away to a very bad start in English. It was used, from the early 16th century onwards, to mean confusion, disorder, lawlessness, licence, and absence or nonrecognition of authority. Similarly for most of its cognates 'anarch', 'anarchal', 'anarchial', 'anarchic', 'anarchical', 'anarchially', 'anarchism', 'anarchist' and 'anarchize', (see OED entries). 'Anarchism' itself had also acquired its re/evanf modem sense of 'the principles and practice of anarchy or anarchists', namely 'the Doctrine Position or Art of those that teach anarchy; also the being itself of people without a Prince or Ruler' by 1656 (in Blount GZo^^gr). As a political theory anarchism is standardly said, however, to have emerged much later (and there are stock, 'inconsistent' presentations: a state without a state, government without government, theory without doctrine, order without order, etc.) It is the interaction between popular longer-standing usage and later serious ideological use that helps account for the astonishing folkloric history of the term aKarc/n-yTK. It also reflects one facet of the pervading amateurism of anarchism, its lack of industrious research. Consider what certain encyclopaedias say, beginning with one that is not so much wrong as sloppy. Historically the word "anarchist", which derives from the Greek an arc/io-y, meaning "no government", appears first to have been used pejoratively to indicate one who denies all law and wishes to promote chaos. It was used in this sense against the Levelers during the English Civil War and during the French Revolution by most parties in criticizing those who stood to the left of them along the political spectrum. The first use of the world as an approbatory description of a positive philosophy appears to have been by Pierre Joseph Proudhon when, in his (W%<3/ Af property?, Paris, 1840), he described himself as an anarchist because he believed that political organization based on authority should be replaced by social and economic organisation based on voluntary contractual agreement (Woodcock p. 111). According to a rival encyclopaedia, however, The word "anarchy" describing a stateless society was used[?J for the first time by Louis Armand de Labortan in his voyage Z' (1703), describing the Indians living in a society without state, laws, prisons, priests, private property, in short "in anarchy" (Lehning p.71). A glance at the OED, such as we took above, along with a comparison of the stories, reveals the falsity of many of these interesting contentions. Much historical detail remains to be sorted out satisfactorily. Though there are many histories of anarchism, until very recently a 3 The pejorative sense was not contrived or imposed following some significant political incident, such as the pivotal Chicago events of 1886, which is what Jp^ies 86 implies. No doubt, however, following the Chicago events, stigmatisation and denigration of anarchism, and its automatically assumed association with violence and disorder, were deliberately orchestrated and propagated in USA. Such an outcome contributed further to development of an already established anti-anarchist mythology. �3 reasonably satisfactory one had yet to be written. Fortunately that has now changed (during the drafting of this text). Conveniently we are now absolved from lamenting the absence of such work and likewise from attempting more historical detail.^ For Marshall's massive text, has now appeared, it can be deferred to (by no means always uncritically) on many historical issues and for mad detail, to which it affords fine access. The concentrate on systematic and theoretical matters. Most of the seminal and interesting work on anarchism has come from outside present text can now universities and standard intellectual circles, and often from political amateurs. Academics have contributed histories, surveys and (usually not so sympathetic) criticisms, but, with a very few exceptions, little original thought. $ For typically they are ideologically stuck with the state, be it a pathetically minimal one. Intellectuals are so inured to the state that they are inclined to such pronouncements as that the idea of abolishing the state entirely must strike us as utopian .6 Yes, as eutopian. 'Most political philosophers in the past few generations have been unable to escape what the psychoanalysts might call a "state fixation". Even those those temper and reason caused them to distrust a nationalist philosophy could not deal with the state except as a rigid entity. They wished it large or small, isolated or cosmopolitan, but in any case a rounded unit which had to be taken as it was and maintained as such in any reconstruction of... society'7 It is easy to speculate on reasons for this, connected with academics being part of the expensive state scene. While anarchism has vanished from the mainstream academic scene, it is again becoming visible, if hardly prominent, in alternative (especially green) scenes and in work of disaffected academics associated with them. A surprising amount of the adventurous anarchist literature now appears, like the earlier utopian literature, in fiction, especially science fiction (and so, under prevailing division of labour, tends to become a subject for literary criticism, not political philosophy). But the ideas and plans appear there in quite insufficient detail. There, moreover, it can easily be dismissed as fantasy, as unrealistic, not a serious and proper contribution to political dialectic. The entire range of political discussion concerns whether there should be marginally more government intervention, or marginally less; marginally more public expenditure on welfare services is marginally less. Nobody [much] challenges the whole system, still less the existence of the state itself. The state's own socialisation processes see to that (Luard p.52). While virtually all political discussion undoubtedly traffics in such marginalia, powerful and warranted challenges there certainly have been: It is plain that on general principles of law and reason ... the Constitution is no contract; that it binds nobody, and never did bind anybody; and that all those who pretend to act by its authority, are really acting without any legitimate authority at all: that, on general principles of law and reason, 4 5 6 7 In contrast thus to James 186 who reiterates the familiar lament. Even the very occasional (here deliberately unspecified) exceptions are exceedingly cautious. Miller p.182. Mitrany p.98. �4 they are mere usurpers, and that everyone ... has the right... to treat them as such.s Given the United States is not contractually legitimated, what other state is? None appears to have superior credentials! None is rationally legitimated, so it will be argued in detail. The State in general and in abstract is not justified. So, whether it can be exploited for environmental and social purposes or not, its use is not justified. Environmentalism is still more modem than anarchism. Though it has ancient roots, and though the movement grew substantially in the 19th century, fusing there with an earlier romantic movement, environmentalism is an archetypically 20th century ideology. The more widely diffused green movement is essentially a contemporary phenomena, no doubt the most distinctive new political force of the late 20th century (the feminism movement is older). Green anarchism draws together elements from environmentalism and anarchism. While it can be seen as continuous with environmentally sensitive later 19th century social anarchism (of Morris, Kroprotkin, and others), environmental problems now appear in a new light and take on a new urgency. For we are now confronted by what is not inaccurately referred to as the envzronmenfa/ crAyZy, combining the cumulative efforts of rapid human population growth, rapid concomitant growth of vast industrial and human pollution threatening and undermining biological life support systems, rapid depletion of habitats species and nonrenewable resources, and very extensive and worsening environmental deterioration. In the present parlous environmental predicament those concerned to take some requisite action, active environmentalists, have two opposently diametrically opposed courses open;9 * Supporting, and working through, strengthened states to try to avert the crisis. Central to 'most environmental justifications of [expanded] state power", according to social individualists, is the argument that people will not voluntarily r&yfram themselves from doing those things of which the environmental crisis is the aggregate effect. They will not voluntarily refrain from hunting whales and other species threatened with extinction, from having "too many children"", from discharging untreated wastes into rivers and lakes, and so on (Taylor pp 1-2, quoted in Grofman p.108). As in collective action theory (advanced typically by individualists), it is concluded (invalidly as will be seen) that state power is required to compel restraint and to undertake compulsory rectification. * Working outside states in more direct efforts to avert elements of the crisis. The alternative, that is, is to abandon the state. Here lies the main chance, and the only genuine long term alternative for a deep, as opposed to merely reformist, environmentalism. For under state regimes, more and more of remaining environments are degraded or destroyed, in the march of 8 9 Spooner (M? Treason) pp 27-8. The omitted phrase asserts that everyone has not only the right but is wtoraZZy to treat them thus. But here Spooner goes further than data seems to warrant, converting supererogation to obligation. (The phrase following the quotation echoes Miller p.38). These choices are differently presented and explained in SM, a main intellectual ancestor of the present work. The approaches complement one another. �5 state growth and economic progress. In fact, there are several reasons for the extra-state anti­ state course. There are serious limits to what states can accomplish, especially in international issues in the interstrices of states, but also as regards individual environmentally-hostile action. Moreover, even when it appears that states can a^t, or contribute, there are sharp limits to what they are prepared to do or attempt. States of course explain their tardiness or reluctance to move in various ways: prior higher commitments (e.g. endless economic ones such as creating jobs, containing inflation, etc.), the need for balance (with a constituency after unparaxeded of any environmental crisis, or wanting, like comments operating with anarchist discount rates, to party now), etc. Concerned environmentalists should take both courses: use the state and exploit state power where opportunities offer (without thereby endorsing the state and its standard practices), but also, more important, they should work outside states and against states. For mam co/ifn&Mfmg coarse o/The anJ ov^ra/Z o/?^rafmg fa worsen if. Given this (no doubt jaundiced) sfa^-mfrz'car^ thesis, surely it is hypocritical also to work through them and use them. Not at all; for states acquire and hold, have expropriated to themselves, considerable social wealth, which arguably should be directed to social concerns, including environmental amelioration. However, while states may properly be used so long as they persist, still ultimately halting the new ubiquitous environmental rot, salvaging or conserving some of what remain of viable environments, will involve, if it can be done, dissolution of states. There are powerful environmental reasons for trying to terminate / the present era of states. States are ineluctably committed to economic growth, of almost any sort; indeed they are main proponents of such growth. This commitment, certainly highly conspicuous, is not merely accidental, and is bound to impact negatively on environments. Australia, for example, needs a growth rate (in GDP) of at least 3% just to provide employment for its school-leavers, more to cater for immigrants, more to allow for some politically acceptable redistribution, more to meet rising aspirations. More, more, more .... States cannot step off the growth treadmill. That growth in turn requires, to deliver essential exports, expanded raids on resources and biological capital (if not that held by the state, that of other states). These exercises in tum inevitably mean, given present technologies and cost structures, pollution in many dismaying forms and environmental degradation.^ So growth implies environmental degradation. Therefore, with contemporary states degradation is inevitable. Such states are inevitably environmental vandals, n 10 11 A prominent recent attempt to block this sort of argument features economic growth subject to con train ts of environmental sustainability. While such constrained economic growth is a feasible (and old) idea, contemporary states, given their commitments, cannot and cannot afford to deliver it. A recent example concerns Australian production of greenhouse gases, where Australia cannot, officials now say, meet the costs involved in attaining expected reduction targets. Sustainable development itself is critically examined in r The kind of practical necessity operating here will concern us in later chapters. Logically there could be benign "states"; but these would be far removed from contemporary state arrangements. ( �6 There is exceedingly little evidence that social and environmental prospects will ever improve under the contemporary regime of states; instead much evidence to contrary has accumulated. "... Reliance on the state or a global superstate for change will lead to a continuation of many of the patterns of domination that the state has done so much to develop and reinforce in the past" the anarchist strategy of change "from below" ... [and "from above" is] much more promising'. Indeed the claim is made that The anarchist vision ... of a fusion between a universal confederation and organic societal forms of a communal character lies at the very centre of the on/y hopeful prospect for the future world order'. 12 Some of the pressures to continued exponential growth, and their environmental and social consequences, themselves positively feeding back to fuel demands for more growth, are colourfully observed in the following passage: One of the most widely pursued common goals of recent times has been economic growth, which is generally regarded as the most important ambition of states. These pressures to high rate of growth not only endanger the world's resources but do not even procure the material satisfactions they are intended to provide. For the effect of competition is that high rates of growth can be achieved only by high rates of investment designed to secure higher productivity. This secures equivalent production with more equipment but less labour. Thus more and more people are displaced from their jobs who cannot necessarily find alternative employment in service industries or elsewhere. All over the Western world, in shipbuilding, in steel, in motor manufacture, in textiles, in fishing, in agriculture and other industries, employment rapidly declines. So the total number of those unemployed increases in all industrial countries and remains high even in those where a relatively high rate of growth is being achieved. And the very fact of high unemployment, by reducing total demand, lowers the level of investment and growth for the future. Periods of growth become shorter and those of recession become longer. The relatively simple devices for stimulating growth in earlier times - lower interest rates, budgetary deficits, fiscal expansion and public works — are either not attempted through fear of inflation, or if attempted do not achieve their effect. Despite persistent recession inflation remains strong, partly because of excessive increases in income obtained by those still at work, partly because of the large sections of the economy which are in public hands and are unaffected by antiinflationary measures. Modern industrial societies, therefore, in appearance so advanced, are yet characterised by the bizarre spectacle of large sections of the population being without work, while ever higher levels of investment are undertaken to reduce employment still further in the future, so ensuring that the benefits of high growth are enjoyed by fewer and fewer people (Laurd p.147). A main dynamic involved can be summarised: Both the State and those major corporations which set much of its agenda aim to increase productivity (for reasons of profit, profile, firm or party growth and survival, etc.). But productivity increase characteristically sheds labour. Restoration of employment requires growth. Hence one heavy pressure to growth: sustaining employment. That pressure is, furthermore, one of many. Another derives from internal dynamics of corporations and bureaucracies. Like the state and capitalism, they all must, as Marx argued, 12 Clark, also quoting Falk from 'Anarchism of world order* in FVo/noj, p.160). �7 grow or die. There are many reasons for the growth imperative, both broad ideological and business specific.^ For satisfactory survival, satisfaction of its executives and employees, its stock holders, and so on, a modem corporation has to grow. Cpntr^l here are such matters as laws of profit decline otherwise, and more general principles of organisational aging and decline. If any serious ecological conclusion is to be drawn from Vol I, it is from Marx's compelling demonstration that the very law of life of capitalist competition, of the fully developed market economy, is based on the maxim, "grow or die". Translated into ecological terms, this clearly means that a fully developed market economy must unrelentingly exploit nature to a point ... that is literally regressive geologically and biologically. Capitalism, in effect, is not only polluting the world on a historically unprecedented scale; it is simplifying all the ecosystems of the planet, turning soil into sand, the oceans into lifeless sewers, indeed, threatening the very integrity of our sources of atmospheric oxygen. If one were to follow the logic of this tendency to its very end, capitalist— and hierarchical— society are utterly incompatible with a viable biosphere. What limits the ecological validity of Marx's view is obviously not his revelation of capitalism's "law of life" but rather the "progressive" role he imparts to capitalism's "success" in supposedly achieving the technical domination of nature. This Janus-faced aspect of Marx's writings is what throw them into conflict with an authentic ecological sensibility. Gorz, by contrast, sides-steps exacfZy what we must learn in the contradictory position of Marx, namely, that the very technical achievements of capitalism, fat^ from a-y-MmzZafing "ecological necessities as technical restraints", are governed by a "law of life" that technologically lacks any TES p.293) form of "restraint' Prevailing political arrangements 'no longer offer us a hopeful prospect of resolving the vast social and ecological crises which now confront humanity ... these systems, with their deep commitment to such values as industrialism, high technology, centralism, urbanization and the state, have been instrumental in creating the social atomization and ecological imbalance which are at the core of these crises' (Clark pp. 141-2). Indeed these systems are bound to exacerbate the problems. While these statements should by now be motherhood statements, they are not. Hope springs eternal: more naive environmentalists regularly appeal to a state that sometimes makes appropriate responsive noises and puts out appealing propaganda, but meanwhile is thoroughly committed to economic growth of environmentally damaging forms. The normal dynamic of th^ "advanced" state is extremely environmentally hazardous. Centralised states support environmentally and socially damaging methods of production, in order to benefit from the surplus and exploitable technology thereby produced - which are important for purposes of state, in particular for spending to remain in power (job generation, pork barrelling, subsidization of large business), for positional enrichment of the bureaucracy, and for development of the forces of coercion, propaganda and authority which matter both for internal social objectives and in order to remain militarily competitive in the region and spheres of influence. Details of the dynamic at work have become familiar from socio-environmental studies of state operation. For example, technologies that facilitate centralized authoritarian 13 The broad and ancient ideological reasons are investigated elsewhere, e.g. MSS. �8 control are favoured (such as nuclear power, which also supplies material for nuclear weapons). Such technologies serve the interests of state actors and those who benefit particularly therefrom, namely economically dominant social strata. This dynamic, which does not require any arms race, only kinds of inter-state competition, encourages ever-increasing productivity, entailing high consumption of resources, high output of pollution, substantial environmental degeneration and destru( tion, and so on. Active aware environmentalists have, in the end, little choice but to attempt to ;abotage this dynamic. 14 Opposition to anarchism from gi een directions, and especially from green infiltrators, often derives from the assumption that under anarchism all environmental regulation would lapse, that it would be an open-go, fret -for-all for anti-environmental forces—the very ones that are already running rampant over the Earth, and perhaps others besides. It needs to be stressed that this opposition rests on a misconception of what green anarchism ^is all about. With a caring anarchism there may be a complete of the usually conceived situations of states and stateless societies, as regards environment regulation and social support. It should not have escaped notice that often states are the prime enemies of environmental regulation, improved environment practices, and the like. Even when there is very extensive community support for regulation, the state acts to block it, and aids and abets damaging practices! A central reason for this is that the state typically reflects a rather narrow range of vested interests, increasingJhese days those of dominant business, not community interests except very secondarily. Contrary then to received conceptions, the state is frequently not a means to, but an obstacle to, satisfactory regulation. Satisfactory green regulation can occur, can only occur, without the modern state. It will be argued that not only are there no intellectual or theoretical problems in dispensing with the state, but fuller there are no serious losses in disposing of it. There is no case for the state, and no need for it. But it is worse than that: it is predominantly bad in its impacts. Accordingly, it ought not to be in place. The practical upshot is that that we should endeavour to remove it. Among the incidental practical difficulties arising as a result, are that for complex societies there is a need for some structure to replace the state (not a intractable theoretical problem any longer). As well there is a need for a strategy to displace the state. That is where radical environmentalism enters again. A thoroughgoing environmentalism accordingly forces a significant type of anarchism, a social non-capitalist anarchism. The basic reason it forces anarchism is that the state, a prime anarchist enemy, not only fails to supply or retain environmental goods, but is frequently actively involved in their degradation or removal. The state is a major facilitator and powerful source of environmental degradation and destruction. Genuine greenness further substantially constrains the directions anarchism can take, the variety of admissible anarchisms. It serves to eliminate as a serious option total reliance on 14 This argument is adapted from A. Carter, Towards a green political theory*. While Carter's way out is not endorsed, his elaboration of the dynamic is, more or less. LL �market methods, as proposed for instance under anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. While excessive reHance upon capitalist markets is rejected, primarily because of heavy externalities, more traditional markets are given a rather free role. The problems with market-capitalism is not so much markets, except as distorted in a capitalist setting, but capitalism.^ Capitalism, both in theory and as normally practised, is a major enemy of environmentalism, and a main source of environmental problems. Capitalism also encourages, what conspicuous capitalists conspicuously exhibit, environmentally unacceptable lifestyles. Greenness also sharply constrains meta-politics. For example, it counts heavily against standard game-theoretic approaches of analytic political philosophy, because these entirely discount environmental effects (except as reflected through human actors' self interests). This work concentrates upon the anarchist components of green anarchism (the green part is attempted in a companion text on green ideology). It is primarily a theoretical work; it concentrates upon what is sometimes usefully called "theoretical anarchism". Because the work does focus on anarchism, little will be said about present green politics (and what thin associated theory there is), because that generally involves politics within conventional state settings. Where this differs from past anarchism is not only its environmental depth, but in the level of detail of arguments, criticism, and organisational structure. The latter especially,jwhere IT- 1 a; thin and threadbare historical anarchism is particularly weak. It is not enough to gesture towards some federation of communities. Details of organisations at each level need to be provided, for a more convincing story. Most of the disappointingly slight contemporary academic literature on anarchism will not be addressed or, if it is, criticised in much detail. Life is too short for that sort of indulgence. However much will have been criticised obliquely or in passing; and enough critical detail is supplied for direct critiques to be produced (as exercises by energetic readers). While there is mMc/z scope for theoretical improvement of anarchism, there is little room for reinventing anarchism. There is a long and distinguished Hne of amateur anarchist thought form virtually every significant idea that will be which contains in seminal (if developed herein. Thus, like most of the academic literature^this text is not particularly original. Unlike much of that literature it does not pretend to be. Virtually everything in this book has been said before, if not in anarchist theory then elsewhere; scarcely anything is original. But it has never been put together quite like this before. Moreover, some of it needed and needs saying again, with a little new information and arguments a bit differently ordered. But no means all is repeated. Where something, perhaps important for the dialectic, is said at least as well I can reiterate it, I simply cross-refer. That has the effect of making the work visibly less contained (self-containment is ^bmething of an illusion), but it saves on labour and materials. For other purposes too, repetition, despite its extravagance, may be important. Significant 15 On the deliberately neglected, or papered over, major differences between marketism and capitalism, �10 ideas and books often get neglected, because for instance they were not published at the right times, in the right places, by the right authors; they did not get duly circulated, and so forth. I judge the time at least is more propitious for green anarchism than it has been, perhaps ever before. As well, there are many things that this book, which is pitched in a theoretical, rationalistic way, does not aim or attempt to do. It does not attempt to supply much background, historical or other information, a lot of which is easily found in better equipped libraries. Relevant background can all be tracked, however, through references in work referred to in this book. 16 It does not attempt a full account of substitutes for important current institutions and arrangements such as those connected with property, markets, law, and so on; nor does it offer, what is warranted, a sustained critique of prevailing arrangements, for which opposite substitutes are sought and indicated. Fortunately again, some of the critique, if not positive detail of substitutes, has been well accomplished in other texts. 17 What is attempted is however a scholarly and systematic work (though, as indicated, a far from exhaustive work), on theoretical anarchism. Accordingly the book is littered with notes, some of which merely cite references, but many of which elaborate points in the text, especially details hat lead off in different directions from the thrust of the text. I should like to thank Frances Redrup for processing reams of inelegant scribble, from which this text grew, and to acknowledge the continuing support the Australian National University gave during slow production. I want to thank Debbie Trew for proofing the typescript (no straightforward business) and organizing a bibliography. I should record my gratitude to Bob Goodin for a continuing supply of background books, and to him and to the publishers and editor of Anarc/iAyf 16 17 for encouraging me to work upon anarkism again. A major recent source, for history of Northern Hemispheric anarchism, is, as observed, Marshall, While Marshall concentrates, no doubt correctly upon Northern hemispheric activity, and within that heavily upon Anglo-American work, there is room for a supplementary production taking due account of anarchism elsewhere, Australia for one example. Although an anarchist club was formed in Melbourne only a century ago (and then upon an American model), an extraordinarily sustained period of "original anarchism" (coupled often with "original (or primitive) affluence") flourished in Australia before European settlement two centuries ago, with more than 500 centuries perhaps more than 10000 centuries, of continuous Aboriginal anarchist arrangements. Much of the story of post-settlement Australian anarchism (which included remarkable Queensland activity and a Paraguayan expedition organised by Lane, as well as extensive Victorian agitation) is recounted by James, in a series of local publication, add Burgmann and by Souter. The story of Australian Aboriginal anarchism has yet to be told. The story for the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, both before and after European conquests and political imposition, remains to be satisfactorily told. Thus, for instance, Carter on property, Bumheim on bureaurcracy, othe^on democracy. A �// 1. EXPLICATIONS OF ANARCHISM CHAPTER and of green subforms G 1. Initial explanation: fud and dilute forms, and corollaries. Anarchism is the theory, principles or practice of anarchy. As practised by engaged anarchists, who are naturally adherents, authors or promotors of anarchy, it includes the assertion of anarchy and rejection of nonanarchy, i.e. rejection of archy. Anarchy itself, in its norma/ political form, applies to societies or communities, territories or countries. It is, according to the dictionaries, the following sort of condition or state: lack of coercive government, absence of a political state, want of authoritarian political heads or leaders, institutions or organisations. Politically there are evidently fhr^ j^racrara/ aa^ar/(y, ca^rciaa, and normally comprehending both, the political .yraf^.i The anchoring notion of anarchy has recently been extended beyond political arrangements to apply to other institutional forms such as the Church, Science, and Law, to mean alternative forms lacking authoritarian structure and coercive methods. Thus appear, under transference, such varieties as epistemological anarchism and philosophical anarchism, instead of po/zfzcn/ anarchism upon which this text focuses. However the far-reaching analogies should not lost sight of; they matter. Anarchism is to political authority, as atheism is to religious authority, and rather as scepticism is to scientific authority. Although the conditions specified for anarchy are normally taken as conjoined, it is possible to construe them disjointly, yielding what could be called anarchisms. One diluted form which has obtained a little exposure is a /zzzzz^J anarchism appropriately opposed to the state but prepared to endorse carefully-controlled coercive authorities.^ A differently diluted form is a anarchism which is opposed to all prevailing states, because of some serious but in principle removable defect or other of each and every one of these states, but is not opposed to the very idea of an ideal state, or to a new wonderful order of states; that is it is, not, so to say, a principled anarchism. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether historic anarchists are j?rznczp/^r/ anarchists or merely de facto ones. There are limits to how far definitional dilution should be allowed to proceed: a theory (such as libertarianism) postulating a minimal coercive centralised state presumably exceeds acceptable diluted bounds, as n^key element is retained. Within such bounds, we shall operate both with full and dilute forms, accounting all anarchism (in a bro^d sense, qualifying as need be). Routes to full anarchism may well lead through dilute forms. Indeed these offer main paths towards anarchism proper. -t These three key elements are duly signposted in many, though not all, serious on anarchism. J- �12 It is evident that anarchy, and therewith anarchism, can be better characterised, negatively, through what it rejects, namely to sharpen the characterisation, centralised coercive forms, than in assertive formulation obtained through awkward locutions like 'absence' 'lack' 'want'. The simpler negative formulation (supplying the of anarchy), rejection of archy, makes it immediately evident that much of what vulgarly pass for meaning conditions upon or essential features of anarchism are not. Firstly, a variety of political arrangements and organisation, including of government, are entirely compatible with anarchy. It is enough for these arrangements not to include anarchy-violating features such as authoritarian or coercive elements. For example, a government without such elements, a government nonetheless in the dictionary sense of 'administration of public affairs', satisfies the principle of anarchy, and so is anarchistic. Such an anarchistic government can include normal components of organisation, regulation and control, so long as they conform to the principle. Certainly a territory without government, since therefore lacking an archist government, is anarchistic. But the popular converse fails. An anarchistic system may well, like several societies substantially destroyed by European conquest, have a small smooth-running public administration, free of authoritarian elements. Thus it would have a government, but not an authoritarian government. No doubt it would also be in a predominant modem, but narrow, use of 'government'. The term 'government', which is variably determinable, vacillates in particular between * administration of public affairs (including control, regulation, what it once meant) and its important and now dominant restriction, the enarchistically unacceptable determinate, * authoritative administration of public affairs (i.e. that exercising authority, and characteristically backed by coercion). Much confusion concerning anarchism has resulted through failure to separate the wider and narrower determinates^ It may well be true that, as dictionaries assert, an anarchist would 'oppose all existing systems of government'; but this is not a matter of meaning, it is contingent upon the character of prevailing state systems. Nor therefore are prevailing political forms everywhere so far removed from anarchistic alternatives: they may even overlap them. Make the following kind of thought-experiment concerning the government and operation of some modem freer, less violent, more peaceful society: the coercive and authoritarian elements are blacked out (both operational components and what they typically operate upon). For instance, there is a strike of relevant groups, judges �and accused, police and criminals, prison warders and prisoners, etc. (perhaps because the broad society had reduced the opportunities for crime and accordingly threatened their contra­ operative livelihoods). What may well happen, what we shall imagine happening, is that governmental affairs simply keep running for some time. Things work well enough. Partial examples of just this sort of phenomenon are not uncommon, as when police forces go slow or strike. For example, when traffic police stop work traffic keeps on going, much as before. It may be irrelevantly objected that such anarchistic periods are mere interludes, presupposing surrounding authoritarian structures (somewhat as anarchistic end-states of marxism are premissed on preceding super-productive authoritarian states). Such thought experiments were designed to remove a different intellectual blockage: the common assumption that anarchism is utterly remote from the political practice of complex modem states and impossible to realise at all. As a theory, anarchism tends to advance a stronger theme than the progressive particular claims that anarchistic systems are possible, realisable, and sometimes realised. After all, these arrangements may be realisable—as more than an interlude—only in restricted or anomalous circumstances (e.g. a few people on an isolated tropical island). The stronger theme, linked with the anarchist principle, is that there is no need at all for authoritarian or coercive regulation. So rejection can succeed universally. Universal anarchism encounters many problems which do not trouble less ambitious parfict/Zar anarchisms, such as those to be advanced here. For example, how to rectify especially degenerate or evil societies? An attempt is sometimes made to render all anarchism universal, through the connecting thesis that for anarchism to succeed anywhere it must succeed everywhere (else be destroyed by ruthless, expansionist or greedy states, or similar). Fortunately the fallacious connecting thesis, though popular with critics, is implausible.^ Although anarchism proper does exclude certain kinds of government, coercive and authoritarian forms, it does not automatically include, certainly not as a matter of semantics, specific positive kinds. Anarchism is not necessarily "a theory of government based on the free agreement of individuals rather than on submission to law and authority", despite what dictionaries assert (incompatibly incidentally with their definitions of 'anarchy'). Such positive accounts of anarchism, as offering a certain theory of government, both try to convert a particular variety, individualistic anarchism, into the more general object, and try to import a certain motivation for, or differently explanation of, or justification of, anarchism into the very essence of the object (this is the general fallacy of verificationism in operation). Anarchism, or at least its assertion, may well be regularly motivated by ideals of free arrangements, not imposed by narrow or incompetent authoritarian forces, but motivation is one thing, meaning �14 another, verification a third. Not only is the assumption that anarchism is incompatible with government, wellregulated government, mistaken. So also therefore are the assumptions that anarchism is incompatible with organisation, with regulation, with a positive noncoercive "law", with order. So mistaken therefore are the widespread assumptions that anarchism entails disorganisation, disorder, confusion, lawlessness, chaos. Yet all these negative associations have been incorporated into degenerate popular meanings of anarchism. It is similar with related assumptions that anarchism implies violence, paramilitary activity, or terrorism. A popular picture of the anarchist, encouraged by authors like Conrad and Dostoevsky, is the excitable fictional character with a bomb in his pocket (not a Tolstoy or a Thoreau).5 These too are assumptions and pictures, with little basis either in semantics or in general anarchist theory or practice, promulgated by an unsympathetic opposition generally comfortable in present poor to appalling political systems or unaware of alternatives. With anarchy, as with many other valuable terms, a concerted confusion or destruction effort has been made, part of an extensive terminological vandalism in human intellectual affairs. Rather than reconciling ourselves to sacrifice of the damaged term anorc/ug/n, let us salvage the term explicitly for the pristine notion, and isolate the conventional associations under the term anarchi-pm, shortened, if a single term is sought, to Most fictional anarchists of system-supportative authors are degenarchists; but they are far from representative of anarchists. There are many anarchists who are not terrorists, few who are; there are many who are not dangerous troublemakers bent upon violently upsetting local settled order; increasingly there are many anarchists within environmental and peace movements, many of them anarchists. Gentler anarchisms tend to be all of more pacific, more social and more rational than tougher or hardened anarchisms. 2. Rival, typically defective, definitions, and beyond. Much of what is taken as typical or even characteristic of anarchism, especially popularly and journalistically, consist of optional extras, not even typical of anarchism. They represent, like what gets written into degenarchism, attempts at easy smearing or dismissal of anarchism, for instance as an ideology unworthy of serious consideration. As regards violence, terrorism, disorder, disorganisation, confusion, these sorts of point ought to be well enough known. But they apply also to other more benign features widely taken to characterize anarchism, such as attempts to tie anarchism variously to individualism, capitalism, voluntarism, primitivism, spontaneity, or socialism. Thus such erroneous characterisations of anarchism as those of the selection that follows:- 5 �15 * One utterly appalling characterisation comes from a Russian DzcZzozzrzzy of PAz/o^op/zy. ^ "Azz^zrc/zz^zzz, a petty-bourgeois socio-political trend that is hostile to all authority and the state, and counterposes the interests of petty private ownership and small peasart economy to the progress of society based on large-scale production" * Another dismal, indeed wild, characterisation comes from an American political scientist, who audaciously asserts that "anarchism ... is anti-political—that is, it does not really offer political solutions" (p.l), rather "the primitive core of anarchism is not so very different from Christianity. That is, it rests on the notion that man has a need, not just a preference, to love" While this is wild, there are convergences and congruences between types of anarchism and early Christianity.? * It is "a political doctrine based on the value of individual freedom"? While this is not wild, it does erroneously convert what is a frequent powerful motive, and reason, for anarchism into part of it, confusing motivation and justification with essence. For it is by no means an invariant feature. A socialist or monastic community, placing no great emphasis upon or even discouraging individuality, can be organised anarchistically. * It is "a theory of government based on the free agreement of individuals rather than submission to law and authority" (Concz-y^ Eng/zj/z Dzcfzozzazy). But it also asserts that the same %7z#rc/zz.yAy "... are opposed to all forms of government". That inconsistent information should, as already seen, be discounted. Furthermore, there may be no free agreement; an anarchistic situation can, as already also seen, just happen. More likely, a sustained anarchism may emerge under favourable historical opportunities, again without any sort of contract or general agreement; it is then only zf there were free agreement. Certainly, there would no longer be "submission to authority", but there would likely be systems of rules, which people normally followed. * The very short characterisation of rzzzrzrc/zMzzz (and rendition of zzzMrc/zz?^) as "no government" is defective because of the elasticity, slippiness and determinability, of "government"? For example, to increase documentation, according to one dictionary ((/zzzv^r^zz/ Ezz^/z^/z), gove?7Z7?zenf means "... system of polity in a state; territory ruled by a governor ..." in which case it incompatible with anarchism; but it also means "... control; administration of public affairs" in which case it is certainly no? incompatible. Granted there have been attempts to represent anarchism as if it entailed no organisation or administration at all (state-of-nature arguments regular rely on this fallacy of false dichotomy), but it does not, and if it did there would be a gap for a near-identical relative (a/za&yrz^ for instance) to All. One of the rather better brief characterisations is the following: "a social philosophy that rejects authoritarian 6 7 8 9 Ed I. Frolov, 2nd revised ed, Progress, Moscow, 1989. Apter p.3. HI p.70. For such proposals see e.g. Carter,Websters' Dictionary (?), Marshall p.3. �16 government and maintains that voluntary institutions are best suited to express man's natural social tendencies'/ (Woodcock, Ency Phil, p.lll). While the first negative conjunct, which n governmental' right, might rate a pass (though anarchism is not always a philosophy, it is sometimes a practice), the second positive conjunct calls the whole account into doubt. Many humans naturally thrive in authoritarian settings. Defective definitions of anarchism abound, many regrettably supplied by high profile anarchists or well-regarded commentators (whereupon they assume a certain air of authority, a bogus air). A few examples will be considered, mostly drawn from a large list of similarly defective definitions included in Clark, who is out to show that any definition which attempts to do justice to anarchism through an essentialistic definition deploying one simple idea is bound to fail, abysmally, to does not 'mean literally "without government'" contrary to Carter, for one. It does however imply systems without governments of prevailing sorts, which is what she immediately proceeds to: 'and the lowest common demominator of anarchist thought is the conviction that existing forms of government are productive of wars, internal violence, repression and misery' (p.14). Right on! Kropotkin, for another, defines 'anarchism' in terms of 'society ... without government'. Like most of the brief definitions to be cited, this is neither necessary #)r sufficient. For 'government' has to be narrowed to its coercive and authoritarian determinate, and other archie arrangements also excluded. Many, Runkle for one, maintain that anarchism 'opposes authority in all its forms'; but elsewhere Runkle holds that its essence is individual liberty'. Others, Goodman for one, suggest anarchism is defined in terms of decentralization, still others, Bakunin for one, suggest characterisation in terms of 'organization from below upwards, by means of federation'. Again this is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not so easy to And an adequate characterisation of anarchism. (I have found none in the literature, despite some searching. That is reason why a certain amount of work has gone into such basics). There is a tendency to leap from the inadequate to the excessive—a tendency exemplified by Clark, who also cites Woodcock approvingly. Anarchism is first contracted to a rather elaborate doctrine, or political theory, thereby excluding practice. Then requirements are sharply inflated: For a political theory to be called "anarchism" it must contain: 1) a view of an ideal, non-coercive, non-authoritarian society; 2) a criticism of existing society and its institutions, based on this anti-authoritarian ideal; 3) a view of human nature that justifies the hope for significant progress towards the ideal; and 4) a strategy for change, involving immediate institution of non-coercive, non­ authoritarian, and decentralist alternatives (p.127). As Clark indicates, this "minimum" "definition" is an elaboration of another account, briefer and 10 See Clark p. 118ff. Clark's attack on essentialistic definitions is in the style of Wittgenstein. �17 better, that Woodcock also offers: 'historically, anarchism is a doctrine which passes a criticism of existing society; a view of a desirable future society; and a means of passing from one to another" (cf. p.120). There is nothing here about human nature, which anarchism need have no particular views about, perhaps rejecting the notion altogether as part of archist propaganda or similar, n There is nothing about the ideal society, or any commitment to one. Anarchists are not seeking societies; that is an illusory, Enlightenment goal, have transformed to get another excessive condition of adequacy for anarchist societies. It would be quite enough to achieve satisfactory societies. 12 Realistic anarchists may even come to appreciate that there are no ideal societies, perhaps just various less unsatifactory and better justified societies than virtually all of the extraordinarily narrow range of modem societies presently exhibited or on offer. However Clark's discussion of "the ideal"" reveals that he does not really intend an ideal, but only one or other of the plurality of societies meeting certain adequacy conditions. It certainly does not intend a unique one, ideal. 'Some adequate" or similar should substitute" for 'an (the) ideal", and the definition should be duly pluralised. Outside explications of anarchism which answer back to dictionary accounts, there are various high redefinitions (e.g. Clark) and some weird redefinitions. One such weird redefinition is that proferred by Taylor, who—rightly enough contrasting anarchism with the presence of the state where there is a concentration of the means of deploying force—defines a as where 'force is perfectly dispersed, not concentrated at all" (82 p.6). But Taylor does advance from pure anarchy, of which there are no examples, to an illuminating discussion of the exercise of concentrated force in societies. In recognisably anarchistic societies there is but limited concentration of force (based on physical inequalities), which 'is /10c in use. There is no standing specialist group or organisation or centralised system of groups...' No doubt a /MZ/er anarchist f/t^ory has to accomplish much of what excessive characterisations of anarchism,^ list, and more. Any reasonably full theory should * include a critique of authoritarian and coercive features of present and past societies and their institutions; 11 12 13 The important matter of such "nature" is discussed later.. Presently we are very far removed from such societies, except for small communities mainly in rich countries. States have done extremely poorly in this regard. There is not one satisfactory state in all of Africa or the Americas. Even small European states that at least have avoided extensive poverty, homelessness, and violence are in doubt because of * virtually entire destruction of their natural environments * reliance for wealth on impoverished Third World countries * justified dissatisfaction of many of their inhabitants. those of Woodcock and Clark p.120, p.126. r �18 * outline features of noncoercive nonauthoritarian societies as alternatives to, and improvements upon present dominant social arrangements, for some regions at least; * suggest strategies for attempting to change from defective forms to improved alternatives. Clarke also tries to insist, what we shall subsequently reject, that for a 'theory to called "anarchism" it justifies the hope for significant progress towards the ideal' (p.127). As well as theory, there is practice. (Clarke also goes astray in excluding anarchism as a , "anarchism without doctrine", and so on.) The pracfice of anarchism, generously construed, naturally includes the state of being in anarchist conditions, of living under anarchism (though perhaps unaware of doing so). There is scope for wfr/toM? Many primitive societies thus qualify as anarchistic; they practice, or practiced, anarchism though unaware (somewhat as wild animals practice hygiene, knowing without knowing ;%af). Further, no doubt now stretching 'practice' beyond its assumed anthropic context, many animal communities practice anarchism, very successfully. Many attracted to anarchism, an anarchism without name even, long for analogous pure practice, many practicing environmentalists for instance. They hope that whatever it is will operate, perhaps even materialize, without any heavy-duty theory, without excess or even any intellectualizing, perhaps without even thought or much effort on their part. In contemporary circumstances they would have to be extraordinary lucky; a paternal state with caring elements, such as safe jobs and spoon-fed indoctrinal education for all citizens, does not relinquish its control voluntarily. While definitions can be defective or otherwise unsatisfactory, in m^y ways, one thing they are not is dogmatic (as suggested by Marshall, none too subtlely trying to evade critical details in delimiting his massive study, p.3). Though insisting upon^themes definitions yield upon substitution can be dogmatic, having or offering definitions is not. Significant criticism of definitions is logically different, belonging to different categories. As well as decking anarchism out with defective definitions, with all the scope for argumental malpractice that affords, there is a coupled practice of boxing anarchism in, by narrow and confining constraints, jf iZZ/czf/y ctrcMWMcri&ing (Whereas definitions characteristically yield necessary and sufficient, conditions, such circumscription concerns necessary, or possibly sufficient conditions). Many of the restrictions imposed are, however, quite inessential, and have rather the effect of excluding viable alternatives. Simple examples concern waAmg, which is sometimes taken as having always to be case by case, and elsewhere is seen as necessarily involving all parties, large assemblies, or even complete social participation. None of this is essential, often the restrictions would prove undesirable. Often the circumscription technique proceeds by presenting features of, or said to be of, �19 historic anarchism, then tacticly assuming that all anarchism must conform to those features.*4 That is one reason why definition and characterisation are important; so anarchism is not set in riged past forms, unable to adapt to new circumstances and ideas. Another example concerns the character of the anarchist revolution, onto which many restrictions are loaded, often resulting in gratuitous puzzles, which are removed with the impositions. For example, it is said that 'the revolution had to be a mass affair" (M p.94). But nothing in anarchism, or its general development, requires this. (As a result the dilemma Miller finds .p.99 ff., simply falls over.) A revolution could be carried out by an elite anarchist band, or, in some states, through a single governor or president. Again, it said that the revolution is bound to be authoritarian (which renders an anarchist revolution contradictory), violent, and so on. This we have on authority from Engels: 'a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles [etc.] authoritarian means, if such there be at all', to which Miller adds approvingly that to say in power the party must rely on military means and 'terror of arms' (M p.92). None of this is so. A revolution could lag rapid change through mass conversion; for instance, there is a sign or appearance that is widely recognised, a new social movement which spreads like "wild fire", etc. 3. Anarchism and the state. While organisation and government are entirely compatible with anarchism, that most conspicuous modem institution, the state, is not: it is the paradigmatic archist form. Nor are ancient power formations such as the empire and the kingdom really compatible with anarchism. A prime reason is their authoritarian character and their extensive use of coercion and violence, but reasons als<4 includd^hein centralized organisation (such as power and hierarchical structure). Let us focus upon the state, against which a major and often virulent part of anarchistic political critique is directed; indeed such is the opposition to the state and its features that anarchism is sometimes distinguished in that way, in terms of 'hostility to the state ... [which] should be abolished and replaced by a new form of social organisation' (thus Miller p.5). But again these may be consequential, not characterising features of anarchism, which are derived from characterising features together with a standard theoretical characterisation of Under one such standard (though fairly strong^) characterisation, the state is a and 14 15 This is a much favoured tactic with critics of anarchism. For many examples, some only Quoted in the main text, see Miller. Although strong, in certain respects the characterisation is not strong enough. A state must not only be able to c/ai/n all these sorts of power, but sometimes to exercise them. Cf. Taylor's criticism of Weber's definition of the state (p.5). A �body ... it claims complete authority to define the rights of its subjects .... Second, the state is a body, in the sense that everyone bom into a given society is forced to recognise obligations to the state that govern that society. Third, the state is a body: it claims a monopoly of force in its territorial area, allowing no competitor to exist alongside it (Miller p.5). It also normally claims other monopolies, such as on legal tender. It is virtually immediate, powers. So it is that anarchism is often epitomized as directed at the dissolution of, what is widely seen then, that the state is a comprehensive as major political problem, the state. As to why it is such a problem, anarchist critiques of the state, sketched below, will reveal. With anarchism implemented in a place there is then an end there to any institution that is recognisably a state. The subsequent argument for anarchism does not depend upon a strong characterisation of .yfafe, such as that so far offered. Even fairly weak characterisations will serve. But inadequate characterisations, such as the following, will not: 'a collective object with territorial boundaries and political organisation throughout that territory". For that omits essential features of the state, such as sovereignty, authority, coercive control; it describes a possible anarchist society. 16 Arguments/or the state (which anarchism is normally concerned to fault) are however sensitive to characterisation. Mostly these arguments reach little further than, justify no more than, some sort of "minimal state"", very different from anything the Earth has had on offer (e.g. a nice state guaranteeing basic rights rather than removing rights: but anarchism need hardly oppose such arrangements). So it will matter just how ^<2^ is characterized. But this is easier said than done: is a ^k cluster ( muqti-criterial) notion, explications of which are controversial and typically contested.i? In seeking a satisfactory working characterisation, a useful starting point is the following short definition: 'a collective item with territorial boundaries and political organisation exercising sovereign power".is As anarchism can comfortably accommodate the first parts, political organisation within a region, it is the last part, sovereign power (as spelt out, e.g., in Miller's account) that is the problematic distinguishing factor. In a way, the term ruling sui^ipreme, derived from la&Ctptein which reflects the Greek reigning or says it all, why anarchism is bound to oppose a state so empowered. Improved detailing will exhibit a similar division between acceptable and unacceptable. A state, which comprises a 16 A' 17 18 q/ Virtually all the key political terms that we shall encounter have a disconcerting multiplicity of meanings: so it is with state, sovereignty, democracy (422 senses in Naess p.30), ideology, and so on. Fortunately these terms are dealt with^ elsewhere in this work. For a useful attempt at a multi-criterial characterization,and discussion of controversies over characterisations see Dun^eary "The state * (in Goodin & Pettit). Reese, with 'item * substituted for 'entity * to evade reificative issues. �21 interconnected (their level of cohesion justifying a definite description), has domains consisting of a and of who form an associated society. The territory of a state consists of spatial regions, over which it normally exercises control. Subjects are generally those humans who regularly reside in the territory (citizens form a of subjects, singled out by possession of certain duties and rights). The state is not the only authoritarian body to be repudiated. Lesser authoritarian organisation, such as those proposed under terms of functionalism (military barracks, prisons, reform schools, etc.) are to be similarly repudiated. No doubt on occasion the ability to coerce makes an institution more "effective", much as childrens learning of uninviting material is sometimes rendered more effective by coercive means, e.g. heavy cannings, floggings. But the repugnant means, and their common chase outw^eight the gains, if any, in effectiveness achieved. Now, having thus arrived at regular anarchism, reputiating the state, we confess to the evident, to the refinement of the notion of anarchy away from widespread common usage where it functions primarily as a powerful directive away from disapproved anti-statist life. Given that anarchism is thereby rendered (as in many dictionaries which of course reflect usage) a contradictory notion, encompassing both disorder without the state and order alternative to the state, some refinement and some diversion of disorder is no doubt desirable. The trouble with this easy resolution is that the early uses of 'anarchism' in English operated precisely with the corrupt drunk-and-disorderly side of the contradiction—disorder as contrasted with spendid state order. That was what (in defiance of the original Greek meaning) 'anarchy' and 'anarchism' were introduced to mean (see OED citations from 16-17th C). Thus the early usage, which persists, contradicts the refined and now regular usage. In technical presentations this problem is easily sliced through, by coining a term to mean what anarchy as refined means (anaRyri'2 and anacracy are such terms). Here however we shall simply persist with the refinement of the prevailing term, and in the course of giving it etymological justification over the early corrupt uses, further refine. 19 But the justification for refinement is not only 19 Tempting as it may be to switch, alternatively to new, freeing terminology, that temptation has here been largely resisted. Anarchism is a term, and idea, worth retaining. Not that there is anything amiss with new terminology: quite the contrary, provided that it is well-indroduced and pointful. In the course of drafting this book, a variety of new terminology has been toyed with—including such nice terms as (signifying non-domination)—because, as is regularly emphasized, anarchism is now such a turn­ off for most people. No doubt in more pdular versions (written by someone else), anarchism will disappear from headings, displaced by new terminology with a hint of old such as ^ada^waacra^y, or, less scrupulously, its place usurped by ^car-vacuous terms in high popular favour such as d^/nocracy. In this less popular version, anarchism stays; but, in pa^t compensation, some pleasant absolute terms, and senses, have been revised. They offer acceptable alternatives. A more powerful consideration than negative connotations is perhaps this: The present text, though strictly / �22 etymological. Do we need yet another term for lawlessness, or for disorder? Don't we rather need a term to help break the false dichotomy between: the state or political disorder? As if there are no further alternatives, like stateless order of various kinds? Or (as much ill-informed literature suggests), no political theory without the state, merely untheorizable confusion? 4. A refined explication of anarchism. derives from the ancient Greek Etymologically meaning: without a chief or head, or without a top authority. Of course what the form derives from, though often indicative, does not determine what it now means. (Anarchism was not, after an ancient political theory, but is in fact, under familiar classifications, the most recent and novel of major political ideologies.) However it M worth drawing out the etymological meaning, because it is revealing. What it appears to exclude are political arrangements structured with a top element of any of the following authoritarian sorts: a monarch, a prince, a ruler, a leader, a president, a prime minister, and shifting from individual to group form, a party, a clique, a ruling elite, a central power such as a state, etc. There are, analysis reveals, two interacting foci: one, a top or centre, and two, control or dominance flowing from this top by what are adjudged inadmissible means, authoritarian or coercive means in particular. A chief both stands at the top of a power hierarchy and exercises authoritarian control from there. Under this anarchy entails double foci structure or organisation without inadmissible top-down or centralized means. Let us look at the foci in turn, beginning with the more independent one, the top. Topologically, wif/tonf % fop amounts to wzt/zoMt % cenfre, because by topological transformations (roughly&^nJzKg and stretching as what rubber objects will permit) what is a top transforms to a centre, and vice versa. Diagrams illustrate the transformations: top (of tree, semi lattice) o centre o investigating is so far removed from what normally enters under that denomination that different terminology is warranted, terminology which then has the advantage of shaking off all those negative associations of anarchy. The salient differences from run-of-the-mill anarchism will appear when preferred forms are detailed subsequently. �23 Volcano from top from sides * peak * peak Given such transformations, which will be taken for granted, anarchism also excludes arrangements structured with a controlling centre, such as a ruling central government. It implies decentralization in a precise sense. It does not thereby also remove all structure: it leaves intact a rich variety of structure including network arrangements with no centres (or with multiple "centres"), federation structures or similar. Yet another example is afforded by lateral structuring with central "centres" dispersed via function, as ilustrated;^ service "centres" The skeleton or scaffolding of organisation is structure; it is the frame on which organisation is hung, which organisation fills or fleshes out. The sense of explicating the underlying organic image, implies as much. According, for instance, to the Conci-ye Dzcfiofiuiy, 'structure: manner in which a building or organism or other complete whole is constructed, supporting framework or whole of the essential parts of something *. Structure itself is primarily, though not entirely, a matter of of elements and parts, among which order relations figure prominently, though not exclusively. That is, structure involves order, as a critical component. Remarkably, the same sort of <y%n/c%r&y occur in a range of seemingly diverse theoretical areas, not just social and political theory, to be displaced in each case by a similar sort of problem-dissipating structure. To illustrate, consider an order on a type (or set) of items Q given by one order relation R, 20 Insofar as there is a single centre, it is the bottom, the people. Major condinating issues are referred to people, for instance through referenda. So there a will be a referenda organising office, but it will be independent cooperative. �24 on item c in Q, i.e. R = Re- For example, where Q is a system of where R may itself worlds including your world the ordering R of worlds may depend on your world (and my world could supply a different order). Differently, where Qis a system of values or valued items, R may depend upon your values; and so on. As an orJer, R is at least transitive, and perhaps either (if like <) reflexive or (if like <) symmetric, on its ranged The system <Q, R> is a simple ordered structure, or ay%w%^. (The latter is the term now used in modal logic, where such structures are the bases of models for the logic.) A or top t of such a system is an element such that all items of Q bear R to t but which does not itself bear R to any element of Q. (The notion, that of -yMpreyniow, and likewise woxiwMw, may be similarly defined relative to subsets or types within Q.22) 77^oreTH. There are order structures without tops. Examples are provided by systems (often with much more structure) with no supremum. Here is a simple 6 element example drawn from relevant logical theory. +1 +2 „ = {=2,-l,-0, +0, +l,+2} +0 R - — is as shown by arrows. -0 -1 T = {+0, +1, +2} is a frufh component -2 Topologically, several notions of prime political and philosophical cast are tantamount to tops in order structures, including chiefs (top persons in power rankings) hierarchs, grand leaders, centres, absolutes, and objective items. Consider, a pertinent issue, the matter of control or authority, where as in the next diagram all elements to t. trans^ity required of order. 21 There are various cases, depending upon conditions 22 A supremum t of R (in type T) is an (that) element (of T) such that all elements (of T) bear R to t but which does not itself bear R to anything (in T). �Looked at from above t is centre of a network. In the diagram shown, it remains a structure, a flattened hierarchy, when t and relations leading to it are deleted, under so to say. What this shows in a simple fashion is that there can be ordered structures without central control (and ranging further there can be statelessness, absence of central control, anarchy without "anarchy" or chaos, because there is order), structures. afford numerous examples. Order, including good order of a range of sorts, does not require central controls, leaders, absolute rulers or arrangements, or similar. Order does not require hierarchy, such hierarchy. 23 As immediate corollary is that inferences from anarchy (without a top or centre) to absence of order to disorder are fatally flawed. What lacks a top or centre may nonetheless enjy satisfactory order. Structures induced in anarchic arrangements can be far from chaotic (and may be modest and stable equivaien&s8i conditions). It is worth alluding to a much wider philosophical sweep. Related order structural considerations to those that tell against central states, absolute rulers, monarchs, patriarchs, top authorities as required for satisfactory order, also count against <2^x9/%^ of other sorts, such as absolute truth (there need be none, as the first diagram above indicates), absolute order (thus R 23 Part of what seems correct in Bookchin's vendetta against hierarchy can be captured in this way. More on this subsequently. �26 itself is relative to c), and of various sorts, such as objective fact (another supposed absolute), objective value (supplied under an absolute order), and so on. On this broad sweep the following sorts contrast sets emerged centralism elitism statism absolutism realism objectivism in rough contrast respectively with maximizing rationalism decentralism egalitarianism anarchism pluralism nonrealism nonjectivism satisizing rationalism Naturally, these simple structural considerations are only indicative, not decisive. For we might find, as more and more constraints are imposed on structures, as account is taken of actual conditions, that freedom contracts, that structural arrangements are forced towards centralism or absolutism. While such forcing may now look, in the light of a little logic, implausible, it requires further argument that it need not in general eventuate. The to be developed agam-yf takes these lines: that there is ready design of institutional arrangements for decentralised communities which does not lead back to a central state. The state is organisationally otiose. Organisation is delivered anencephaletically. For an added or infiltrated top or the centre to be troublesome, something anarchism need bother removing or shun where it figures, it has to have an role. Politically that presumably means exercising power in some way. That is, the head (the head that is lacking in %7i#rc%(?.y) is an operative head, not a mere figurehead. Anarchism need not exclude princes, monarchs, emperors, or "governors", such as some countries now maintain. If the people really like having such relics, royalty or "aristocracy", as is often said they do, then they can presumably have them if they are prepared to afford them. Indeed this figurehead role is just what is presumed for the prince under more plausible anarchist construals of Taoism.25 The ideal prince is a Taoist who takes no action, a sage who is rarely or never seen, whose existence may merely be known to the populace or even simply rumoured (that is almost to say, though Lao Tzu could not tactfully assert it, the ideal prince is a nonexistent inoperative sage). 24 For a fuller picture see Sylvan 93/4, chapter 10. 25 See Clark 84 p.165. Also UTD. �27 As indicated, the main features adduced are mirrored in logic, which can serve as a structural guide. It is striking, as well as technically advantageous, that logical and political predelictions converge. Mainstream irrelevant logics have algebraic structures with top elements, Boolean algebras in the case of classical logics. By contrast relevant logics, which now challenge the classical logical paradigm, do not. Their corresponding algebras, De Morgan monoids and such like need include no top element. The top element, T, is directly responsible for positive paradoxes, of the basic form A -* T (anything at all implies the True), of mainstream logics, paradoxes infecting much theory which relevant logic avoids.^ The logical structure shows that sub "centres" need not have such damaging effects; a plurality of local "centres", regional nodes, induces no paradox. The figurehead analogy also operates analogically, in logic. It does not matter if a semi­ lattice structure is extended to include a top element, so long as that addition provides only a conservative extension. (If T is added to top a relevant lattice, it has in stronger logics to be kept out of implication relations, else it will induce a non-conservative relevant extension with theses like A -* T.) But otherwise, as an inoperative top-piece it is admissible. Technical comparisons now reach much further than logic alone, as we leam more and more about decentralised structures, about decentralised cerebral organisation, decentralised Al and topless connectionism, and decentralised intelligent structure. Intelligent organisation without top or central elements may abound both in nature, for instance in insect cerebral organisation and in vertebrate brain structure, and in many future artificial intelligence applications. Logic and computing technology demonstrate, what is widely appreciated outside political theory, that topless is feasible.2? There is scope, and need, for twenty-first century anarchism to be highly techno-logically sophisticated. There is more to anarchism than political structure without an operative top, head or centre, than a lateral structuring. That more, the residue of the rejection of archy, is more difficult to characterize in a way non-prejudicial to types of anarchism. It is bound up with the operation of the active top, with the confroZ for example it exercises, the potter it exerts, or the like: non-prejudicially, it cannot operate As to what are unacceptable means, however there are different specifications. These many include—what can be summarized, under a single rubric, as —force, coercion, authoritarianism (and what implies any of those, such as totalitarianism); and, much more controversial, nonvoluntary, nonindividualistic, socialist and communist, means. As in dictionariess entries for "anarchism", only coercive and authoritarian elements will be ruled unacceptable (for 26 See WR. 27 The subsequently preferred variety of anarchism, while not at all opposed to slates losing their heads, is powerfully opposed to people literally loosing their heads (figuratively again, it may be alright). ��34 A Gramsci, 'The intellectuals * and 'The modem prison * in gcZccfzony /row ?7zc Prz'yon M?fc&ooRy (ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith), International Publishers, New York, 1971. D. Mannison and others (eds.), Environment?/ P/zz/oyopAy, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980; referred to as EP. D. Miller, Aaarc/zzym, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1984; referred to as M. D. Mitrany, 7%c Ennctona/ 77zcory o/PoEr/cy, Martm Robertson, London, 1975. A. Naess and associates, Democracy, /Jeo/ogy aaJ D/?/eciiviiy, Oslo University Press, Norway, 1956. R. and V. Routley, 'The irrefutability of anarchism *, &?cza/AZfcrnaEvcy, R. and V. Routley, 'Social theories, self-management and environmental problems *, in EP; referred to as SM. R. Sylvan, and D. Bennett, 'On Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology *, D/ycayyzoa Papery in EavzrozzmczzZaZ P/zz/oypp/zy, #19, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1990. R.P. Wolff, 7a De/ence o/Aaarc/zzym, Harper & Row, New York, 1970. ADDITIONAL SOURCES P. Nursey-Bray, an Aaaa/arcJ EzEZzagrap/zy a/Aaarc/zzym , Greenwood Press, 1992. END NOTES 2 Cf Clark p.ll8ff. The general methodological issue of multiple determinates of key political terms and their archist confinement is taken up in a later chapter. �*J^A /TrT^^<Z7 (y/^cA e.ncrcicj/ ^ A A' '< -' z? y // /yr *-^. C r^O V. J * /X o J* ,<^A<_ . ) *4 C^c/^ / /Xot^z &J> f A-w^ t^i^L to n > etA A jt? cj C rZ-?/T^T <*C Zt , <^<!"// , cx^d /7^/^'Cx �^9 /?. 3* f,. /A^t / TL^i- c— ^^4—UT^-? ^-7y47 /^" <-/ f' z' ^^L-J 7 �1 CHAPTER 2. ELABORATIONS OF ANARCHISMS There are wany anarchist theories. For an anarchist theory is any laterally structured theory which duly conforms to the anarchy principle, of rejecting political authority and coercion. While received anarchist theories restrict anarchism to certain more specific forms (the standard options of considered below), p/ara/ijtic anarchism does not; plural anarchism not only admits the plurality, but takes advantage of it any may revel in it. Not all of this variety, not all anarchisms in the sheaf of systems, are of equal merit. Some forms are decidedly undesirable — like anarchisms expanding on the violent or chaotic varieties of popular imagination — in much the way that the nasty states of modem history, that anarchism opposes, are undesirable. Such undesirability may devolve from external rather than internal political characters. Thus, for instance, regions committed to global power projection to retain their privileged way of life (most unlikely under anarchistic arrangements) or committed to transnational terrorist practices. While standard anarchisms have been located in the more desirable, or even eutopian, end-range of anarchist systems, they by no means exhaust the satisfactory forms or even the most promising forms (as explained in chapter 5). Indeed in important respects the desirable range is significantly open for further elaboration of newer (and greener) forms. As varieties of anarchy may diverge, widely, so correspondingly do motivations and justifications for various divergent forms. The motivations, for instance, range from entirely theoretical (conceding to the warranted force of political scepticism) to practical (changing the local world); from personal and perhaps selfish (getting the state off one's back, or out of one's business and one's till) to other directed (eliminating a state oppressing its people) to environmental (disestablishing another vandalistic state). Common motivations trace back to the common character of anarchism: repulsion by, or opposition to, oppression, perhaps generalised from the state to all analogous political and bureaucratic structures, or expanding on that again, to all gross power relations. Indeed it is appealingly suggested that what anarchy is really all about is gross power relations, their reduction and removal; state coercive and authoritarian power are but paradigmatic of such power and domination relations. But while such opposition to gross power does characterizer gentler anarchism, heavy power methods are acceptable to tougher anarchisms; gentler anarchisms tend, so it will be argued, to be all of more pacific, more liberal and more rational than tougher or hardened anarchism. There are other expansionary liberal democratic motives for anarchism, further varying this theme: a yearning for removal of constraints, and for more extensive freedom; or a desire for more extensive equality, which would of course diminish those inequalities power delivers. Such motivations too have illicitly worked their way into variant characterisations of anarchism. ? �2 While a popular image of anarchists remains that of hardened terrorists, exercising authority over hostages using state-manufactured guns, many anarchists are joined by opposition to all such naked authority or coercion. Indeed 'behind the anarchist attack on the state and other coercive institutions, there has often stood a fundamental critique of the idea of authority itself (M p.15). An important, though certainly not invariant, mofivafmg and r^<?n for anarchism derives from a more sweeping anti-authoritarianism: the theme that no person or organisation can ever rightfully exercise authority of (political cast) over another. Picturesquely it is the theme that no authority is justified, no one, state or other, has a right to push another around. Too briefly it is sloganised to assert, no bosses, no leaders, or similar. Such general opposition to the principle of authority has even been dubbed "philosophical anarchism". It is an unfortunate choice of terminology given Feyerabend's different anarchistic challenge to much in philosophical theory and practice. * But some further classification and labelling undoubtedly helps. A princZp/^J anarchism takes exception on principled, characteristically ethical, grounds to objectionable authority or to coercion, that is to prime target elements undiluted anarchism directly rejects. But irrespective of type of anarchism intricated, much in anarchist theory, including a fuller characterisation, turns upon the twin notions of anf/ion/y and coercion, what these terms mean and cash out to, and why it is considered important to avoid damaging features of this sort? Both authority and coercion fall into the general category of power relations, a category that has rightly featured large not merely in anarchist theory but in social theory more comprehensively. As Aristotelian definitions of 'authority and coercion , by gunus and differentia, will be offered, an essential preliminary consists in pinning down the genus, power. * Power gm/ reZevan? serfs. Defective definitions of power, authority and coercion abound. Despite the importance of the notions for political theory, not just for anarchism, it is rare to encounter satisfactory formulations. A defective formulation from recent relevant anarchist theory defines power as 'the ability to compel compliance, either through the use of force or the threat of force (Wolff p.4), a conspicuously high redefinition. Rather, a power reZofion is a relation where one of the relata, that having the power, can normally get the other relata to do something (down to entertaining a belief, considering an idea). Power is a can-do; it may not be exercised. But there need be no compulsion or compelling compliance; nor need its exercise always succeed. Further its exercise need not involve force or threat thereof; it may be effected by a range of other means. 1 By Wolff, and following him, Miler and others. Feyerabend's philosophical anarchism, his is sometimes better labelled anarc/h-yiH, a type of nihilism. But it stops short, excluding logical methods (irrationally scorned however) from variation^ .In fact without a sharp—unavailable—distinction between logical and other (empirical or pwidivist) methods, this methodological anarchism is incoherent. �3 on the one side, bribery, seduction, blackmail, and so on, and on the other, knowledge, prowess, charisma, and so on. It is no secret that major problems in human social and political affairs devolve upon power, its excessive or evil use, misuse, regulation and control. But by no means all power, not even all political power, is bad. Distangling the undesirable, negative forms is an essential exercise, often neglected. After observing the failure of radical social theory to provide an adequate investigation of power, Clark embarks on a critique of the "classical model"2 According to the received conception, power is depicted as a relation of domination in which the powerful subject the powerless to control in order to exploit the latter. In both classical Marxism and anarchism this exploitation is conceived as being essentially economic. Thus, for Marx, "political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another (p.231). It is evident that what we see here is an attempt to explain power through, and then reduce power to, certain of its determinate forms: domination, then control, exploitation, oppression, and then organised and economic forms of these. These determinates are all, though important, rather special and rather negative, black forms of power. Power may be short-term, just for a day for instance or once only (a creature requires power only for a short period, because of what it is, because it loses power thereafter, because it has access to short-term drugs, magic, hypnosis, contracts, etc.). Domination is a longer-term relation, a disposition, between recognised parties, with a decided bias in favour of one party the power-holder; exploitation and oppression increase that bias, in specifiable ways, control however removes it. Power may, furthermore, be applied for positive and libertary, purposes, to help powerless to achieve something or other, to survive, prosper, and so on. Briefly, the concerning power is not power itself, but certain of its forms, its negative forms, and its excessive use. This last can be assimilated, by taking excess as a negative form. The negative forms are, of course, though they can be independently specified, the bad, or undesirable forms, forms as was earlier said.3 These include, among other forms, closed authority and coercion. They also include such overlapping forms as oppression, exploitation, domination, and so on. Privilege goes with these latter forms; it is held by the power-holders and their circle. It is held moreover exclusively by this circle; others, at the other end of the power relation, the power-less, are excluded from its possession. That is, the domain and range of a given power relation are exclusive: no one is both an exploiter and exploited (though of course someone, a husband day labourer for example, may be both exploited in his labour and domineering over his wife). 2 3 A critique, p.231 ff. too quickly petering out in an inconclusive, discussion of Foucault on power, where power turns into what is not, something mystical and all-pervasive. In these respects, power is like other notions, of green political significance, for one, for another. �4 There are two separable kinds of undesirable power: excessive and malselective or illdirected. The two kinds are more or less replicated in other significant phenomena that have been, like power, too sweepingly condemned: economic growth and material consumption. The problematic concerning human consumption is not consumption itself, some level of which is essential to human societies and indeed survival. The problems derive basically from excessive consumption and from poorly selected consumption. Conspicuous consumption, insofar as it delivers a negative form, derives from these: it is either excessive and wasteful or malselective or a mix of these. But the kinds are distinctive. For example, a poor family that buys expensive junk food may spend its limited income poorly, but its consumption may well not be excessive. Similarly with power: the limited power an individual or group possesses, whether exercisable for evil or not, may be better or worse directed. In term of power and its gross exercise, much in more gentle anarchisms can be / synthesized, namely all that is otherwise packed into the rubric: unacceptable means. What is unacceptable is gross exercise of power, including types of political power exploited by tougher anarchisms, terrorist power, crude fire power from the barrels of guns, and so on. What correspondingly gentler anarchisms oppose are all institutions and arrangements, not just the state and those tied to it, that can exert gross power. The state mightly concentrates, and centralizes, such power/ Even so the state is merely paradigmatic among undesirable and excessive power structures — a power hungry one at that, since it looks for a surplus product in power, along with a monopolistic position. But militia posts, torture shops, and pirate ships are other more localized structures. Coercive and closed authoritarian arrangements (opposition to which helps define anarchism) are distinctive marks of such grossness. Dilute anarchisms tone down opposition certain types of power (typically authority); they admit exercise of power that gentler anarchism would regard as gross. From the problematicness and undesirability of excessive power, main objectives of ( anarchism for ameliorative change flow: decentralisation, division and separation of powers. Centralised powers are to be separated and decentralised; aggregated powers to be broken down into functional components; and so on. Tougher anarchism proposes more, rival power play, resisting and undermining power through power, to break down its excesses and reveal its limitations, fighting fire with fire. One trouble with this tough and morally dubious strategy, which can be spectacular, is that it easily overreaches, producing for instance inadmissible coercion of others. 4 Not all state power is undesirable. Some of state regulation and redistribution, effected through power is certainly desirable. The argument will be that these elements are completely outweighted by the undesirable components of state power, and that they can be independently effected without the state. �5 Gentler anarchism travels in the vanguard of the long retreat from barbarism in human practices and institutions. In more enlightened parts of the world we have witnessed the progressive removal of physical punishment, such as: maiming, blinding, executing, stoning, torturing, transporting, flogging, corporal punishing, starving, chaining, incarcerating, imprisoning, infecting, ...and extensions, such as: serious threats thereof and assistance or encouragement of these practices elsewhere. Such enlightenment has not penetrated many parts of the world to any extent, and has far to reach yet even in the most civilized regions. TTyugh the gentler anarchist theme of curtailment of power, we can tap into several rich connections. The excessive drive to power and strength, the "will to power", is a conspicuous feature of modernity. Interestingly Nietzsche went so far as to claim that the will to power was basic motive in human affairs. Fortunately such a socio-psychological claim, about prevailing human nature and institutions, has little to substantiate it. But undoubtedly power motivates much, much too much, in modernity; otherwise anarchism would lose much of its more sweeping point. It was not always so; the quest for power at all costs, the flaunting of power, was at least highly problematic (as drama revealed); it did not always gain the adulation it now widely commands. It did not win respect from early anarchism, as manifested in Stoicism and Taoism. It would not have won endorsement from Aristotelibnism; for power, of both institutions and individuals, like so many other attributes, is evidently similarly constrained to a While the rough bounds are evident enough for an instrumental object such as a vehicle, which wastes fuel and becomes dangerous when excessively powered, but cannot perform its tasks if underpowered, the bounds, especially ^e lower, may not be so conspicuous elsewhere (e.g. with military hardware, intelligence reserves, etc.). Organisations and institutions, which should be vehicles to serve social ends, enjoy once again a striking analogy with logical systems. Logical systems, when excessively strong in the fashion of modem mainstream systems, ensnarl users in a tangle of paradoxes and other troubles (for detailed discussion see RLR, p.240 ff.). On the other hand, if they are excessively weak they fail to meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, to afford satisfactory vehicles of inference and reasoning. Two species of gross power feature particularly in the definitional elaboration of anarchism: authority and coercion. While undesirable authority is characteristically tied into excessive power, coercion is different, is often once-off, and is malselective power. �6 * Authority, and warranted repugnance of closed forms. Authority is a type of power relation, a relation with the power or influence conferred or supported by other features of one of the relata, the bearer of authority, namely character, station, recognised control of coercive means, or the like. itself is the abstract of the relation : a has authority over or with respect to b. Authority is a proper subrelation of power. For evidently many power relations — those exerted by bullies, bandits, etc — are not authority relations, since the relation is not supported by suitable station. Again the following definition of authority (upon which Wolff founds his philosophical defence of anarchism) is far too narrow: "the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed" (p.4). Only some who hold authority may be (conventionally) conceded a right to command, or more broadly, to exercise their power. For evidently their power may be exercised in a variety of other ways than through command structures, such as blockages, delays, vetoes, withholdings, and so on, and on the other side, concessions, gifts, rewards, and so on. There are many types of authority relations, many inadmissibly excluded under narrow definitions, not all of which are objectionable, or objected to by anarchists. For an example of an unobjectionable sort, consider the relation of a student to an authority in some field of knowledge, who can in turn back up expert judgements by appeal to a further range of assessible evidence. Such an authority might be called frampar^if (or open), because those with time and some skill can proceed through the authority to assess claims made. Among op%n authorities are contemporary teachers, by contrast with old fashioned disciplinarians, and advanced parents, who can back up their orders with satisfactory reasons. Contrasted with such authorities are op&q%^ (or cZo<y^%f) authorities, who simply stand on their position or station, such authority is objectionable in part because of its dogmatic character.^ Closely allied to op^M^ authorities who can appeal to a conventional rule or procedure (that is how things are done, have been done) without being able to or prepared to opaque authorities are step beyond some rule book. Rule-book authorities are commonplace in bureaucracies, which often encourage such practice in lower level officials. In opaqM^ authorities the justificatory procedure stops a step further out; there is a set of rules, which has been enacted (for reasons not open to, or bearing, examination) by a further substantially opaque authority. Other authority relations are objectionable because of the way in which or the means by which they are backed. Unobjectionable is the authority figure which is exemplary, where what it exemplifies is in its tum satisfactory. Not so relations backed by coercive means, by violence or threats of violence: Big-stick authority relations. Such relations are condemned on moral 5 The impression is widely promoted that science reliably furnishes examples of transparent authorities, in the shape of experts. That impression is astray. Dominant Science frequently functions as a substantially closed authority, rather as the universal Church did, standing on received theory as gospel (for elaboration see DP, chapter 12). �7 grounds, for example by moral pacifists opposed to violence, who do not object to the carrot methods such as sanctions, boycotts, civil disobedience, etc. A diagram will summarise the position so far attained. o/'gMf/tonfy Confine##.? Methods carrot <- stick possibly benign Pacifist Back-up transparent T opposition A opaque Enlightenment Liberal opposition opposition It will be evident that the objections to nonbenign authoritarian relations—to what in clear cases may be presented as to — can be of significantly different sorts. To more opaque authority relations there are objections of enlightenment cast, that reason is lacking for what an authority requires, proposes or asserts, as it was lacking in authoritarian religious and political practice against which the Enlightenment was primarily targeted. (A significant strand of anarchism, more theoretical anarchism, is a descendant: undisclosed reasons of State are not adequate reasons.) To more coercive authority relations there are objections from non-violence devotees. To there may be a kind of liberal opposition, that the party subject to authority is being denied, in one way or another, for unacceptable reasons, a certain freedom, namely ' autonomy. Naturally, movements have been directed at breaking down authoritarian power relations: masters over slaves, humans over animals, men over women, adults over children, etc. States over citizens. A comprehensive civil liberties movement would merge with anarchist movements. Plainly then, these three convergences are linked to three interconnected forms of opposition to authoritarianism: namely * convergence of anarchism with an Enlightenment opposition to opaque authority, which anarchism takes to include state authority. (A response will contend, as religious groups did against Enlightenment charges, that State authority is justified, e.g. it represents the people's will, or some similar fairy tale. But that is what is at issue.) * convergence of anarchism with moral pacifism in opposition to violence and coercion as unmitigated evils which should always be avoided. Of course only some forms of anarchism are �8 involved. Some anarchists are not averse at all to the exercise of heavy power relations, for instance of violence or terror against others (no matter how this violates their free personal space). But observe that such uses of power are not supported by recognised authority but normally directed agnm-sf such authority; so they might be dubbed relations. * convergence of anarchism with forms of liberalism, deriving from solid commitment of normal forms of anarchism, particularly individual varieties to personal liberty. Libertarian ideals have served as a major motivation in historical anarchism. There is a vision of a free society, a 'vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labour is freely undertaken'.6 ( There are of course other convergences as well, some of them much discussed, such as with marxism. When opposition to authority is broadened to opposition to domination, no doubt there are further convergences, with feminism, with deep environmentalism. A recent convergence, of initial promise, is with ecofeminism, which ought to highly sympathetic to environmentally sensitive anarchism. For both are opposed to domination in all its forms, to downward control lines and power hierarchies. There is an important argument against the state based on its authoritarian character. This argument, to be found is Proudhon and in embryonic form in Rousseau, is developed and given a Kantian tum in Wolff? What Proudhon portrayed as a conflict between the authority of the state and freedom, Wolff represents as 'the conflict between authority and autonomy' (p.18). In this conflict, where the state represents authority, autonomy takes precedence; anarchism is consistent with the supreme virtue of authonomy, but archist doctrines supporting the state are not, because of authoritarian character of the state. Because Wolffs argument has been subject to much criticism which an improved formulation would shed, because too Wolffs formulation leaves something to be desired (it is not sufficiently sharp or tight), the argument will be revamped. A crucial difference is this: whereas Wolff asserts that 'all authority is equally illegitimate', a judgement already rejected, it is now said that all authority is illegitimate, meaning thereby wtoraZ/y illegitimate, not 'having a binding moral force ? 6 7 8 Chomsky, in Guerin p.xii, As to Proudhon see Ritter p.13, pp. 15-16. According to Rousseau such undesirable restrictive features need not pertain for all forms of government; naturally they do not obtain for his favoured arrangements. Wolff tries to repeat this sort of point, less than successfully for unanimous direct democracy. Of course a state may proclaim, even legislate, that its authority is legitimate, and even have other states do the same. But that will not achieve moral, a de jt/re, legitimacy. It is similar when the state endeavours to enforce its authority; /noraf legitimacy is not thereby obtained. Nonetheless these sorts of features go far towards explaining why people acknowledge, rarely questioning, closed authorities like the state. There are other elements which enter into explaining this popular sheepishness, such as: The force of tradition, that is the way things have always been done, the �9 Nor is all closed authority equally objectionable. The unquestionable directives of a benevolent dictator (one whose authoritarian directives and regulations prove inductively to be well directed) can be seen as less objectionable than those of a malevolent dictator. Similarly for a dictatorial group, a junta, or a majority. That the dictator said so, or that the majority said so, does not offer a reason rendering the state less than a closed authority. A core theme, to be embroided and defended, is W1. An autonomous person does not recognise a closed authority as legitimate. But W2. The state is a closed authority, of a certain of course. Hence WC1. An autonomous person does not recognise the state as legitimate. The core theme depends crucially on the notion of aMfonowy, on characterising features of the autonomous person. But before that task is addressed, observe that autonomy can be eliminated. First, the rafiona/ person, or a little less satisfactorily, the person, can carry the argument instead, using for instance W3. A rational person is autonomous. So results Wl' with 'rational' displacing 'autonomous', W1'. A rational person does not recognise a closed authority as legitimate. That premiss at once suggests a direct argument devoid of the circuit through persons (or through agents). For what a rational, still more an enlightened, person does not recognise as legitimate presumably is not, and certainly vice versa. In any case, U1. A closed authority is not legitimate. Hence, by W2, UC1. The state is not legitimate. Since this conclusion is equivalent to UC2. The concept of a legitimate state is null, the result sharpens the tentative conclusion Wolff reaches: 'Hence, the concept of a jure legitimate state would appear to be vacuous', to which he adds, thereby presuming other links already made explicit, 'and philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man' (p.19). As observed, not too much hangs upon the notion of moral legitimacy deployed, thus far following Wolffs lead, throughout. Simple variations replace 'morally legitimate' or 'legitimate' by 'morally warranted', 'morally justified', 'justifiable', 'rightful' (the last, though a trifle old-fashioned, captures what is intended well). force of character of leaders; their occupation of official positions, which have heavy bureaucratic backing. �10 These arguments permit of much other interesting variation. Wolff s original argument, for instance, precedes from authority as The defining mark of the state', with authority defectively explicated as 'the right to rule' (p.18). Evidently then the middle term, authority, can drop out, and the argument can be formulated along the following lines: VI. The state has the right to rule (without question, its citizens, more or less as it pleases). V2. An autonomous person rejects any (sweeping) right to rule. Therefore VC1. An automonous person rejects the state. Further variations may be obtained by amending the middle term, "right to rule without question" (which effectively replaced "exercise of close authority") to reflect other features of the state, for instance that it can simply tell its citizens what to do, that is has a right to coerce its citizens, rights to institute state monopolies, and so on. Under some variations "autonomous person" should be correspondingly replaced. For instance, if VI is specialized from a right to command and control to the right to send citizens to war, then V2 may be adjusted to apply to the person of conscience, of peace, or similar. As Wolff seeks a grander conclusion than VC1, which might be merely taken to reveal that there are but few autonomous actors about, he invokes a further premiss V3. Autonomy is a (even the) primary obligation. From there, it is an analytic shuffle to the more impressive conclusion VC2. The state ought to be rejected. The arguments are as vulnerable as their premisses. What gets especially contested in the first argument is Wl, concerning the autonomous person. For all the surface reasonableness and even open-door aspects of a more liberal state, W2 holds; it swings into effect as soon as the going gets tough. As Dahl puts it, To obey the authority of the state ... means doing what the you do it'? While there may be a little scope for light and reson as regards more flexible minor officials, that scope is officials of the state tell you to do simply and soley ( t/z^y small; the wall of closed authority can be quickly encountered, particularly with judges and law enforcement officers. If W2 did not hold the state would risk sliding into a voluntary organisation, out of which citizens could opt. In the end citizens are expected to act in a variety of ways (fill in form, take out licences, pay taxes, etc.) because the state tells them to, just because, or else face punitive action. The argument to Wl depends heavily on the meaning of gMfono/ny. Here is one way it can be presented (following Dahl): An autonomous person is self determining. Such a person is not under the direction or choices of another item. While the person may do what another tells him 9 See p.92..Dahl's reconstruction of Wolff effectively applies W2, using Wolffs definition of HMf%<?r#y, to obtain VI. This produces a more complex, and defective, argument. G �11 or her, she does not she has been told to do it. Thus the autonomous person does not conform to closed authorities, and does not acknowledge them or assign them recognition (more than recognition that is). While autonomy is one thing, responsibility is quite another; still a critical reason for arriving at autonomy intricates responsibility. ... so long as we recognise our responsibility for our actions, and acknowledge the power to reason within us, we must acknowledge as well the continuing obligation to make ourselves authors of such commands as we may obey (Wolff p.17), i.e. to make ourselves autonomous. A primary moral demand, central to the moral condition, is, according to Kant and Wolff, to 'acknowledge responsibility and achieve autonomy whenever and whenever possible" (p.17). Assuming responsibility in a life is by means the only reason for striving for autonomy: achieving a certain personal freedom (within natural bounds) and operating a life rationally are other crifica/ reasons. A main argument to V3 indicated by Wolff does proceed from responsibility. It is simply that in order to take full responsibility (for one's actions, choices, etc.), which one should, one has to be autonomous. So one should be autonomous. At least as important philosophically as the argument from W1 and W2 is that from Wl' and W2. While the argument to Wl' may proceed through autonomy it may short-circuit it. The philosophical argument for Wl' is well-known, having been repeatedly emphasized from Socrates through to Russell: that a rational person does not accept anything for which there are not independent investigatible reasons and evidence. The pronouncements of a closed authority do not fall into this class. By revamping the arguments especially that from autonomy as directed against authority, many objections to Wolffs arguments are fairly autonomically voided. Firstly (contrary to Dahl p.47), the arguments are not (any longer, if they ever were) arguments against 'authority of any kind". Not merely was Wolff concerned with the authority of the state; further as Dahl points out next page, the type of authority concerned is that of 'doing what someone tells you to do fo ^Zo if, that is a closed form. A rational person can of course acknowledge an open authority who can offer reason and evidence for prono^cements. For similar reasons, experts, guides and guardians, of open character, are not excluded. Accordingly the arguments does not cut "too broad a swath""; while it properly cuts out closed authorities like absolute rulers, states and similar, it does not mow down open authorities. In like fashion, much of Miller's parallell criticism of philosophical anarchism is voided. Things go astray (in Miller's chapter 2) from the very outset, from the slack formulation of "the principle of authority"", which is chauvinistically formulated, 'no man can ever rightfully exercise political authority over another, that is have a right to issue directions which the other has an obligation to obey' (p.15), and which is then intended to apply to the relation of a state �12 and its officials to its citizens. The formulation has both to be expanded to include persons and organisations as subjects of the relation, and sharply contracted to delimit the kinds of authority and rights concerned. For the explanatory (that is) clause offered reaches far beyond (closed) political authority; it would wrongly rule out contractual relations such as those of freely arranged employment, parental relations, and so on. The counterexamples Miller designs to Wolffs arguments also depend upon shifting ground from closed authority like the state to more open arrangements, such as contracts an autonomous person may have entered into freely. Plainly there will be a limited range of such contracts that a rational person will enter into; long-term future bondage or slavery will not be among them, and Miller's examples may border on the rationality dubious. In any case, in one, an agent morally concerned to relieve poverty enters into authoritarian arrangements, imagined unavoidable for successful action, in which it becomes obligatory for the agent to act under authoritative instruction (p.28). Firstly, the authorities are not closed, they have to be pursuing means directed to poverty relief, else an autonomous agent will not enter into such ". * arrangements Secondly, while contractual obligations, and therewith certain directives of open authoritarian cast, may constitute reasons for action, the situation with the state is very different. There is no contract, and no reasons of contract (also lacking are spotless reasons justifying entering into such a contract). Examples like Miller's arrangements and contracts can be inflated into stock flawed arguments, from consent to the state. Unremarably, Dahl attempts to patch up again these well- worn arguments, but in two mutually inconsistent ways. Second, he proposes that To opt for a democratic state' is The most responsible way of exercising our moral autonomy', and reasonable and rational as ways of maximizing our autonomy (p.49). Insofar as there are any arguments for such wishful conclusions, they depend upon familiar fantasy-world assumptions about the blackness of nonstate arrangements presumed to impact utterly unfavourably on autonomy and the contrasting whiteness of democratic states. That those states are at best a pretty dirty gray, Dahl's first more honest considerations suggest. There he asks, What is so great about autonomy? 'Why not sacrifice some moral autonomy?' As 'unlimited autonomy is impossible', why not settle for autonomy within reasonable state limits? (cf p.48). Compare: why not sacrifice some resistance to homocide and settle for reasonable killing of humans for reasons of state? The moral importance of autonomy Wolff has already explained nicely (pp 14- 17). Autonomy is a primary oM/ganon of rational persons, a constraint, not what Dahl converts it utilitarian-fashion into, a supreme value, to be questioned then traded off against other values. Because of its importance for rational practice the obligation should not be weakened; nor is there good reason to do so. There appear no grounds for forfeiting autonomy to closed 10 Compare Wolffs discussion (on p.15) of relations with one's doctor. �13 authorities, such as the state. It is doubtful that there are even grounds for what Wolff allows, forfeiture of some autonomy to one s doctor, hopefully no longer a closed authority, rather than retaining autonomy and freely following the doctor's advice. Autonomy is not like freedom in limitations; it can in principle always be exercised by a rational person. Submission to the state is a gross forfeiture of that autonomy. While an autonomous agent may place itself under guidance of leadership of another for limited purposes, and may indeed enter into certain sorts of contracts, it will not surrender its whole future life or extensive parts of it to a directorate that may well proceed in suboptimal, subliminal or even irrational ways. Yet that latter is what expected acceptance of the state implies. Accordingly an autonomous person cannot recognise the state; nor can a fully rational one, as it is irrational to place oneself indefinitely under a closed authority. It may be objected that it is unfair to treat Dahl, Miller and others in the preceding fashion, which changes the dialectical playing field. They were attacking Wolff and his over-extended arguments, not a refinement of Wolff which singles out the philosophical nasty elements in authority, and accordingly destroys their counter-examples which operated at the rational open end of authority relations. But that was not all that they were doing. They were using Wolff as a vehicle to draw quite conclusions about the unviability of principled anarchism (e.g. Dahl p.50, Miller p.29), and accordingly should have taken account of simple revampings of arguments like those of Wolff. Nor is this the only respect in which their practice is methodologically unsound. A principle—like that of closed authority, that such authority is legitimate—does not stand because someone's attack (e.g. Wolff s) against it is unsuccessful. Yet this is Miller's methodological procedure against philosophical anarchism (p.26, p.29). This is Popperian falsificationism gone rampant and badly astray. For Popper at least required sustained and strenuous testing and adequate variation; not a few select and easy examples. But of course a Popperian approach by archists is unsatisfactory; the onus of argument is the other way around. An archist has to establish that political authority, such as that the claims and exercises, is rightful. That Wolff intended to work with something like closed authority should have emerged both from Wolffs emphasis on the place of 'grounds and sources' in legitimate authority (p.9), and his flirtation with unanimous direct democracy. What Wolff is exercised about is not compliance with a authority or obedience where there are good or independent reasons for it, but blind, or closed obedience: doing what you are told because you are told to do it (p.9). (Yours not to reason why, yours but to do ....) While these points exonerate Wolff from some overzealous criticisms, they immerse him in others, namely his attempt to combine authority with autonomy under unanimous direct democracy. A major problem is that this combination, �14 so far as it is workable^, appeals not to the closed authority of the state, but to open autonomous arrangements which do not conform to requirements of the state (as Dahl remarks on p.48, the "authority" here is not the "authority" of his earlier definition'; and as Miller observes on p.27, *it is ... arguable whether this state of affairs [under unaminous direct democracy] involves the recognition of Autonomy and freedom tell not merely against the exercise of opaque authority, but against use of coercion. This connection affords the basis for a parallel argument to that against closed authority, to the desirability of a sharp decline in deployment of coercive methods. But parallels between coercion and closed authority do not proceed very far. * Coercion, an impermissible activity. Coercion is very different from exercise of authority. All four places, 1 to 4, in a cross­ classificatory matrix are regularly occu Died: actions coercive authoritative 1 non-authoritive 2 non 4 coercive 3 Place 1 is well occupied given the State, and is widely exemplified in not only state-citizen relations, but also in authorized domination relations. Place 2 is illustrated in a range of operations which the state often tries to repress such as banditry, piracy, protection rackets, but also in a variety of interpersonal relations. Place 4, that clear indicator of unqualified anarchism, is well exemplified through voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. Place 3, characteristic of many work-place and educational situations, can be easily illustrated through advanced ( education. Coercion, unlike authority, is action. That is why comparisons are with .... of authority; authority may sit, like power, unused, but coercion cannot. Like all action it is a process, a state to state transition, but actively changing or maintaining state. It is a transitive action relation having both a doer, a coercer, and done-tos, coerced, all normally creatures. The transitions include a wide range of more determinate actions such as constraining, restraining, securing, moving, pushing, pulling and so on; and thus coercion (the abstract) includes forcible constraint and compulsion. An essential feature of coercion is that state transitions are effected A/<Z or attempted by coercers through force or genuine threats of force. No such force, no coercion. NY- Defective definitions of coercion are liable particularly to neglect this feature. Thus e.g. Fridman 11 Wolff himself concludes it is not except under highly improbable conditions. Indeed the conditions are more onerous those Wolff allows: required are humans who having consented do not change their minds, etc. _________ /e �/6 L < s _ _ z^<^4^-f ___' / ^ry^- /i, <^___ . �15 p.xviii, according to whom being coerced is 'not being left alone'. Perhaps in one special sense, but a person who chooses to have a constant companion is not being thereby coerced. Pressuring someone to do something without attempts or threats to apply force is not coercion. Similarly persuasion is not coercion; censuring, withholding support, applying peaceable sanctions, are so on, are not. All this proves important in meeting objections to anarchist methods. Coercion is not a success notion; a coercer may well not succeed in obtaining what was sought through coercion. This will prove important in explaining why appeal to the state does not automatically resolve political dilemmas. To coerce is maintain or change states, normally of another creature, by implied force (i.e. force or accepted threat thereof). The state transition or statis includes the full range of relevant actions such as constraining, restraining, securing, moving, pushing, pulling aa so on, and thus coercion (the abstract) includes forcible constraint and compulsion. Coercion, by contrast with * exercise of authority, entails potential use of force, force furthermore which will characteristically tum into violence if resistance is attempted. Therein lies a main reason why coercion is so objectionable; its intrication with force and immediate potential for violence. For violence is generally undesirable.^. It follows therefrom that coercive arrangements are generally undesirable and, devolving therefrom, If social organisation can be achieved without them, usually so much the better, certainly the more ethical. A main onus to show that coercive arrangements, such as the state characteristically incorporates, are inevitable, unavoidable or the like, thereupon falls upon archists. 'Since coercive power is self-defeating' and worse, a general theory of 'non-coercive authority' is presented as a 'pressing problem of this stage of history'.13 Unfortunately, the general theory has obtained but little development. But functionalism, in such forms as demarchy (to be transformed below), has gained some elaboration, by some in the peace movement. 14 Worse, Merrifield arrives at the "pressing problem" on the strength of the need for Rt/M? of solution to the authority problem': thesources, methods, and ends of authority (p.724). This "problem" is presumed by way of the following large (anarchist) assumptions: Authority is a requisite of all social life, since in its absence it is both psychologically and physically impossible to coordinate human behaviours so that the ordinary social processes can continue to operate and flourish (p.729). The main claim is an important part of what is at issue between anarchists and archists and is at best highly dubious. Moreover the reason offered in its support is false and should be rejected (a range of counter models and counter examples have been indicated or will be). Furthermore, Merrifield goes on (on the next page) to adduce information on organisations of a sort which 12 13 14 Sec wp in. Merrifield p.724 alluding to the wording Notably B. Martin A/Z&) -sy-Mezn of political functionalism. �16 serve to cast severe doubt upon his claim and its supporting reason. There are various nongovernmental organisation (NGOs), and some intergovernmental organisation (IGOs), which rely upon voluntary, permissive or non-coercive motivations ... to accomplish their functional purposes. ... They may explain, demonstrate, justify and argue, but they cannot usually coerce. The role of functional NGO's is even more pronounced. Lacking any coercive power, they must rely on the validity and demonstrability (p.725). Some of the organisation rely, or need rely, not at all on closed authority. Like the voluntary support and participation basis, so too the organisational structure is voluntarily maintained. There is no hard authority, and no conspicuous authority problem. Coercion, in this respect authority, is also open to objection on rational grounds. Namely, ways of controlling, governing, or getting rational creatures coercive methods are not to do things. Rationality—not the undesirability and demeanment of force not, or not just, freedom—is the ground of this objection. The analysis of coercion admits of immediate fruitful application to (internal) criticisms of anarchism. In the first place, it has been argued that anarchism does not avoid coercion but incorporates coercive elements—which would render it inconsistent (as normally characterised). Further, because of these coercive elements anarchism is incompatible with liberty, thereby multiplying inconsistency, as liberty constitutes one of its main goals. These alleged problems derive from the reliance of anarchism on public censure, and like methods, to control social behaviour. According to Ritter, for example, who makes much of the second problem^, anarchists have the following goals: an (admirable) commitment to liberty, and a heavy reliance on public censure. But these goals are incompatible. For such a 'social scheme relies so much on coercive public * censure (p.10, also p.l). However, the argument to incompatibility is invalid; it makes an illicit insertion of 'coercive * * 'coercive (as the quote above illustrates; in fact the prejudicial slipping in of and 'coercion * occurs right through Ritter's discussions; see e.g. p.25 top and bottom). The social scheme as described involves only public censure in a free setting; such censure does not imply coercion, as no use of force need be involved or even contemplated. Secondly, connectedly, there is a widely exploited false dichotomy between voluntary and coerced activity, under which it supposed that all activity which is not purely voluntary is coerced. To the contrary, the range of actions is more satisfactorily diagrammed as follows: Voluntary vs coerced activity In a first chapter short-tided 'Liberty and pubiic censure', particularly on a muddled p.2. ,u„ ZL.. �17 hard pressured ! soft pressured ) ! (entirely) free ) influenced encouraged (fully) coerced <Actions -* In most standard arguments for the state only the outer bounds are considered.^ But noncoercive methods can include a wide range of influenced or pressured actions, which are less than entirely free. The interesting argument that Dahl draws from anarchism, directed against the state, turns upon on the undesirability, indeed the intrinsic badness, of coercion. In essence (leaving out support offered for the premiss as) the argument is as follows: Pl. M? one Zs obZZg#R?6? to -report or o&ey a sfafe. P2. A// sfafes ore coercive. P3. Coercion Zs intrin-nca/Zy bnJ. P4. A society wit/iont a state is a yeasi&Ze aitemative to a society with a state. This conclusion derives fiom these premisses ('assumptions' as he calls them) Dahl draws Ave conclusions' (p.41). As these are not the most direct or pointed conclusions, let us sharpen the conclusions: Cl. AZZ states are necessariiy &aJ. ^rom P2 and P3 (equivalently recast as: all coercive items are intrinsically bad items), given that intrinsicaZZy so implies necessariZy so. Dahl prefixes Cl by the conjunct, 'because all states are necessarily coercive'. Not only does Cl not require that support; we do not have it (e.g. in P2). While coercion may be taken as defining of the state, or an essential characteristic of it, as Dahl does, however states are defined it is continently true that all of them are coercive. C2 No one has an o&ZZgahon fo, Zs o&ZZgafed to, to support or obey any state. From Pl and Cl. Again Dahl unnecessarily prefixes his analogue of C2 (as for Cl above). Insofar as political obligation is obligation to the state, C2'. 77iere Zs no poZZtZcaZ obZZgatZon; political obligation lapses. Conclusions Cl and C2 specialize, because democratic states are states, to democratic states (that is effectively Dahl's fourth conclusion, p42). Dahl, like Wolff, senses a democratic escape through unaminity procedures, and reaches towards a fifth conclusion, which we will subvert. P5. Unanimity decision practices (can) escape coercion. 16 See for instance Taylor's presentation of game-theoretic arguments. 2^ �18 P6. Democracy can operate through unanimity procedures. These procedures and democracy are presumed to apply to some society, community or association. C51. prac/zc&y (can) escape -yfafcF. C52. Democracy can operate wif/zoaf any .sfafe. This last conclusion is interesting because Dahl regularly assumes, as against anarchism, that democracy must operate through the state, and that democracy is therefore in compatible with anarchism. As conclusion C52 reveals, these assumptions are astray, on grounds Dahl himself supplies (the inadequacy of these assumptions will be independently investigated subsequently). It is worth noting that, irrespective of the merit of premisses P5 and P6 (e.g. because unanimity wears off, because of the rareness of unanimity), the conclusions do not follow without other lesser presumptions. For C52 the transitivity of opcrafc wifAoMf (doubtfully a universal linkage) is presumed, and perhaps some modal shuffles as well. For derivation of C51 from P5 what is presumed is that what escapes coercion escapes the state, which requires a strengthened P2 (already encountered), that states necessitate coercion (as well as a little of the logic of escapism). Dahl's third conclusion, after detachment of (three) because-clauses, is C3D. A// PMg/tf a? A minimal inference scheme enabling derivation of C3D from previously derived statements is this: P3D. where an item is necessarily bad and there is a feasible (less bad) alternative to that item, the bad item ought to be abolished. Then C3D follow from (strengthened) P3D. These are important arguments, both for principled anarchists and for archists, and Dahl rightly invests detailed study to certain of the premisses, those he imagines he can dispose of, most notably P2 concerning the coerciveness of states. It is not that other premisses and steps are not highly controversial; they are. The very first, Pl, yields at least the stock debate as to whether one is obliged to support or obey a bad law; for a state can be viewed as a structure of laws. Instead of an argument for Pl, Dahl offers a thumbnail history of its status, a genetic '^justification". Other justifications there are, rendered easier if P2 is strengthened (as it may be without upsetting the arguments dependent upon it) by replacing 'bad' by 'evil' or 'immoral'. Then initial support for strengthened Pl is that political obligation, likewise legal obligation, is a type of obligation, justified by considerations of obligation generally, and accordinging triumphed by ethical obligation. The detailed arguments for these themes gets down to fundamentals, to the justification of obligations through values. Briefly, obligations obtain only towards items which normally exhibit a sufficient level of positive value. An item like an evil state that condition. So no obligation obtains towards such a state. �19 To escape such an outcome, archists contend that certain states are not evil, for instance Dahl will claim that 'a democratic state is not an evil state" (p.40). Anarchists will by contrast assemble a great deal of evidence that democratic states, like others, are evil (see next chapter). The immediate issue is, however, whether states are evil in principle, by virtue of their coercive features. Now Dahl does not contest 'so elementary a proposition" as P2, the universal coerciveness of states. 'Like any state, a democratic state would use coercion to enforce democratically enacted laws ..." Accordingly, to make his escape, Dahl is bound to dispute P3, and does; coercion is instrumentally justified as a means 'essential to a good purpose , a democratic state (p.40). * As to supposed (second-rate) justifiability of coercion. A conionplace claim, which Dahl advances, is DI. Even though coercion is intrinsically bad, its use is sometimes (reasonably) justified (p.44). Which times?, on which occasions? will turn out to be a critical issue. As against Dahl, it will be contended that its use is never woraZZy justified. However in moral dilemma situations, where all other feasible alternatives have been exhausted, its use can be given a "secondary"" secondrate justification. Such a secondary justification, in very limited circumstances, gives no succour to the state, which depends upon and makes widespread use of much more coercion. That is, DI itself does not justify the sfaR?'.? use of coercion. The first argument Dahl offers is overtly dilemmatic. There is a 'recalcitrant wrongdoer , ( who simply will not refrain from doing serious harm to others. Despite the best efforts of his associates, neither reason, argument, persuasion, public opinion, nor the final sanction of social octricism dissuades him from doing harm. His associates finally conclude that he will persist in harming others unless he is forcibly restrained or threatened with severe harm (that is, coerced) (p.44). Why should that stop him, threats in particular (it does not deter young alienated men in contemporary states)? With ali due respect^the gentle best efforts cited by no means exhaust nocoercive methods available. But let us grant not merely that there are situations where coercion occurs (plainly it is presently a frequent occurrence), but that there are dilemmatic situations where a person may have no alternative in preventing violence but to resort to coercion, for instance in preventing or limiting assault upon another, in self-defence, and so on. In such circumstances, 'coercion would be employed—either by the wrongdoers or by those who restrained them" (p.44). Granted, it is employed. The issues however are whether it is morally permissible, and who may be justified. Certainly the wrongdoers are not justified, and what they do is impermissible. More controversially, what the restrainers do is also morally impermissible; even so their actions may be justified. Given the fixes they were in, where all alternatives were forbidden, still what �20 they did may be situationally justified, as a satisfactory actions in the dilemmatic circumstances.*7 Such situational justification is not what Dahl and other consequentialists are seeking; they want coercion justified without impermissibility strings attached. There is no reason, or need, to accede to their desires. Such a reasonable, and practiced, approach to moral dilemmas (which Dahl himself subsequently takes in his discussion of whether to always obey laws of a democratic state p.4950) here escapes notice. And Dahl introduces two difficulties he incorrectly presumes fatal to 'alternative position ... [that] violence and coercion are absolutely forbidden" (p.45). Firstly, given that coercion is employed, 'the position in self-contradictory". Wrong. For that coercion occurs, whether perpetrated by wrongdoers or by those trying to prevent wrongdoers, does no? imply that coercion is morally permissible (i.e. p -f Pp). Nor does the impermissibility of incompatibles imply self-contradiction, for the covering deontic functors cannot be deleted (i.e. -Pp & -P-p is no contradiction; of course given, what gets rejected, -Pq -* -q, contradiction would ensure). Also wrong, then, is what Dahl takes to emerge from such self-contradiction, no 'guidance for the most elementary choices", said to be an 'indefensible" position (p.95). For coupled with the story concerning moral dilemmas are suggested procedures for making choices (often far from elementary choices) from within the dilemmas. Secondly, Dahl wrongly supposes that so rendering coercion absolute makes it 'a supreme value that eliminates all other ends" including justice, freedom, etc. It does not. No hierarchy of principles (or values), this or another, is adopted, which is one reason why dilemmas occur. As in ordinary ethical practice, ^he principles stand, they are not simply prima they are not ranked, there are no 'trade-offs". It may have become apparent, what requires only a little between-lines interpretation, that Dahl is playing a rather familiar utilitarian game underneath the surface moral concern. Render 'the objection to coercion as a means ... not absolute but contingent on consequences". So weaken absolutist prohibitions on coercion and violence that generous room can be made for an institution which routinely practices them, and to which we can trade up with consequential advantage. Given that coercion occurs without the state, indeed may be quite widespread in the absence of the state, then there might be gains in installing a coercive imitation 'to restrict [!] and regulate coercion". Moreover, if 'on balance the gains from creating a state are likely to exceed the costs, then from a utilitarian perspective it would be reasonable to opt for a state" (p.45). There are two critical gaps in this utilitarian state-pleading. Firstly, impressive evidence for the conditional antecedent that the gains from the state exceed the costs has never been assembled, but rather evidence points in the opposite direction (as we shall see in the next 17 This controversial story has been told before, that for coercion resembles that already related for violence. The general theory of moral dilemmas (in MD) is applied to the issue of violence, control of pacifism (in WP TV). �21 chapter), so detachment from the antecedent is not warranted. Secondly, the performance even of better states in coercion is utterly unimpressive; these states foo amplify coercive practices, do not regulate basic cases, and so on. The state appears to exacerbate the levels, both in extent and intensity, of coercion, over the low levels genuine moral dilemmas would yield. It is unnecessary to contend, however, as Dahl asserts anarchists contend, "that if states did not exist coercion would soon disappear or decline to a tolerable level' (p.45). That judgement, which is not exactly an 'empirical' one, depends very much on the character of alternative societies. An individualistic society might enjoy high levels of coercion owing to the activities of its public-like protective agencies. By contrast, a well-organised society may be afflicted with comparatively little coercive behaviour, rendering Dahl's uncompleted utilitarian argument extremely difficult to complete, ever. Interlarded with the dulcet utilitarian approach, under which they beneficent, ^states will provide us with all those promised superior values many millions are still awaiting — freedom, justice, equality, and so on — lies a more sinister argument; that to the gangster state. That evil state is not so far removed, some may think, from many states that are presently recognised. Without the strong state, the gangster state looms, so Dahl insinuates. So adopt the state, or worse will eventuate. That sort of decision theory argument (itself unpleasantly coercive and out of the same big stable as utilitarianism) depends on some (derived) principle such as choose a least bad alternative, and accordingly fails unless another independent argument to the state succeeds. For otherwise superior stateless choices remain on offer. Yet nothing more than the po&H&iZi/y that a small gang of wrongdoers may pool resources, andwhat results may evolve into a "gangster state" is floated (similarly for claim 2, p47, that some group wng/tf manage to create a highly oppressive state, which is as true in many a state as in stateless conditions). There is a complex evolutionary path, with many obstacles and hitches, from a small gang, through growing rival gangs and protection rackets, to a single one, and thence to a state. It is moreover a path that is rather easily blocked at early stages in an organised society, as simple counter examples show (one such example, that of the Inuit, Dahl introduces on the very next page). Apart from the inconclusive utilitarian considerations, Dahl offers a further page, under the boldface heading 'On the Need for the State' (a strikingly minimal effort in a book of about 400 pages most of which are premised on the assumption that the state is a needed item). He concedes, what seems to put a large dent in his bold claim, that preliterate societies, like those of the Inuit, have subsisted, over long periods, without the state. But that is past history, the world has advanced, the state is here, there, and everywhere. Granted it is; that does not show it is needed. Many gadgets that are now produced are not needed. Consider Dahl s reasons why a return to societies without states is 'if not impossible, highly undesirable (p.46). First, the world is already too densely populated to provide much space for autonomy (p.46, less than a �22 page after the utilitarian promise of a satisfactory state maximizing 'freedom and justice'; similarly p.51 etc.) But there are many regions where autonomy could undoubtedly be increased by expansionary or imperial states backing off (not merely in East Timor, on the West Bank, etc., but in the lands of the Inuit, the Micronesians, etc.). Further, the denseness of human population, hardly affords a reason. For one thing, the excessive human population is highly concentrated; most parts of the Earth carry, by comparison, sparse populations. For another, autonomy does not depend, so directly, on available space. 'Thirdly, virtually the entire globe is now already occupied by states'. Similar points apply: for instance, such an accomplished fact does not establish a need, or the impossibility of change. While not true 'throughout recorded history', but a very modem phenomenon, it is no doubt recently confingenfZy true that 'small autonomous groups of people have been extraordinarily vulnerable to conquest and absorption by larger states', and that it is presently doubtful that 'states would permit any small, independent group to exist anywhere [much] on earth'. Such present yizcfo political power relations do not demonstrate a need, still less impossibility of alternative, still less undesirability of changes. Consciousness change could come very rapidly, furthermore, with a welcome change in popular attitudes in large democratic states to oppression of minorities elsewhere (in Europe this seems to be happening). These points also serve to destroy Dahl's second reason, that 'a multiplicity of interdependencies cannot be snapped apart without enormous costs that few people would accept.' The break-up of states in Eastern Europe shows that substantial changes can occur very rapidly; the costs involved were much higher than they should have been because of the attitudes of states, not attitudes of their peoples by and large. In sum, then, all Dahl has accumulated is evidence of the repressive grip of the present regime of states, rendering local change pragmatically very difficult. Such evidence does nothing to establish a need for states, nothing at all to establish the undesirability of stateless societies. Accordingly the main assumptions fail with which Dahl claims support his 'conclusion that if woM/J &^ff^r fo fry fo cr^afg a mfz^/acfory jfafe f/ian f/y io ^xAff in a .soci^fy wif%OMf o sfaf^' (p.47). As it happens, the failed assumptions also fail to support such a conclusion—without suppressed material, of the utilitarian cast already criticised. All the assumptions would indicate, werf they granted, is the practical undesirability of trying to set up small stateless associations in a regime of states like mot prevailing today exc^pf that the states are satisfactory. But the assumptions should be scuttled. * Aggfnsf Jowfnaffon Domination is an important type of power relation. It is a comprehensive relation: persistent over a period, not simply once-off or occasional, pervasive, extending over a range of action and behaviour. It offers confro/ in a spread of cases. In such cases, if the dominator exercises control (e.g. adjusts the appropriate controls, pulls requisite levers) then the dominated normally responds. A significant form of control within extended human affairs is that of A �23 command or ability to command. Of course the creature commanded, the servant, the domesticated animal, the subdued or subjugated person, has to be able to understand what is commanded. But domination operates in significant spheres where such conditions for commanding do not obtain: in particular, but not only, in the domination of nature, its parts and elements, such as animals that do not understand commands, biota that do not recognise manipulation, and so on. Domination originated with (what the etymology of the term reflects) lord-subjects and master-servant relations, which remain paradigmatic for this power relation. It was soon and easily extended to cover owner-slave relations, where control was much more extensive, God­ human relations, human-working animal relations, and so on. It has long covered parent­ children and husband-wife relations, as well as certain class relations; and as classes have changed with political restructuring, industralisation and the rise of cities, so have domination relations. Those of higher classes or castes tend to dominate those of lower ranking, similarly for those higher in new hierarchies. Domination of nature and its parts is a relatively recent addition to the varieties of domination, since the acclaimed success of "the war against Nature" (still going on last century) before which technological humans (lacked the considerable level of power they have now acquired over natural systems.^ An aim of softening or removing forms of domination links social and environmental objectiv&with anarchism. These aims are united in green social anarchism. Opposition to all forms of domination, is yet another extension of certain types of anarchism, perhaps incompatible with other types of anarchism (e.g. communal anarchisms which assume that affairs should be organised along strict patriarchal lines, which accordingly not altogether coherently oppose social archy only to retain or even reinforce a tribal or familial archy). There may by now be some confusion concerning the variety of extensions of anarchism encountered. More exactly these "extensions" are subextensions, which isolate the principle of some type or ( key feature of anarchism and generalize it. generalisation of principled subtype with distinguishing principle. 18 Intellectual vandals have been at work on dondnahon also, stretching it from a relation from ensembles of actors, the dominators, to whole structures, systems or institutions (what might be called by partial analogy with the vandalism worked on .sTrHctund domination). Stretched dominators include the capitalist economy, market forces, the economy, the state, and so on. Under the stretching, /to (structural) dondnadon is said to imply, what straightforwardly is right enough, no subordination of the people to market forces, or even, what is impossible to avoid in a sophisticated society, no influences on members through the operation of its economy. A �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document J SHORT CONTENTS OF TOWARDS GREEN ANARKISM: EUCRATIC POLITICAL INVESTIGATION? ? 0. PROLOGUE 1. EXPLICATIONS 2. ELABORATIONS 3. ARGUMENTS I 4. ARGUMENTS II 5. VARIETIES AND OPTIONS TAKEN 6. ECONOMIC ELEMENTS: PROPERTY, CAPITAL, MARKETS, TAX 7. POLITICAL ELEMENTS: ORGANISATION, DEMOCRACY, BUREAUCRACY 8. SOCIAL THEORY ELEMENTS: NATURE, CULTURE 8A LEGAL ELEMENTS 9. ECOREGIONAL STRUCTURES, EUTOPIAN MODELLING 10. ROUTES, TRANSITION 11. FURTHER CRITICISMS FOILED 12. PROBLEM RESOLUTION 13. EPILOGUE. BIBLIOGRAPHY (INCLUDING RESOURCES) by a minor marginaZi-s^J p/iiZo-yop/^r writing in 7. ? Richard Sylvan, Za^ At^nri^f/i c^nfary. PROLOGUE WHY GREEN ANARKISM? Green anarchism is not merely an intellectually attractive intersection of anarchism with genuine environmentalism; it is also a rational imperative. Modem states are not merely without justification; they are a major force driving and facilitating degradation and destruction of global environments, to points of no return for many natural species and environments, and even seriously threatening future human viability. Anarchism would, with full justification, remove these major problem sources. Green anarchism derives from anarchism coloured by a deeper environmentalism. Anarchism itself is said to be essentially a modem ideology, arising after, and in opposition to, the modem state. Though there may be significant anticipations of anarchism in earlier philosophy, and though there are many worthwhile examples of early anarchistic societies, the main intellectual work begins only in the late eighteenth century (with the eruption of the French Revolution). Since then there have been waves of anarchistic output of varying strength, the most recent initiated in Paris again in 1968^(immediately following a series of academic texts pronouncing that anarchism was dead)L In important respects this received picture, ever so lightly sketched, is misleading. Anarchist ideas were already advanced in those similar ancient ideologies, Taoism and Stoicism,** in opposition to ancient empires. Lao Tzu, shadowy founder of Taoism, was not merely a trenchant critic of the Empire, but advocated a society in which the ruler, the Prince, disappeared into a do-nothing exemplary and merely legendary figure. What Taoism asserted is virtually tantamount to Thoreau's small but crucial anarchist amendment to Jefferson, that the best government is the one that does not govern at all. In a similar vein, "Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, advocated a society without government. Laws should be abolished[!], since virtue and morality would only be achieved in liberty'.2 That common ancient tradition, spanning East and West, though often submerged, has never been lost. The Taoist tradition persisted (if often in degenerate form) in China, and heavily influenced west Asian adaptations of Buddhism. Stoicism survived, as (often degenerate) internal critic, for the duration of the western Roman Empire, and was directly incorporated into early Christianity. Although anti­ authoritarian features were subsequently suppressed in the Stoic-Christian tradition, elements survived even in the increasingly authoritarian climate of that religion, and the positive ideas have resurfaced again and again in religious freer-thinkers. 1 For details see Marshall pxi. Amusingly anarchism in Australia has more recently also been * Taoism and Stoicism can almost be seen as variants upon one another, back to the very names. It is tempting to conjecture that they may have both arisen from a proto-Toi-ism. Lehner, H of I, p.71. On Taoism as anarchist, see Clark, ch7, Marchall, ch4, and UT. 2 2 The term * anarchism' was however introduced into English in a highly perjorative sense, signifying disorder, chaos, lawlessness and the likeA It is regularly displayed in this negative connotation, in politically unstable times in England, long before much theoretical work on anarchism began (nonetheless there were tracts, like that of Winstanley). As a result, the term 'anarchy' got away to a very bad start in English. It was used, from the early 16th century onwards, to mean confusion, disorder, lawlessness, licence, and absence or nonrecognition of authority. Similarly for most of its cognates 'anarch', 'anarchal', 'anarchial', 'anarchic', 'anarchical', 'anarchially', 'anarchism', 'anarchist' and 'anarchize', (see OED entries). 'Anarchism' itself had also acquired its re/evanf modem sense of 'the principles and practice of anarchy or anarchists', namely 'the Doctrine Position or Art of those that teach anarchy; also the being itself of people without a Prince or Ruler' by 1656 (in Blount GZo^^gr). As a political theory anarchism is standardly said, however, to have emerged much later (and there are stock, 'inconsistent' presentations: a state without a state, government without government, theory without doctrine, order without order, etc.) It is the interaction between popular longer-standing usage and later serious ideological use that helps account for the astonishing folkloric history of the term aKarc/n-yTK. It also reflects one facet of the pervading amateurism of anarchism, its lack of industrious research. Consider what certain encyclopaedias say, beginning with one that is not so much wrong as sloppy. Historically the word "anarchist", which derives from the Greek an arc/io-y, meaning "no government", appears first to have been used pejoratively to indicate one who denies all law and wishes to promote chaos. It was used in this sense against the Levelers during the English Civil War and during the French Revolution by most parties in criticizing those who stood to the left of them along the political spectrum. The first use of the world as an approbatory description of a positive philosophy appears to have been by Pierre Joseph Proudhon when, in his (W%<3/ Af property?, Paris, 1840), he described himself as an anarchist because he believed that political organization based on authority should be replaced by social and economic organisation based on voluntary contractual agreement (Woodcock p. 111). According to a rival encyclopaedia, however, The word "anarchy" describing a stateless society was used[?J for the first time by Louis Armand de Labortan in his voyage Z' (1703), describing the Indians living in a society without state, laws, prisons, priests, private property, in short "in anarchy" (Lehning p.71). A glance at the OED, such as we took above, along with a comparison of the stories, reveals the falsity of many of these interesting contentions. Much historical detail remains to be sorted out satisfactorily. Though there are many histories of anarchism, until very recently a 3 The pejorative sense was not contrived or imposed following some significant political incident, such as the pivotal Chicago events of 1886, which is what Jp^ies 86 implies. No doubt, however, following the Chicago events, stigmatisation and denigration of anarchism, and its automatically assumed association with violence and disorder, were deliberately orchestrated and propagated in USA. Such an outcome contributed further to development of an already established anti-anarchist mythology. 3 reasonably satisfactory one had yet to be written. Fortunately that has now changed (during the drafting of this text). Conveniently we are now absolved from lamenting the absence of such work and likewise from attempting more historical detail.^ For Marshall's massive text, has now appeared, it can be deferred to (by no means always uncritically) on many historical issues and for mad detail, to which it affords fine access. The concentrate on systematic and theoretical matters. Most of the seminal and interesting work on anarchism has come from outside present text can now universities and standard intellectual circles, and often from political amateurs. Academics have contributed histories, surveys and (usually not so sympathetic) criticisms, but, with a very few exceptions, little original thought. $ For typically they are ideologically stuck with the state, be it a pathetically minimal one. Intellectuals are so inured to the state that they are inclined to such pronouncements as that the idea of abolishing the state entirely must strike us as utopian .6 Yes, as eutopian. 'Most political philosophers in the past few generations have been unable to escape what the psychoanalysts might call a "state fixation". Even those those temper and reason caused them to distrust a nationalist philosophy could not deal with the state except as a rigid entity. They wished it large or small, isolated or cosmopolitan, but in any case a rounded unit which had to be taken as it was and maintained as such in any reconstruction of... society'7 It is easy to speculate on reasons for this, connected with academics being part of the expensive state scene. While anarchism has vanished from the mainstream academic scene, it is again becoming visible, if hardly prominent, in alternative (especially green) scenes and in work of disaffected academics associated with them. A surprising amount of the adventurous anarchist literature now appears, like the earlier utopian literature, in fiction, especially science fiction (and so, under prevailing division of labour, tends to become a subject for literary criticism, not political philosophy). But the ideas and plans appear there in quite insufficient detail. There, moreover, it can easily be dismissed as fantasy, as unrealistic, not a serious and proper contribution to political dialectic. The entire range of political discussion concerns whether there should be marginally more government intervention, or marginally less; marginally more public expenditure on welfare services is marginally less. Nobody [much] challenges the whole system, still less the existence of the state itself. The state's own socialisation processes see to that (Luard p.52). While virtually all political discussion undoubtedly traffics in such marginalia, powerful and warranted challenges there certainly have been: It is plain that on general principles of law and reason ... the Constitution is no contract; that it binds nobody, and never did bind anybody; and that all those who pretend to act by its authority, are really acting without any legitimate authority at all: that, on general principles of law and reason, 4 5 6 7 In contrast thus to James 186 who reiterates the familiar lament. Even the very occasional (here deliberately unspecified) exceptions are exceedingly cautious. Miller p.182. Mitrany p.98. 4 they are mere usurpers, and that everyone ... has the right... to treat them as such.s Given the United States is not contractually legitimated, what other state is? None appears to have superior credentials! None is rationally legitimated, so it will be argued in detail. The State in general and in abstract is not justified. So, whether it can be exploited for environmental and social purposes or not, its use is not justified. Environmentalism is still more modem than anarchism. Though it has ancient roots, and though the movement grew substantially in the 19th century, fusing there with an earlier romantic movement, environmentalism is an archetypically 20th century ideology. The more widely diffused green movement is essentially a contemporary phenomena, no doubt the most distinctive new political force of the late 20th century (the feminism movement is older). Green anarchism draws together elements from environmentalism and anarchism. While it can be seen as continuous with environmentally sensitive later 19th century social anarchism (of Morris, Kroprotkin, and others), environmental problems now appear in a new light and take on a new urgency. For we are now confronted by what is not inaccurately referred to as the envzronmenfa/ crAyZy, combining the cumulative efforts of rapid human population growth, rapid concomitant growth of vast industrial and human pollution threatening and undermining biological life support systems, rapid depletion of habitats species and nonrenewable resources, and very extensive and worsening environmental deterioration. In the present parlous environmental predicament those concerned to take some requisite action, active environmentalists, have two opposently diametrically opposed courses open;9 * Supporting, and working through, strengthened states to try to avert the crisis. Central to 'most environmental justifications of [expanded] state power", according to social individualists, is the argument that people will not voluntarily r&yfram themselves from doing those things of which the environmental crisis is the aggregate effect. They will not voluntarily refrain from hunting whales and other species threatened with extinction, from having "too many children"", from discharging untreated wastes into rivers and lakes, and so on (Taylor pp 1-2, quoted in Grofman p.108). As in collective action theory (advanced typically by individualists), it is concluded (invalidly as will be seen) that state power is required to compel restraint and to undertake compulsory rectification. * Working outside states in more direct efforts to avert elements of the crisis. The alternative, that is, is to abandon the state. Here lies the main chance, and the only genuine long term alternative for a deep, as opposed to merely reformist, environmentalism. For under state regimes, more and more of remaining environments are degraded or destroyed, in the march of 8 9 Spooner (M? Treason) pp 27-8. The omitted phrase asserts that everyone has not only the right but is wtoraZZy to treat them thus. But here Spooner goes further than data seems to warrant, converting supererogation to obligation. (The phrase following the quotation echoes Miller p.38). These choices are differently presented and explained in SM, a main intellectual ancestor of the present work. The approaches complement one another. 5 state growth and economic progress. In fact, there are several reasons for the extra-state anti­ state course. There are serious limits to what states can accomplish, especially in international issues in the interstrices of states, but also as regards individual environmentally-hostile action. Moreover, even when it appears that states can a^t, or contribute, there are sharp limits to what they are prepared to do or attempt. States of course explain their tardiness or reluctance to move in various ways: prior higher commitments (e.g. endless economic ones such as creating jobs, containing inflation, etc.), the need for balance (with a constituency after unparaxeded of any environmental crisis, or wanting, like comments operating with anarchist discount rates, to party now), etc. Concerned environmentalists should take both courses: use the state and exploit state power where opportunities offer (without thereby endorsing the state and its standard practices), but also, more important, they should work outside states and against states. For mam co/ifn&Mfmg coarse o/The anJ ov^ra/Z o/?^rafmg fa worsen if. Given this (no doubt jaundiced) sfa^-mfrz'car^ thesis, surely it is hypocritical also to work through them and use them. Not at all; for states acquire and hold, have expropriated to themselves, considerable social wealth, which arguably should be directed to social concerns, including environmental amelioration. However, while states may properly be used so long as they persist, still ultimately halting the new ubiquitous environmental rot, salvaging or conserving some of what remain of viable environments, will involve, if it can be done, dissolution of states. There are powerful environmental reasons for trying to terminate / the present era of states. States are ineluctably committed to economic growth, of almost any sort; indeed they are main proponents of such growth. This commitment, certainly highly conspicuous, is not merely accidental, and is bound to impact negatively on environments. Australia, for example, needs a growth rate (in GDP) of at least 3% just to provide employment for its school-leavers, more to cater for immigrants, more to allow for some politically acceptable redistribution, more to meet rising aspirations. More, more, more .... States cannot step off the growth treadmill. That growth in turn requires, to deliver essential exports, expanded raids on resources and biological capital (if not that held by the state, that of other states). These exercises in tum inevitably mean, given present technologies and cost structures, pollution in many dismaying forms and environmental degradation.^ So growth implies environmental degradation. Therefore, with contemporary states degradation is inevitable. Such states are inevitably environmental vandals, n 10 11 A prominent recent attempt to block this sort of argument features economic growth subject to con train ts of environmental sustainability. While such constrained economic growth is a feasible (and old) idea, contemporary states, given their commitments, cannot and cannot afford to deliver it. A recent example concerns Australian production of greenhouse gases, where Australia cannot, officials now say, meet the costs involved in attaining expected reduction targets. Sustainable development itself is critically examined in r The kind of practical necessity operating here will concern us in later chapters. Logically there could be benign "states"; but these would be far removed from contemporary state arrangements. ( 6 There is exceedingly little evidence that social and environmental prospects will ever improve under the contemporary regime of states; instead much evidence to contrary has accumulated. "... Reliance on the state or a global superstate for change will lead to a continuation of many of the patterns of domination that the state has done so much to develop and reinforce in the past" the anarchist strategy of change "from below" ... [and "from above" is] much more promising'. Indeed the claim is made that The anarchist vision ... of a fusion between a universal confederation and organic societal forms of a communal character lies at the very centre of the on/y hopeful prospect for the future world order'. 12 Some of the pressures to continued exponential growth, and their environmental and social consequences, themselves positively feeding back to fuel demands for more growth, are colourfully observed in the following passage: One of the most widely pursued common goals of recent times has been economic growth, which is generally regarded as the most important ambition of states. These pressures to high rate of growth not only endanger the world's resources but do not even procure the material satisfactions they are intended to provide. For the effect of competition is that high rates of growth can be achieved only by high rates of investment designed to secure higher productivity. This secures equivalent production with more equipment but less labour. Thus more and more people are displaced from their jobs who cannot necessarily find alternative employment in service industries or elsewhere. All over the Western world, in shipbuilding, in steel, in motor manufacture, in textiles, in fishing, in agriculture and other industries, employment rapidly declines. So the total number of those unemployed increases in all industrial countries and remains high even in those where a relatively high rate of growth is being achieved. And the very fact of high unemployment, by reducing total demand, lowers the level of investment and growth for the future. Periods of growth become shorter and those of recession become longer. The relatively simple devices for stimulating growth in earlier times - lower interest rates, budgetary deficits, fiscal expansion and public works — are either not attempted through fear of inflation, or if attempted do not achieve their effect. Despite persistent recession inflation remains strong, partly because of excessive increases in income obtained by those still at work, partly because of the large sections of the economy which are in public hands and are unaffected by antiinflationary measures. Modern industrial societies, therefore, in appearance so advanced, are yet characterised by the bizarre spectacle of large sections of the population being without work, while ever higher levels of investment are undertaken to reduce employment still further in the future, so ensuring that the benefits of high growth are enjoyed by fewer and fewer people (Laurd p.147). A main dynamic involved can be summarised: Both the State and those major corporations which set much of its agenda aim to increase productivity (for reasons of profit, profile, firm or party growth and survival, etc.). But productivity increase characteristically sheds labour. Restoration of employment requires growth. Hence one heavy pressure to growth: sustaining employment. That pressure is, furthermore, one of many. Another derives from internal dynamics of corporations and bureaucracies. Like the state and capitalism, they all must, as Marx argued, 12 Clark, also quoting Falk from 'Anarchism of world order* in FVo/noj, p.160). 7 grow or die. There are many reasons for the growth imperative, both broad ideological and business specific.^ For satisfactory survival, satisfaction of its executives and employees, its stock holders, and so on, a modem corporation has to grow. Cpntr^l here are such matters as laws of profit decline otherwise, and more general principles of organisational aging and decline. If any serious ecological conclusion is to be drawn from Vol I, it is from Marx's compelling demonstration that the very law of life of capitalist competition, of the fully developed market economy, is based on the maxim, "grow or die". Translated into ecological terms, this clearly means that a fully developed market economy must unrelentingly exploit nature to a point ... that is literally regressive geologically and biologically. Capitalism, in effect, is not only polluting the world on a historically unprecedented scale; it is simplifying all the ecosystems of the planet, turning soil into sand, the oceans into lifeless sewers, indeed, threatening the very integrity of our sources of atmospheric oxygen. If one were to follow the logic of this tendency to its very end, capitalist— and hierarchical— society are utterly incompatible with a viable biosphere. What limits the ecological validity of Marx's view is obviously not his revelation of capitalism's "law of life" but rather the "progressive" role he imparts to capitalism's "success" in supposedly achieving the technical domination of nature. This Janus-faced aspect of Marx's writings is what throw them into conflict with an authentic ecological sensibility. Gorz, by contrast, sides-steps exacfZy what we must learn in the contradictory position of Marx, namely, that the very technical achievements of capitalism, fat^ from a-y-MmzZafing "ecological necessities as technical restraints", are governed by a "law of life" that technologically lacks any TES p.293) form of "restraint' Prevailing political arrangements 'no longer offer us a hopeful prospect of resolving the vast social and ecological crises which now confront humanity ... these systems, with their deep commitment to such values as industrialism, high technology, centralism, urbanization and the state, have been instrumental in creating the social atomization and ecological imbalance which are at the core of these crises' (Clark pp. 141-2). Indeed these systems are bound to exacerbate the problems. While these statements should by now be motherhood statements, they are not. Hope springs eternal: more naive environmentalists regularly appeal to a state that sometimes makes appropriate responsive noises and puts out appealing propaganda, but meanwhile is thoroughly committed to economic growth of environmentally damaging forms. The normal dynamic of th^ "advanced" state is extremely environmentally hazardous. Centralised states support environmentally and socially damaging methods of production, in order to benefit from the surplus and exploitable technology thereby produced - which are important for purposes of state, in particular for spending to remain in power (job generation, pork barrelling, subsidization of large business), for positional enrichment of the bureaucracy, and for development of the forces of coercion, propaganda and authority which matter both for internal social objectives and in order to remain militarily competitive in the region and spheres of influence. Details of the dynamic at work have become familiar from socio-environmental studies of state operation. For example, technologies that facilitate centralized authoritarian 13 The broad and ancient ideological reasons are investigated elsewhere, e.g. MSS. 8 control are favoured (such as nuclear power, which also supplies material for nuclear weapons). Such technologies serve the interests of state actors and those who benefit particularly therefrom, namely economically dominant social strata. This dynamic, which does not require any arms race, only kinds of inter-state competition, encourages ever-increasing productivity, entailing high consumption of resources, high output of pollution, substantial environmental degeneration and destru( tion, and so on. Active aware environmentalists have, in the end, little choice but to attempt to ;abotage this dynamic. 14 Opposition to anarchism from gi een directions, and especially from green infiltrators, often derives from the assumption that under anarchism all environmental regulation would lapse, that it would be an open-go, fret -for-all for anti-environmental forces—the very ones that are already running rampant over the Earth, and perhaps others besides. It needs to be stressed that this opposition rests on a misconception of what green anarchism ^is all about. With a caring anarchism there may be a complete of the usually conceived situations of states and stateless societies, as regards environment regulation and social support. It should not have escaped notice that often states are the prime enemies of environmental regulation, improved environment practices, and the like. Even when there is very extensive community support for regulation, the state acts to block it, and aids and abets damaging practices! A central reason for this is that the state typically reflects a rather narrow range of vested interests, increasingJhese days those of dominant business, not community interests except very secondarily. Contrary then to received conceptions, the state is frequently not a means to, but an obstacle to, satisfactory regulation. Satisfactory green regulation can occur, can only occur, without the modern state. It will be argued that not only are there no intellectual or theoretical problems in dispensing with the state, but fuller there are no serious losses in disposing of it. There is no case for the state, and no need for it. But it is worse than that: it is predominantly bad in its impacts. Accordingly, it ought not to be in place. The practical upshot is that that we should endeavour to remove it. Among the incidental practical difficulties arising as a result, are that for complex societies there is a need for some structure to replace the state (not a intractable theoretical problem any longer). As well there is a need for a strategy to displace the state. That is where radical environmentalism enters again. A thoroughgoing environmentalism accordingly forces a significant type of anarchism, a social non-capitalist anarchism. The basic reason it forces anarchism is that the state, a prime anarchist enemy, not only fails to supply or retain environmental goods, but is frequently actively involved in their degradation or removal. The state is a major facilitator and powerful source of environmental degradation and destruction. Genuine greenness further substantially constrains the directions anarchism can take, the variety of admissible anarchisms. It serves to eliminate as a serious option total reliance on 14 This argument is adapted from A. Carter, Towards a green political theory*. While Carter's way out is not endorsed, his elaboration of the dynamic is, more or less. LL market methods, as proposed for instance under anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. While excessive reHance upon capitalist markets is rejected, primarily because of heavy externalities, more traditional markets are given a rather free role. The problems with market-capitalism is not so much markets, except as distorted in a capitalist setting, but capitalism.^ Capitalism, both in theory and as normally practised, is a major enemy of environmentalism, and a main source of environmental problems. Capitalism also encourages, what conspicuous capitalists conspicuously exhibit, environmentally unacceptable lifestyles. Greenness also sharply constrains meta-politics. For example, it counts heavily against standard game-theoretic approaches of analytic political philosophy, because these entirely discount environmental effects (except as reflected through human actors' self interests). This work concentrates upon the anarchist components of green anarchism (the green part is attempted in a companion text on green ideology). It is primarily a theoretical work; it concentrates upon what is sometimes usefully called "theoretical anarchism". Because the work does focus on anarchism, little will be said about present green politics (and what thin associated theory there is), because that generally involves politics within conventional state settings. Where this differs from past anarchism is not only its environmental depth, but in the level of detail of arguments, criticism, and organisational structure. The latter especially,jwhere IT- 1 a; thin and threadbare historical anarchism is particularly weak. It is not enough to gesture towards some federation of communities. Details of organisations at each level need to be provided, for a more convincing story. Most of the disappointingly slight contemporary academic literature on anarchism will not be addressed or, if it is, criticised in much detail. Life is too short for that sort of indulgence. However much will have been criticised obliquely or in passing; and enough critical detail is supplied for direct critiques to be produced (as exercises by energetic readers). While there is mMc/z scope for theoretical improvement of anarchism, there is little room for reinventing anarchism. There is a long and distinguished Hne of amateur anarchist thought form virtually every significant idea that will be which contains in seminal (if developed herein. Thus, like most of the academic literature^this text is not particularly original. Unlike much of that literature it does not pretend to be. Virtually everything in this book has been said before, if not in anarchist theory then elsewhere; scarcely anything is original. But it has never been put together quite like this before. Moreover, some of it needed and needs saying again, with a little new information and arguments a bit differently ordered. But no means all is repeated. Where something, perhaps important for the dialectic, is said at least as well I can reiterate it, I simply cross-refer. That has the effect of making the work visibly less contained (self-containment is ^bmething of an illusion), but it saves on labour and materials. For other purposes too, repetition, despite its extravagance, may be important. Significant 15 On the deliberately neglected, or papered over, major differences between marketism and capitalism, 10 ideas and books often get neglected, because for instance they were not published at the right times, in the right places, by the right authors; they did not get duly circulated, and so forth. I judge the time at least is more propitious for green anarchism than it has been, perhaps ever before. As well, there are many things that this book, which is pitched in a theoretical, rationalistic way, does not aim or attempt to do. It does not attempt to supply much background, historical or other information, a lot of which is easily found in better equipped libraries. Relevant background can all be tracked, however, through references in work referred to in this book. 16 It does not attempt a full account of substitutes for important current institutions and arrangements such as those connected with property, markets, law, and so on; nor does it offer, what is warranted, a sustained critique of prevailing arrangements, for which opposite substitutes are sought and indicated. Fortunately again, some of the critique, if not positive detail of substitutes, has been well accomplished in other texts. 17 What is attempted is however a scholarly and systematic work (though, as indicated, a far from exhaustive work), on theoretical anarchism. Accordingly the book is littered with notes, some of which merely cite references, but many of which elaborate points in the text, especially details hat lead off in different directions from the thrust of the text. I should like to thank Frances Redrup for processing reams of inelegant scribble, from which this text grew, and to acknowledge the continuing support the Australian National University gave during slow production. I want to thank Debbie Trew for proofing the typescript (no straightforward business) and organizing a bibliography. I should record my gratitude to Bob Goodin for a continuing supply of background books, and to him and to the publishers and editor of Anarc/iAyf 16 17 for encouraging me to work upon anarkism again. A major recent source, for history of Northern Hemispheric anarchism, is, as observed, Marshall, While Marshall concentrates, no doubt correctly upon Northern hemispheric activity, and within that heavily upon Anglo-American work, there is room for a supplementary production taking due account of anarchism elsewhere, Australia for one example. Although an anarchist club was formed in Melbourne only a century ago (and then upon an American model), an extraordinarily sustained period of "original anarchism" (coupled often with "original (or primitive) affluence") flourished in Australia before European settlement two centuries ago, with more than 500 centuries perhaps more than 10000 centuries, of continuous Aboriginal anarchist arrangements. Much of the story of post-settlement Australian anarchism (which included remarkable Queensland activity and a Paraguayan expedition organised by Lane, as well as extensive Victorian agitation) is recounted by James, in a series of local publication, add Burgmann and by Souter. The story of Australian Aboriginal anarchism has yet to be told. The story for the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, both before and after European conquests and political imposition, remains to be satisfactorily told. Thus, for instance, Carter on property, Bumheim on bureaurcracy, othe^on democracy. A // 1. EXPLICATIONS OF ANARCHISM CHAPTER and of green subforms G 1. Initial explanation: fud and dilute forms, and corollaries. Anarchism is the theory, principles or practice of anarchy. As practised by engaged anarchists, who are naturally adherents, authors or promotors of anarchy, it includes the assertion of anarchy and rejection of nonanarchy, i.e. rejection of archy. Anarchy itself, in its norma/ political form, applies to societies or communities, territories or countries. It is, according to the dictionaries, the following sort of condition or state: lack of coercive government, absence of a political state, want of authoritarian political heads or leaders, institutions or organisations. Politically there are evidently fhr^ j^racrara/ aa^ar/(y, ca^rciaa, and normally comprehending both, the political .yraf^.i The anchoring notion of anarchy has recently been extended beyond political arrangements to apply to other institutional forms such as the Church, Science, and Law, to mean alternative forms lacking authoritarian structure and coercive methods. Thus appear, under transference, such varieties as epistemological anarchism and philosophical anarchism, instead of po/zfzcn/ anarchism upon which this text focuses. However the far-reaching analogies should not lost sight of; they matter. Anarchism is to political authority, as atheism is to religious authority, and rather as scepticism is to scientific authority. Although the conditions specified for anarchy are normally taken as conjoined, it is possible to construe them disjointly, yielding what could be called anarchisms. One diluted form which has obtained a little exposure is a /zzzzz^J anarchism appropriately opposed to the state but prepared to endorse carefully-controlled coercive authorities.^ A differently diluted form is a anarchism which is opposed to all prevailing states, because of some serious but in principle removable defect or other of each and every one of these states, but is not opposed to the very idea of an ideal state, or to a new wonderful order of states; that is it is, not, so to say, a principled anarchism. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether historic anarchists are j?rznczp/^r/ anarchists or merely de facto ones. There are limits to how far definitional dilution should be allowed to proceed: a theory (such as libertarianism) postulating a minimal coercive centralised state presumably exceeds acceptable diluted bounds, as n^key element is retained. Within such bounds, we shall operate both with full and dilute forms, accounting all anarchism (in a bro^d sense, qualifying as need be). Routes to full anarchism may well lead through dilute forms. Indeed these offer main paths towards anarchism proper. -t These three key elements are duly signposted in many, though not all, serious on anarchism. J- 12 It is evident that anarchy, and therewith anarchism, can be better characterised, negatively, through what it rejects, namely to sharpen the characterisation, centralised coercive forms, than in assertive formulation obtained through awkward locutions like 'absence' 'lack' 'want'. The simpler negative formulation (supplying the of anarchy), rejection of archy, makes it immediately evident that much of what vulgarly pass for meaning conditions upon or essential features of anarchism are not. Firstly, a variety of political arrangements and organisation, including of government, are entirely compatible with anarchy. It is enough for these arrangements not to include anarchy-violating features such as authoritarian or coercive elements. For example, a government without such elements, a government nonetheless in the dictionary sense of 'administration of public affairs', satisfies the principle of anarchy, and so is anarchistic. Such an anarchistic government can include normal components of organisation, regulation and control, so long as they conform to the principle. Certainly a territory without government, since therefore lacking an archist government, is anarchistic. But the popular converse fails. An anarchistic system may well, like several societies substantially destroyed by European conquest, have a small smooth-running public administration, free of authoritarian elements. Thus it would have a government, but not an authoritarian government. No doubt it would also be in a predominant modem, but narrow, use of 'government'. The term 'government', which is variably determinable, vacillates in particular between * administration of public affairs (including control, regulation, what it once meant) and its important and now dominant restriction, the enarchistically unacceptable determinate, * authoritative administration of public affairs (i.e. that exercising authority, and characteristically backed by coercion). Much confusion concerning anarchism has resulted through failure to separate the wider and narrower determinates^ It may well be true that, as dictionaries assert, an anarchist would 'oppose all existing systems of government'; but this is not a matter of meaning, it is contingent upon the character of prevailing state systems. Nor therefore are prevailing political forms everywhere so far removed from anarchistic alternatives: they may even overlap them. Make the following kind of thought-experiment concerning the government and operation of some modem freer, less violent, more peaceful society: the coercive and authoritarian elements are blacked out (both operational components and what they typically operate upon). For instance, there is a strike of relevant groups, judges and accused, police and criminals, prison warders and prisoners, etc. (perhaps because the broad society had reduced the opportunities for crime and accordingly threatened their contra­ operative livelihoods). What may well happen, what we shall imagine happening, is that governmental affairs simply keep running for some time. Things work well enough. Partial examples of just this sort of phenomenon are not uncommon, as when police forces go slow or strike. For example, when traffic police stop work traffic keeps on going, much as before. It may be irrelevantly objected that such anarchistic periods are mere interludes, presupposing surrounding authoritarian structures (somewhat as anarchistic end-states of marxism are premissed on preceding super-productive authoritarian states). Such thought experiments were designed to remove a different intellectual blockage: the common assumption that anarchism is utterly remote from the political practice of complex modem states and impossible to realise at all. As a theory, anarchism tends to advance a stronger theme than the progressive particular claims that anarchistic systems are possible, realisable, and sometimes realised. After all, these arrangements may be realisable—as more than an interlude—only in restricted or anomalous circumstances (e.g. a few people on an isolated tropical island). The stronger theme, linked with the anarchist principle, is that there is no need at all for authoritarian or coercive regulation. So rejection can succeed universally. Universal anarchism encounters many problems which do not trouble less ambitious parfict/Zar anarchisms, such as those to be advanced here. For example, how to rectify especially degenerate or evil societies? An attempt is sometimes made to render all anarchism universal, through the connecting thesis that for anarchism to succeed anywhere it must succeed everywhere (else be destroyed by ruthless, expansionist or greedy states, or similar). Fortunately the fallacious connecting thesis, though popular with critics, is implausible.^ Although anarchism proper does exclude certain kinds of government, coercive and authoritarian forms, it does not automatically include, certainly not as a matter of semantics, specific positive kinds. Anarchism is not necessarily "a theory of government based on the free agreement of individuals rather than on submission to law and authority", despite what dictionaries assert (incompatibly incidentally with their definitions of 'anarchy'). Such positive accounts of anarchism, as offering a certain theory of government, both try to convert a particular variety, individualistic anarchism, into the more general object, and try to import a certain motivation for, or differently explanation of, or justification of, anarchism into the very essence of the object (this is the general fallacy of verificationism in operation). Anarchism, or at least its assertion, may well be regularly motivated by ideals of free arrangements, not imposed by narrow or incompetent authoritarian forces, but motivation is one thing, meaning 14 another, verification a third. Not only is the assumption that anarchism is incompatible with government, wellregulated government, mistaken. So also therefore are the assumptions that anarchism is incompatible with organisation, with regulation, with a positive noncoercive "law", with order. So mistaken therefore are the widespread assumptions that anarchism entails disorganisation, disorder, confusion, lawlessness, chaos. Yet all these negative associations have been incorporated into degenerate popular meanings of anarchism. It is similar with related assumptions that anarchism implies violence, paramilitary activity, or terrorism. A popular picture of the anarchist, encouraged by authors like Conrad and Dostoevsky, is the excitable fictional character with a bomb in his pocket (not a Tolstoy or a Thoreau).5 These too are assumptions and pictures, with little basis either in semantics or in general anarchist theory or practice, promulgated by an unsympathetic opposition generally comfortable in present poor to appalling political systems or unaware of alternatives. With anarchy, as with many other valuable terms, a concerted confusion or destruction effort has been made, part of an extensive terminological vandalism in human intellectual affairs. Rather than reconciling ourselves to sacrifice of the damaged term anorc/ug/n, let us salvage the term explicitly for the pristine notion, and isolate the conventional associations under the term anarchi-pm, shortened, if a single term is sought, to Most fictional anarchists of system-supportative authors are degenarchists; but they are far from representative of anarchists. There are many anarchists who are not terrorists, few who are; there are many who are not dangerous troublemakers bent upon violently upsetting local settled order; increasingly there are many anarchists within environmental and peace movements, many of them anarchists. Gentler anarchisms tend to be all of more pacific, more social and more rational than tougher or hardened anarchisms. 2. Rival, typically defective, definitions, and beyond. Much of what is taken as typical or even characteristic of anarchism, especially popularly and journalistically, consist of optional extras, not even typical of anarchism. They represent, like what gets written into degenarchism, attempts at easy smearing or dismissal of anarchism, for instance as an ideology unworthy of serious consideration. As regards violence, terrorism, disorder, disorganisation, confusion, these sorts of point ought to be well enough known. But they apply also to other more benign features widely taken to characterize anarchism, such as attempts to tie anarchism variously to individualism, capitalism, voluntarism, primitivism, spontaneity, or socialism. Thus such erroneous characterisations of anarchism as those of the selection that follows:- 5 15 * One utterly appalling characterisation comes from a Russian DzcZzozzrzzy of PAz/o^op/zy. ^ "Azz^zrc/zz^zzz, a petty-bourgeois socio-political trend that is hostile to all authority and the state, and counterposes the interests of petty private ownership and small peasart economy to the progress of society based on large-scale production" * Another dismal, indeed wild, characterisation comes from an American political scientist, who audaciously asserts that "anarchism ... is anti-political—that is, it does not really offer political solutions" (p.l), rather "the primitive core of anarchism is not so very different from Christianity. That is, it rests on the notion that man has a need, not just a preference, to love" While this is wild, there are convergences and congruences between types of anarchism and early Christianity.? * It is "a political doctrine based on the value of individual freedom"? While this is not wild, it does erroneously convert what is a frequent powerful motive, and reason, for anarchism into part of it, confusing motivation and justification with essence. For it is by no means an invariant feature. A socialist or monastic community, placing no great emphasis upon or even discouraging individuality, can be organised anarchistically. * It is "a theory of government based on the free agreement of individuals rather than submission to law and authority" (Concz-y^ Eng/zj/z Dzcfzozzazy). But it also asserts that the same %7z#rc/zz.yAy "... are opposed to all forms of government". That inconsistent information should, as already seen, be discounted. Furthermore, there may be no free agreement; an anarchistic situation can, as already also seen, just happen. More likely, a sustained anarchism may emerge under favourable historical opportunities, again without any sort of contract or general agreement; it is then only zf there were free agreement. Certainly, there would no longer be "submission to authority", but there would likely be systems of rules, which people normally followed. * The very short characterisation of rzzzrzrc/zMzzz (and rendition of zzzMrc/zz?^) as "no government" is defective because of the elasticity, slippiness and determinability, of "government"? For example, to increase documentation, according to one dictionary ((/zzzv^r^zz/ Ezz^/z^/z), gove?7Z7?zenf means "... system of polity in a state; territory ruled by a governor ..." in which case it incompatible with anarchism; but it also means "... control; administration of public affairs" in which case it is certainly no? incompatible. Granted there have been attempts to represent anarchism as if it entailed no organisation or administration at all (state-of-nature arguments regular rely on this fallacy of false dichotomy), but it does not, and if it did there would be a gap for a near-identical relative (a/za&yrz^ for instance) to All. One of the rather better brief characterisations is the following: "a social philosophy that rejects authoritarian 6 7 8 9 Ed I. Frolov, 2nd revised ed, Progress, Moscow, 1989. Apter p.3. HI p.70. For such proposals see e.g. Carter,Websters' Dictionary (?), Marshall p.3. 16 government and maintains that voluntary institutions are best suited to express man's natural social tendencies'/ (Woodcock, Ency Phil, p.lll). While the first negative conjunct, which n governmental' right, might rate a pass (though anarchism is not always a philosophy, it is sometimes a practice), the second positive conjunct calls the whole account into doubt. Many humans naturally thrive in authoritarian settings. Defective definitions of anarchism abound, many regrettably supplied by high profile anarchists or well-regarded commentators (whereupon they assume a certain air of authority, a bogus air). A few examples will be considered, mostly drawn from a large list of similarly defective definitions included in Clark, who is out to show that any definition which attempts to do justice to anarchism through an essentialistic definition deploying one simple idea is bound to fail, abysmally, to does not 'mean literally "without government'" contrary to Carter, for one. It does however imply systems without governments of prevailing sorts, which is what she immediately proceeds to: 'and the lowest common demominator of anarchist thought is the conviction that existing forms of government are productive of wars, internal violence, repression and misery' (p.14). Right on! Kropotkin, for another, defines 'anarchism' in terms of 'society ... without government'. Like most of the brief definitions to be cited, this is neither necessary #)r sufficient. For 'government' has to be narrowed to its coercive and authoritarian determinate, and other archie arrangements also excluded. Many, Runkle for one, maintain that anarchism 'opposes authority in all its forms'; but elsewhere Runkle holds that its essence is individual liberty'. Others, Goodman for one, suggest anarchism is defined in terms of decentralization, still others, Bakunin for one, suggest characterisation in terms of 'organization from below upwards, by means of federation'. Again this is neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not so easy to And an adequate characterisation of anarchism. (I have found none in the literature, despite some searching. That is reason why a certain amount of work has gone into such basics). There is a tendency to leap from the inadequate to the excessive—a tendency exemplified by Clark, who also cites Woodcock approvingly. Anarchism is first contracted to a rather elaborate doctrine, or political theory, thereby excluding practice. Then requirements are sharply inflated: For a political theory to be called "anarchism" it must contain: 1) a view of an ideal, non-coercive, non-authoritarian society; 2) a criticism of existing society and its institutions, based on this anti-authoritarian ideal; 3) a view of human nature that justifies the hope for significant progress towards the ideal; and 4) a strategy for change, involving immediate institution of non-coercive, non­ authoritarian, and decentralist alternatives (p.127). As Clark indicates, this "minimum" "definition" is an elaboration of another account, briefer and 10 See Clark p. 118ff. Clark's attack on essentialistic definitions is in the style of Wittgenstein. 17 better, that Woodcock also offers: 'historically, anarchism is a doctrine which passes a criticism of existing society; a view of a desirable future society; and a means of passing from one to another" (cf. p.120). There is nothing here about human nature, which anarchism need have no particular views about, perhaps rejecting the notion altogether as part of archist propaganda or similar, n There is nothing about the ideal society, or any commitment to one. Anarchists are not seeking societies; that is an illusory, Enlightenment goal, have transformed to get another excessive condition of adequacy for anarchist societies. It would be quite enough to achieve satisfactory societies. 12 Realistic anarchists may even come to appreciate that there are no ideal societies, perhaps just various less unsatifactory and better justified societies than virtually all of the extraordinarily narrow range of modem societies presently exhibited or on offer. However Clark's discussion of "the ideal"" reveals that he does not really intend an ideal, but only one or other of the plurality of societies meeting certain adequacy conditions. It certainly does not intend a unique one, ideal. 'Some adequate" or similar should substitute" for 'an (the) ideal", and the definition should be duly pluralised. Outside explications of anarchism which answer back to dictionary accounts, there are various high redefinitions (e.g. Clark) and some weird redefinitions. One such weird redefinition is that proferred by Taylor, who—rightly enough contrasting anarchism with the presence of the state where there is a concentration of the means of deploying force—defines a as where 'force is perfectly dispersed, not concentrated at all" (82 p.6). But Taylor does advance from pure anarchy, of which there are no examples, to an illuminating discussion of the exercise of concentrated force in societies. In recognisably anarchistic societies there is but limited concentration of force (based on physical inequalities), which 'is /10c in use. There is no standing specialist group or organisation or centralised system of groups...' No doubt a /MZ/er anarchist f/t^ory has to accomplish much of what excessive characterisations of anarchism,^ list, and more. Any reasonably full theory should * include a critique of authoritarian and coercive features of present and past societies and their institutions; 11 12 13 The important matter of such "nature" is discussed later.. Presently we are very far removed from such societies, except for small communities mainly in rich countries. States have done extremely poorly in this regard. There is not one satisfactory state in all of Africa or the Americas. Even small European states that at least have avoided extensive poverty, homelessness, and violence are in doubt because of * virtually entire destruction of their natural environments * reliance for wealth on impoverished Third World countries * justified dissatisfaction of many of their inhabitants. those of Woodcock and Clark p.120, p.126. r 18 * outline features of noncoercive nonauthoritarian societies as alternatives to, and improvements upon present dominant social arrangements, for some regions at least; * suggest strategies for attempting to change from defective forms to improved alternatives. Clarke also tries to insist, what we shall subsequently reject, that for a 'theory to called "anarchism" it justifies the hope for significant progress towards the ideal' (p.127). As well as theory, there is practice. (Clarke also goes astray in excluding anarchism as a , "anarchism without doctrine", and so on.) The pracfice of anarchism, generously construed, naturally includes the state of being in anarchist conditions, of living under anarchism (though perhaps unaware of doing so). There is scope for wfr/toM? Many primitive societies thus qualify as anarchistic; they practice, or practiced, anarchism though unaware (somewhat as wild animals practice hygiene, knowing without knowing ;%af). Further, no doubt now stretching 'practice' beyond its assumed anthropic context, many animal communities practice anarchism, very successfully. Many attracted to anarchism, an anarchism without name even, long for analogous pure practice, many practicing environmentalists for instance. They hope that whatever it is will operate, perhaps even materialize, without any heavy-duty theory, without excess or even any intellectualizing, perhaps without even thought or much effort on their part. In contemporary circumstances they would have to be extraordinary lucky; a paternal state with caring elements, such as safe jobs and spoon-fed indoctrinal education for all citizens, does not relinquish its control voluntarily. While definitions can be defective or otherwise unsatisfactory, in m^y ways, one thing they are not is dogmatic (as suggested by Marshall, none too subtlely trying to evade critical details in delimiting his massive study, p.3). Though insisting upon^themes definitions yield upon substitution can be dogmatic, having or offering definitions is not. Significant criticism of definitions is logically different, belonging to different categories. As well as decking anarchism out with defective definitions, with all the scope for argumental malpractice that affords, there is a coupled practice of boxing anarchism in, by narrow and confining constraints, jf iZZ/czf/y ctrcMWMcri&ing (Whereas definitions characteristically yield necessary and sufficient, conditions, such circumscription concerns necessary, or possibly sufficient conditions). Many of the restrictions imposed are, however, quite inessential, and have rather the effect of excluding viable alternatives. Simple examples concern waAmg, which is sometimes taken as having always to be case by case, and elsewhere is seen as necessarily involving all parties, large assemblies, or even complete social participation. None of this is essential, often the restrictions would prove undesirable. Often the circumscription technique proceeds by presenting features of, or said to be of, 19 historic anarchism, then tacticly assuming that all anarchism must conform to those features.*4 That is one reason why definition and characterisation are important; so anarchism is not set in riged past forms, unable to adapt to new circumstances and ideas. Another example concerns the character of the anarchist revolution, onto which many restrictions are loaded, often resulting in gratuitous puzzles, which are removed with the impositions. For example, it is said that 'the revolution had to be a mass affair" (M p.94). But nothing in anarchism, or its general development, requires this. (As a result the dilemma Miller finds .p.99 ff., simply falls over.) A revolution could be carried out by an elite anarchist band, or, in some states, through a single governor or president. Again, it said that the revolution is bound to be authoritarian (which renders an anarchist revolution contradictory), violent, and so on. This we have on authority from Engels: 'a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles [etc.] authoritarian means, if such there be at all', to which Miller adds approvingly that to say in power the party must rely on military means and 'terror of arms' (M p.92). None of this is so. A revolution could lag rapid change through mass conversion; for instance, there is a sign or appearance that is widely recognised, a new social movement which spreads like "wild fire", etc. 3. Anarchism and the state. While organisation and government are entirely compatible with anarchism, that most conspicuous modem institution, the state, is not: it is the paradigmatic archist form. Nor are ancient power formations such as the empire and the kingdom really compatible with anarchism. A prime reason is their authoritarian character and their extensive use of coercion and violence, but reasons als<4 includd^hein centralized organisation (such as power and hierarchical structure). Let us focus upon the state, against which a major and often virulent part of anarchistic political critique is directed; indeed such is the opposition to the state and its features that anarchism is sometimes distinguished in that way, in terms of 'hostility to the state ... [which] should be abolished and replaced by a new form of social organisation' (thus Miller p.5). But again these may be consequential, not characterising features of anarchism, which are derived from characterising features together with a standard theoretical characterisation of Under one such standard (though fairly strong^) characterisation, the state is a and 14 15 This is a much favoured tactic with critics of anarchism. For many examples, some only Quoted in the main text, see Miller. Although strong, in certain respects the characterisation is not strong enough. A state must not only be able to c/ai/n all these sorts of power, but sometimes to exercise them. Cf. Taylor's criticism of Weber's definition of the state (p.5). A body ... it claims complete authority to define the rights of its subjects .... Second, the state is a body, in the sense that everyone bom into a given society is forced to recognise obligations to the state that govern that society. Third, the state is a body: it claims a monopoly of force in its territorial area, allowing no competitor to exist alongside it (Miller p.5). It also normally claims other monopolies, such as on legal tender. It is virtually immediate, powers. So it is that anarchism is often epitomized as directed at the dissolution of, what is widely seen then, that the state is a comprehensive as major political problem, the state. As to why it is such a problem, anarchist critiques of the state, sketched below, will reveal. With anarchism implemented in a place there is then an end there to any institution that is recognisably a state. The subsequent argument for anarchism does not depend upon a strong characterisation of .yfafe, such as that so far offered. Even fairly weak characterisations will serve. But inadequate characterisations, such as the following, will not: 'a collective object with territorial boundaries and political organisation throughout that territory". For that omits essential features of the state, such as sovereignty, authority, coercive control; it describes a possible anarchist society. 16 Arguments/or the state (which anarchism is normally concerned to fault) are however sensitive to characterisation. Mostly these arguments reach little further than, justify no more than, some sort of "minimal state"", very different from anything the Earth has had on offer (e.g. a nice state guaranteeing basic rights rather than removing rights: but anarchism need hardly oppose such arrangements). So it will matter just how ^<2^ is characterized. But this is easier said than done: is a ^k cluster ( muqti-criterial) notion, explications of which are controversial and typically contested.i? In seeking a satisfactory working characterisation, a useful starting point is the following short definition: 'a collective item with territorial boundaries and political organisation exercising sovereign power".is As anarchism can comfortably accommodate the first parts, political organisation within a region, it is the last part, sovereign power (as spelt out, e.g., in Miller's account) that is the problematic distinguishing factor. In a way, the term ruling sui^ipreme, derived from la&Ctptein which reflects the Greek reigning or says it all, why anarchism is bound to oppose a state so empowered. Improved detailing will exhibit a similar division between acceptable and unacceptable. A state, which comprises a 16 A' 17 18 q/ Virtually all the key political terms that we shall encounter have a disconcerting multiplicity of meanings: so it is with state, sovereignty, democracy (422 senses in Naess p.30), ideology, and so on. Fortunately these terms are dealt with^ elsewhere in this work. For a useful attempt at a multi-criterial characterization,and discussion of controversies over characterisations see Dun^eary "The state * (in Goodin & Pettit). Reese, with 'item * substituted for 'entity * to evade reificative issues. 21 interconnected (their level of cohesion justifying a definite description), has domains consisting of a and of who form an associated society. The territory of a state consists of spatial regions, over which it normally exercises control. Subjects are generally those humans who regularly reside in the territory (citizens form a of subjects, singled out by possession of certain duties and rights). The state is not the only authoritarian body to be repudiated. Lesser authoritarian organisation, such as those proposed under terms of functionalism (military barracks, prisons, reform schools, etc.) are to be similarly repudiated. No doubt on occasion the ability to coerce makes an institution more "effective", much as childrens learning of uninviting material is sometimes rendered more effective by coercive means, e.g. heavy cannings, floggings. But the repugnant means, and their common chase outw^eight the gains, if any, in effectiveness achieved. Now, having thus arrived at regular anarchism, reputiating the state, we confess to the evident, to the refinement of the notion of anarchy away from widespread common usage where it functions primarily as a powerful directive away from disapproved anti-statist life. Given that anarchism is thereby rendered (as in many dictionaries which of course reflect usage) a contradictory notion, encompassing both disorder without the state and order alternative to the state, some refinement and some diversion of disorder is no doubt desirable. The trouble with this easy resolution is that the early uses of 'anarchism' in English operated precisely with the corrupt drunk-and-disorderly side of the contradiction—disorder as contrasted with spendid state order. That was what (in defiance of the original Greek meaning) 'anarchy' and 'anarchism' were introduced to mean (see OED citations from 16-17th C). Thus the early usage, which persists, contradicts the refined and now regular usage. In technical presentations this problem is easily sliced through, by coining a term to mean what anarchy as refined means (anaRyri'2 and anacracy are such terms). Here however we shall simply persist with the refinement of the prevailing term, and in the course of giving it etymological justification over the early corrupt uses, further refine. 19 But the justification for refinement is not only 19 Tempting as it may be to switch, alternatively to new, freeing terminology, that temptation has here been largely resisted. Anarchism is a term, and idea, worth retaining. Not that there is anything amiss with new terminology: quite the contrary, provided that it is well-indroduced and pointful. In the course of drafting this book, a variety of new terminology has been toyed with—including such nice terms as (signifying non-domination)—because, as is regularly emphasized, anarchism is now such a turn­ off for most people. No doubt in more pdular versions (written by someone else), anarchism will disappear from headings, displaced by new terminology with a hint of old such as ^ada^waacra^y, or, less scrupulously, its place usurped by ^car-vacuous terms in high popular favour such as d^/nocracy. In this less popular version, anarchism stays; but, in pa^t compensation, some pleasant absolute terms, and senses, have been revised. They offer acceptable alternatives. A more powerful consideration than negative connotations is perhaps this: The present text, though strictly / 22 etymological. Do we need yet another term for lawlessness, or for disorder? Don't we rather need a term to help break the false dichotomy between: the state or political disorder? As if there are no further alternatives, like stateless order of various kinds? Or (as much ill-informed literature suggests), no political theory without the state, merely untheorizable confusion? 4. A refined explication of anarchism. derives from the ancient Greek Etymologically meaning: without a chief or head, or without a top authority. Of course what the form derives from, though often indicative, does not determine what it now means. (Anarchism was not, after an ancient political theory, but is in fact, under familiar classifications, the most recent and novel of major political ideologies.) However it M worth drawing out the etymological meaning, because it is revealing. What it appears to exclude are political arrangements structured with a top element of any of the following authoritarian sorts: a monarch, a prince, a ruler, a leader, a president, a prime minister, and shifting from individual to group form, a party, a clique, a ruling elite, a central power such as a state, etc. There are, analysis reveals, two interacting foci: one, a top or centre, and two, control or dominance flowing from this top by what are adjudged inadmissible means, authoritarian or coercive means in particular. A chief both stands at the top of a power hierarchy and exercises authoritarian control from there. Under this anarchy entails double foci structure or organisation without inadmissible top-down or centralized means. Let us look at the foci in turn, beginning with the more independent one, the top. Topologically, wif/tonf % fop amounts to wzt/zoMt % cenfre, because by topological transformations (roughly&^nJzKg and stretching as what rubber objects will permit) what is a top transforms to a centre, and vice versa. Diagrams illustrate the transformations: top (of tree, semi lattice) o centre o investigating is so far removed from what normally enters under that denomination that different terminology is warranted, terminology which then has the advantage of shaking off all those negative associations of anarchy. The salient differences from run-of-the-mill anarchism will appear when preferred forms are detailed subsequently. 23 Volcano from top from sides * peak * peak Given such transformations, which will be taken for granted, anarchism also excludes arrangements structured with a controlling centre, such as a ruling central government. It implies decentralization in a precise sense. It does not thereby also remove all structure: it leaves intact a rich variety of structure including network arrangements with no centres (or with multiple "centres"), federation structures or similar. Yet another example is afforded by lateral structuring with central "centres" dispersed via function, as ilustrated;^ service "centres" The skeleton or scaffolding of organisation is structure; it is the frame on which organisation is hung, which organisation fills or fleshes out. The sense of explicating the underlying organic image, implies as much. According, for instance, to the Conci-ye Dzcfiofiuiy, 'structure: manner in which a building or organism or other complete whole is constructed, supporting framework or whole of the essential parts of something *. Structure itself is primarily, though not entirely, a matter of of elements and parts, among which order relations figure prominently, though not exclusively. That is, structure involves order, as a critical component. Remarkably, the same sort of <y%n/c%r&y occur in a range of seemingly diverse theoretical areas, not just social and political theory, to be displaced in each case by a similar sort of problem-dissipating structure. To illustrate, consider an order on a type (or set) of items Q given by one order relation R, 20 Insofar as there is a single centre, it is the bottom, the people. Major condinating issues are referred to people, for instance through referenda. So there a will be a referenda organising office, but it will be independent cooperative. 24 on item c in Q, i.e. R = Re- For example, where Q is a system of where R may itself worlds including your world the ordering R of worlds may depend on your world (and my world could supply a different order). Differently, where Qis a system of values or valued items, R may depend upon your values; and so on. As an orJer, R is at least transitive, and perhaps either (if like <) reflexive or (if like <) symmetric, on its ranged The system <Q, R> is a simple ordered structure, or ay%w%^. (The latter is the term now used in modal logic, where such structures are the bases of models for the logic.) A or top t of such a system is an element such that all items of Q bear R to t but which does not itself bear R to any element of Q. (The notion, that of -yMpreyniow, and likewise woxiwMw, may be similarly defined relative to subsets or types within Q.22) 77^oreTH. There are order structures without tops. Examples are provided by systems (often with much more structure) with no supremum. Here is a simple 6 element example drawn from relevant logical theory. +1 +2 „ = {=2,-l,-0, +0, +l,+2} +0 R - — is as shown by arrows. -0 -1 T = {+0, +1, +2} is a frufh component -2 Topologically, several notions of prime political and philosophical cast are tantamount to tops in order structures, including chiefs (top persons in power rankings) hierarchs, grand leaders, centres, absolutes, and objective items. Consider, a pertinent issue, the matter of control or authority, where as in the next diagram all elements to t. trans^ity required of order. 21 There are various cases, depending upon conditions 22 A supremum t of R (in type T) is an (that) element (of T) such that all elements (of T) bear R to t but which does not itself bear R to anything (in T). Looked at from above t is centre of a network. In the diagram shown, it remains a structure, a flattened hierarchy, when t and relations leading to it are deleted, under so to say. What this shows in a simple fashion is that there can be ordered structures without central control (and ranging further there can be statelessness, absence of central control, anarchy without "anarchy" or chaos, because there is order), structures. afford numerous examples. Order, including good order of a range of sorts, does not require central controls, leaders, absolute rulers or arrangements, or similar. Order does not require hierarchy, such hierarchy. 23 As immediate corollary is that inferences from anarchy (without a top or centre) to absence of order to disorder are fatally flawed. What lacks a top or centre may nonetheless enjy satisfactory order. Structures induced in anarchic arrangements can be far from chaotic (and may be modest and stable equivaien&s8i conditions). It is worth alluding to a much wider philosophical sweep. Related order structural considerations to those that tell against central states, absolute rulers, monarchs, patriarchs, top authorities as required for satisfactory order, also count against <2^x9/%^ of other sorts, such as absolute truth (there need be none, as the first diagram above indicates), absolute order (thus R 23 Part of what seems correct in Bookchin's vendetta against hierarchy can be captured in this way. More on this subsequently. 26 itself is relative to c), and of various sorts, such as objective fact (another supposed absolute), objective value (supplied under an absolute order), and so on. On this broad sweep the following sorts contrast sets emerged centralism elitism statism absolutism realism objectivism in rough contrast respectively with maximizing rationalism decentralism egalitarianism anarchism pluralism nonrealism nonjectivism satisizing rationalism Naturally, these simple structural considerations are only indicative, not decisive. For we might find, as more and more constraints are imposed on structures, as account is taken of actual conditions, that freedom contracts, that structural arrangements are forced towards centralism or absolutism. While such forcing may now look, in the light of a little logic, implausible, it requires further argument that it need not in general eventuate. The to be developed agam-yf takes these lines: that there is ready design of institutional arrangements for decentralised communities which does not lead back to a central state. The state is organisationally otiose. Organisation is delivered anencephaletically. For an added or infiltrated top or the centre to be troublesome, something anarchism need bother removing or shun where it figures, it has to have an role. Politically that presumably means exercising power in some way. That is, the head (the head that is lacking in %7i#rc%(?.y) is an operative head, not a mere figurehead. Anarchism need not exclude princes, monarchs, emperors, or "governors", such as some countries now maintain. If the people really like having such relics, royalty or "aristocracy", as is often said they do, then they can presumably have them if they are prepared to afford them. Indeed this figurehead role is just what is presumed for the prince under more plausible anarchist construals of Taoism.25 The ideal prince is a Taoist who takes no action, a sage who is rarely or never seen, whose existence may merely be known to the populace or even simply rumoured (that is almost to say, though Lao Tzu could not tactfully assert it, the ideal prince is a nonexistent inoperative sage). 24 For a fuller picture see Sylvan 93/4, chapter 10. 25 See Clark 84 p.165. Also UTD. 27 As indicated, the main features adduced are mirrored in logic, which can serve as a structural guide. It is striking, as well as technically advantageous, that logical and political predelictions converge. Mainstream irrelevant logics have algebraic structures with top elements, Boolean algebras in the case of classical logics. By contrast relevant logics, which now challenge the classical logical paradigm, do not. Their corresponding algebras, De Morgan monoids and such like need include no top element. The top element, T, is directly responsible for positive paradoxes, of the basic form A -* T (anything at all implies the True), of mainstream logics, paradoxes infecting much theory which relevant logic avoids.^ The logical structure shows that sub "centres" need not have such damaging effects; a plurality of local "centres", regional nodes, induces no paradox. The figurehead analogy also operates analogically, in logic. It does not matter if a semi­ lattice structure is extended to include a top element, so long as that addition provides only a conservative extension. (If T is added to top a relevant lattice, it has in stronger logics to be kept out of implication relations, else it will induce a non-conservative relevant extension with theses like A -* T.) But otherwise, as an inoperative top-piece it is admissible. Technical comparisons now reach much further than logic alone, as we leam more and more about decentralised structures, about decentralised cerebral organisation, decentralised Al and topless connectionism, and decentralised intelligent structure. Intelligent organisation without top or central elements may abound both in nature, for instance in insect cerebral organisation and in vertebrate brain structure, and in many future artificial intelligence applications. Logic and computing technology demonstrate, what is widely appreciated outside political theory, that topless is feasible.2? There is scope, and need, for twenty-first century anarchism to be highly techno-logically sophisticated. There is more to anarchism than political structure without an operative top, head or centre, than a lateral structuring. That more, the residue of the rejection of archy, is more difficult to characterize in a way non-prejudicial to types of anarchism. It is bound up with the operation of the active top, with the confroZ for example it exercises, the potter it exerts, or the like: non-prejudicially, it cannot operate As to what are unacceptable means, however there are different specifications. These many include—what can be summarized, under a single rubric, as —force, coercion, authoritarianism (and what implies any of those, such as totalitarianism); and, much more controversial, nonvoluntary, nonindividualistic, socialist and communist, means. As in dictionariess entries for "anarchism", only coercive and authoritarian elements will be ruled unacceptable (for 26 See WR. 27 The subsequently preferred variety of anarchism, while not at all opposed to slates losing their heads, is powerfully opposed to people literally loosing their heads (figuratively again, it may be alright). 34 A Gramsci, 'The intellectuals * and 'The modem prison * in gcZccfzony /row ?7zc Prz'yon M?fc&ooRy (ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith), International Publishers, New York, 1971. D. Mannison and others (eds.), Environment?/ P/zz/oyopAy, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980; referred to as EP. D. Miller, Aaarc/zzym, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1984; referred to as M. D. Mitrany, 7%c Ennctona/ 77zcory o/PoEr/cy, Martm Robertson, London, 1975. A. Naess and associates, Democracy, /Jeo/ogy aaJ D/?/eciiviiy, Oslo University Press, Norway, 1956. R. and V. Routley, 'The irrefutability of anarchism *, &?cza/AZfcrnaEvcy, R. and V. Routley, 'Social theories, self-management and environmental problems *, in EP; referred to as SM. R. Sylvan, and D. Bennett, 'On Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology *, D/ycayyzoa Papery in EavzrozzmczzZaZ P/zz/oypp/zy, #19, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1990. R.P. Wolff, 7a De/ence o/Aaarc/zzym, Harper & Row, New York, 1970. ADDITIONAL SOURCES P. Nursey-Bray, an Aaaa/arcJ EzEZzagrap/zy a/Aaarc/zzym , Greenwood Press, 1992. END NOTES 2 Cf Clark p.ll8ff. The general methodological issue of multiple determinates of key political terms and their archist confinement is taken up in a later chapter. *J^A /TrT^^<Z7 (y/^cA e.ncrcicj/ ^ A A' '< -' z? y // /yr *-^. C r^O V. J * /X o J* ,<^A<_ . ) *4 C^c/^ / /Xot^z &J> f A-w^ t^i^L to n > etA A jt? cj C rZ-?/T^T <*C Zt , <^<!"// , cx^d /7^/^'Cx ^9 /?. 3* f,. /A^t / TL^i- c— ^^4—UT^-? ^-7y47 /^" <-/ f' z' ^^L-J 7 1 CHAPTER 2. ELABORATIONS OF ANARCHISMS There are wany anarchist theories. For an anarchist theory is any laterally structured theory which duly conforms to the anarchy principle, of rejecting political authority and coercion. While received anarchist theories restrict anarchism to certain more specific forms (the standard options of considered below), p/ara/ijtic anarchism does not; plural anarchism not only admits the plurality, but takes advantage of it any may revel in it. Not all of this variety, not all anarchisms in the sheaf of systems, are of equal merit. Some forms are decidedly undesirable — like anarchisms expanding on the violent or chaotic varieties of popular imagination — in much the way that the nasty states of modem history, that anarchism opposes, are undesirable. Such undesirability may devolve from external rather than internal political characters. Thus, for instance, regions committed to global power projection to retain their privileged way of life (most unlikely under anarchistic arrangements) or committed to transnational terrorist practices. While standard anarchisms have been located in the more desirable, or even eutopian, end-range of anarchist systems, they by no means exhaust the satisfactory forms or even the most promising forms (as explained in chapter 5). Indeed in important respects the desirable range is significantly open for further elaboration of newer (and greener) forms. As varieties of anarchy may diverge, widely, so correspondingly do motivations and justifications for various divergent forms. The motivations, for instance, range from entirely theoretical (conceding to the warranted force of political scepticism) to practical (changing the local world); from personal and perhaps selfish (getting the state off one's back, or out of one's business and one's till) to other directed (eliminating a state oppressing its people) to environmental (disestablishing another vandalistic state). Common motivations trace back to the common character of anarchism: repulsion by, or opposition to, oppression, perhaps generalised from the state to all analogous political and bureaucratic structures, or expanding on that again, to all gross power relations. Indeed it is appealingly suggested that what anarchy is really all about is gross power relations, their reduction and removal; state coercive and authoritarian power are but paradigmatic of such power and domination relations. But while such opposition to gross power does characterizer gentler anarchism, heavy power methods are acceptable to tougher anarchisms; gentler anarchisms tend, so it will be argued, to be all of more pacific, more liberal and more rational than tougher or hardened anarchism. There are other expansionary liberal democratic motives for anarchism, further varying this theme: a yearning for removal of constraints, and for more extensive freedom; or a desire for more extensive equality, which would of course diminish those inequalities power delivers. Such motivations too have illicitly worked their way into variant characterisations of anarchism. ? 2 While a popular image of anarchists remains that of hardened terrorists, exercising authority over hostages using state-manufactured guns, many anarchists are joined by opposition to all such naked authority or coercion. Indeed 'behind the anarchist attack on the state and other coercive institutions, there has often stood a fundamental critique of the idea of authority itself (M p.15). An important, though certainly not invariant, mofivafmg and r^<?n for anarchism derives from a more sweeping anti-authoritarianism: the theme that no person or organisation can ever rightfully exercise authority of (political cast) over another. Picturesquely it is the theme that no authority is justified, no one, state or other, has a right to push another around. Too briefly it is sloganised to assert, no bosses, no leaders, or similar. Such general opposition to the principle of authority has even been dubbed "philosophical anarchism". It is an unfortunate choice of terminology given Feyerabend's different anarchistic challenge to much in philosophical theory and practice. * But some further classification and labelling undoubtedly helps. A princZp/^J anarchism takes exception on principled, characteristically ethical, grounds to objectionable authority or to coercion, that is to prime target elements undiluted anarchism directly rejects. But irrespective of type of anarchism intricated, much in anarchist theory, including a fuller characterisation, turns upon the twin notions of anf/ion/y and coercion, what these terms mean and cash out to, and why it is considered important to avoid damaging features of this sort? Both authority and coercion fall into the general category of power relations, a category that has rightly featured large not merely in anarchist theory but in social theory more comprehensively. As Aristotelian definitions of 'authority and coercion , by gunus and differentia, will be offered, an essential preliminary consists in pinning down the genus, power. * Power gm/ reZevan? serfs. Defective definitions of power, authority and coercion abound. Despite the importance of the notions for political theory, not just for anarchism, it is rare to encounter satisfactory formulations. A defective formulation from recent relevant anarchist theory defines power as 'the ability to compel compliance, either through the use of force or the threat of force (Wolff p.4), a conspicuously high redefinition. Rather, a power reZofion is a relation where one of the relata, that having the power, can normally get the other relata to do something (down to entertaining a belief, considering an idea). Power is a can-do; it may not be exercised. But there need be no compulsion or compelling compliance; nor need its exercise always succeed. Further its exercise need not involve force or threat thereof; it may be effected by a range of other means. 1 By Wolff, and following him, Miler and others. Feyerabend's philosophical anarchism, his is sometimes better labelled anarc/h-yiH, a type of nihilism. But it stops short, excluding logical methods (irrationally scorned however) from variation^ .In fact without a sharp—unavailable—distinction between logical and other (empirical or pwidivist) methods, this methodological anarchism is incoherent. 3 on the one side, bribery, seduction, blackmail, and so on, and on the other, knowledge, prowess, charisma, and so on. It is no secret that major problems in human social and political affairs devolve upon power, its excessive or evil use, misuse, regulation and control. But by no means all power, not even all political power, is bad. Distangling the undesirable, negative forms is an essential exercise, often neglected. After observing the failure of radical social theory to provide an adequate investigation of power, Clark embarks on a critique of the "classical model"2 According to the received conception, power is depicted as a relation of domination in which the powerful subject the powerless to control in order to exploit the latter. In both classical Marxism and anarchism this exploitation is conceived as being essentially economic. Thus, for Marx, "political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another (p.231). It is evident that what we see here is an attempt to explain power through, and then reduce power to, certain of its determinate forms: domination, then control, exploitation, oppression, and then organised and economic forms of these. These determinates are all, though important, rather special and rather negative, black forms of power. Power may be short-term, just for a day for instance or once only (a creature requires power only for a short period, because of what it is, because it loses power thereafter, because it has access to short-term drugs, magic, hypnosis, contracts, etc.). Domination is a longer-term relation, a disposition, between recognised parties, with a decided bias in favour of one party the power-holder; exploitation and oppression increase that bias, in specifiable ways, control however removes it. Power may, furthermore, be applied for positive and libertary, purposes, to help powerless to achieve something or other, to survive, prosper, and so on. Briefly, the concerning power is not power itself, but certain of its forms, its negative forms, and its excessive use. This last can be assimilated, by taking excess as a negative form. The negative forms are, of course, though they can be independently specified, the bad, or undesirable forms, forms as was earlier said.3 These include, among other forms, closed authority and coercion. They also include such overlapping forms as oppression, exploitation, domination, and so on. Privilege goes with these latter forms; it is held by the power-holders and their circle. It is held moreover exclusively by this circle; others, at the other end of the power relation, the power-less, are excluded from its possession. That is, the domain and range of a given power relation are exclusive: no one is both an exploiter and exploited (though of course someone, a husband day labourer for example, may be both exploited in his labour and domineering over his wife). 2 3 A critique, p.231 ff. too quickly petering out in an inconclusive, discussion of Foucault on power, where power turns into what is not, something mystical and all-pervasive. In these respects, power is like other notions, of green political significance, for one, for another. 4 There are two separable kinds of undesirable power: excessive and malselective or illdirected. The two kinds are more or less replicated in other significant phenomena that have been, like power, too sweepingly condemned: economic growth and material consumption. The problematic concerning human consumption is not consumption itself, some level of which is essential to human societies and indeed survival. The problems derive basically from excessive consumption and from poorly selected consumption. Conspicuous consumption, insofar as it delivers a negative form, derives from these: it is either excessive and wasteful or malselective or a mix of these. But the kinds are distinctive. For example, a poor family that buys expensive junk food may spend its limited income poorly, but its consumption may well not be excessive. Similarly with power: the limited power an individual or group possesses, whether exercisable for evil or not, may be better or worse directed. In term of power and its gross exercise, much in more gentle anarchisms can be / synthesized, namely all that is otherwise packed into the rubric: unacceptable means. What is unacceptable is gross exercise of power, including types of political power exploited by tougher anarchisms, terrorist power, crude fire power from the barrels of guns, and so on. What correspondingly gentler anarchisms oppose are all institutions and arrangements, not just the state and those tied to it, that can exert gross power. The state mightly concentrates, and centralizes, such power/ Even so the state is merely paradigmatic among undesirable and excessive power structures — a power hungry one at that, since it looks for a surplus product in power, along with a monopolistic position. But militia posts, torture shops, and pirate ships are other more localized structures. Coercive and closed authoritarian arrangements (opposition to which helps define anarchism) are distinctive marks of such grossness. Dilute anarchisms tone down opposition certain types of power (typically authority); they admit exercise of power that gentler anarchism would regard as gross. From the problematicness and undesirability of excessive power, main objectives of ( anarchism for ameliorative change flow: decentralisation, division and separation of powers. Centralised powers are to be separated and decentralised; aggregated powers to be broken down into functional components; and so on. Tougher anarchism proposes more, rival power play, resisting and undermining power through power, to break down its excesses and reveal its limitations, fighting fire with fire. One trouble with this tough and morally dubious strategy, which can be spectacular, is that it easily overreaches, producing for instance inadmissible coercion of others. 4 Not all state power is undesirable. Some of state regulation and redistribution, effected through power is certainly desirable. The argument will be that these elements are completely outweighted by the undesirable components of state power, and that they can be independently effected without the state. 5 Gentler anarchism travels in the vanguard of the long retreat from barbarism in human practices and institutions. In more enlightened parts of the world we have witnessed the progressive removal of physical punishment, such as: maiming, blinding, executing, stoning, torturing, transporting, flogging, corporal punishing, starving, chaining, incarcerating, imprisoning, infecting, ...and extensions, such as: serious threats thereof and assistance or encouragement of these practices elsewhere. Such enlightenment has not penetrated many parts of the world to any extent, and has far to reach yet even in the most civilized regions. TTyugh the gentler anarchist theme of curtailment of power, we can tap into several rich connections. The excessive drive to power and strength, the "will to power", is a conspicuous feature of modernity. Interestingly Nietzsche went so far as to claim that the will to power was basic motive in human affairs. Fortunately such a socio-psychological claim, about prevailing human nature and institutions, has little to substantiate it. But undoubtedly power motivates much, much too much, in modernity; otherwise anarchism would lose much of its more sweeping point. It was not always so; the quest for power at all costs, the flaunting of power, was at least highly problematic (as drama revealed); it did not always gain the adulation it now widely commands. It did not win respect from early anarchism, as manifested in Stoicism and Taoism. It would not have won endorsement from Aristotelibnism; for power, of both institutions and individuals, like so many other attributes, is evidently similarly constrained to a While the rough bounds are evident enough for an instrumental object such as a vehicle, which wastes fuel and becomes dangerous when excessively powered, but cannot perform its tasks if underpowered, the bounds, especially ^e lower, may not be so conspicuous elsewhere (e.g. with military hardware, intelligence reserves, etc.). Organisations and institutions, which should be vehicles to serve social ends, enjoy once again a striking analogy with logical systems. Logical systems, when excessively strong in the fashion of modem mainstream systems, ensnarl users in a tangle of paradoxes and other troubles (for detailed discussion see RLR, p.240 ff.). On the other hand, if they are excessively weak they fail to meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, to afford satisfactory vehicles of inference and reasoning. Two species of gross power feature particularly in the definitional elaboration of anarchism: authority and coercion. While undesirable authority is characteristically tied into excessive power, coercion is different, is often once-off, and is malselective power. 6 * Authority, and warranted repugnance of closed forms. Authority is a type of power relation, a relation with the power or influence conferred or supported by other features of one of the relata, the bearer of authority, namely character, station, recognised control of coercive means, or the like. itself is the abstract of the relation : a has authority over or with respect to b. Authority is a proper subrelation of power. For evidently many power relations — those exerted by bullies, bandits, etc — are not authority relations, since the relation is not supported by suitable station. Again the following definition of authority (upon which Wolff founds his philosophical defence of anarchism) is far too narrow: "the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed" (p.4). Only some who hold authority may be (conventionally) conceded a right to command, or more broadly, to exercise their power. For evidently their power may be exercised in a variety of other ways than through command structures, such as blockages, delays, vetoes, withholdings, and so on, and on the other side, concessions, gifts, rewards, and so on. There are many types of authority relations, many inadmissibly excluded under narrow definitions, not all of which are objectionable, or objected to by anarchists. For an example of an unobjectionable sort, consider the relation of a student to an authority in some field of knowledge, who can in turn back up expert judgements by appeal to a further range of assessible evidence. Such an authority might be called frampar^if (or open), because those with time and some skill can proceed through the authority to assess claims made. Among op%n authorities are contemporary teachers, by contrast with old fashioned disciplinarians, and advanced parents, who can back up their orders with satisfactory reasons. Contrasted with such authorities are op&q%^ (or cZo<y^%f) authorities, who simply stand on their position or station, such authority is objectionable in part because of its dogmatic character.^ Closely allied to op^M^ authorities who can appeal to a conventional rule or procedure (that is how things are done, have been done) without being able to or prepared to opaque authorities are step beyond some rule book. Rule-book authorities are commonplace in bureaucracies, which often encourage such practice in lower level officials. In opaqM^ authorities the justificatory procedure stops a step further out; there is a set of rules, which has been enacted (for reasons not open to, or bearing, examination) by a further substantially opaque authority. Other authority relations are objectionable because of the way in which or the means by which they are backed. Unobjectionable is the authority figure which is exemplary, where what it exemplifies is in its tum satisfactory. Not so relations backed by coercive means, by violence or threats of violence: Big-stick authority relations. Such relations are condemned on moral 5 The impression is widely promoted that science reliably furnishes examples of transparent authorities, in the shape of experts. That impression is astray. Dominant Science frequently functions as a substantially closed authority, rather as the universal Church did, standing on received theory as gospel (for elaboration see DP, chapter 12). 7 grounds, for example by moral pacifists opposed to violence, who do not object to the carrot methods such as sanctions, boycotts, civil disobedience, etc. A diagram will summarise the position so far attained. o/'gMf/tonfy Confine##.? Methods carrot <- stick possibly benign Pacifist Back-up transparent T opposition A opaque Enlightenment Liberal opposition opposition It will be evident that the objections to nonbenign authoritarian relations—to what in clear cases may be presented as to — can be of significantly different sorts. To more opaque authority relations there are objections of enlightenment cast, that reason is lacking for what an authority requires, proposes or asserts, as it was lacking in authoritarian religious and political practice against which the Enlightenment was primarily targeted. (A significant strand of anarchism, more theoretical anarchism, is a descendant: undisclosed reasons of State are not adequate reasons.) To more coercive authority relations there are objections from non-violence devotees. To there may be a kind of liberal opposition, that the party subject to authority is being denied, in one way or another, for unacceptable reasons, a certain freedom, namely ' autonomy. Naturally, movements have been directed at breaking down authoritarian power relations: masters over slaves, humans over animals, men over women, adults over children, etc. States over citizens. A comprehensive civil liberties movement would merge with anarchist movements. Plainly then, these three convergences are linked to three interconnected forms of opposition to authoritarianism: namely * convergence of anarchism with an Enlightenment opposition to opaque authority, which anarchism takes to include state authority. (A response will contend, as religious groups did against Enlightenment charges, that State authority is justified, e.g. it represents the people's will, or some similar fairy tale. But that is what is at issue.) * convergence of anarchism with moral pacifism in opposition to violence and coercion as unmitigated evils which should always be avoided. Of course only some forms of anarchism are 8 involved. Some anarchists are not averse at all to the exercise of heavy power relations, for instance of violence or terror against others (no matter how this violates their free personal space). But observe that such uses of power are not supported by recognised authority but normally directed agnm-sf such authority; so they might be dubbed relations. * convergence of anarchism with forms of liberalism, deriving from solid commitment of normal forms of anarchism, particularly individual varieties to personal liberty. Libertarian ideals have served as a major motivation in historical anarchism. There is a vision of a free society, a 'vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labour is freely undertaken'.6 ( There are of course other convergences as well, some of them much discussed, such as with marxism. When opposition to authority is broadened to opposition to domination, no doubt there are further convergences, with feminism, with deep environmentalism. A recent convergence, of initial promise, is with ecofeminism, which ought to highly sympathetic to environmentally sensitive anarchism. For both are opposed to domination in all its forms, to downward control lines and power hierarchies. There is an important argument against the state based on its authoritarian character. This argument, to be found is Proudhon and in embryonic form in Rousseau, is developed and given a Kantian tum in Wolff? What Proudhon portrayed as a conflict between the authority of the state and freedom, Wolff represents as 'the conflict between authority and autonomy' (p.18). In this conflict, where the state represents authority, autonomy takes precedence; anarchism is consistent with the supreme virtue of authonomy, but archist doctrines supporting the state are not, because of authoritarian character of the state. Because Wolffs argument has been subject to much criticism which an improved formulation would shed, because too Wolffs formulation leaves something to be desired (it is not sufficiently sharp or tight), the argument will be revamped. A crucial difference is this: whereas Wolff asserts that 'all authority is equally illegitimate', a judgement already rejected, it is now said that all authority is illegitimate, meaning thereby wtoraZ/y illegitimate, not 'having a binding moral force ? 6 7 8 Chomsky, in Guerin p.xii, As to Proudhon see Ritter p.13, pp. 15-16. According to Rousseau such undesirable restrictive features need not pertain for all forms of government; naturally they do not obtain for his favoured arrangements. Wolff tries to repeat this sort of point, less than successfully for unanimous direct democracy. Of course a state may proclaim, even legislate, that its authority is legitimate, and even have other states do the same. But that will not achieve moral, a de jt/re, legitimacy. It is similar when the state endeavours to enforce its authority; /noraf legitimacy is not thereby obtained. Nonetheless these sorts of features go far towards explaining why people acknowledge, rarely questioning, closed authorities like the state. There are other elements which enter into explaining this popular sheepishness, such as: The force of tradition, that is the way things have always been done, the 9 Nor is all closed authority equally objectionable. The unquestionable directives of a benevolent dictator (one whose authoritarian directives and regulations prove inductively to be well directed) can be seen as less objectionable than those of a malevolent dictator. Similarly for a dictatorial group, a junta, or a majority. That the dictator said so, or that the majority said so, does not offer a reason rendering the state less than a closed authority. A core theme, to be embroided and defended, is W1. An autonomous person does not recognise a closed authority as legitimate. But W2. The state is a closed authority, of a certain of course. Hence WC1. An autonomous person does not recognise the state as legitimate. The core theme depends crucially on the notion of aMfonowy, on characterising features of the autonomous person. But before that task is addressed, observe that autonomy can be eliminated. First, the rafiona/ person, or a little less satisfactorily, the person, can carry the argument instead, using for instance W3. A rational person is autonomous. So results Wl' with 'rational' displacing 'autonomous', W1'. A rational person does not recognise a closed authority as legitimate. That premiss at once suggests a direct argument devoid of the circuit through persons (or through agents). For what a rational, still more an enlightened, person does not recognise as legitimate presumably is not, and certainly vice versa. In any case, U1. A closed authority is not legitimate. Hence, by W2, UC1. The state is not legitimate. Since this conclusion is equivalent to UC2. The concept of a legitimate state is null, the result sharpens the tentative conclusion Wolff reaches: 'Hence, the concept of a jure legitimate state would appear to be vacuous', to which he adds, thereby presuming other links already made explicit, 'and philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man' (p.19). As observed, not too much hangs upon the notion of moral legitimacy deployed, thus far following Wolffs lead, throughout. Simple variations replace 'morally legitimate' or 'legitimate' by 'morally warranted', 'morally justified', 'justifiable', 'rightful' (the last, though a trifle old-fashioned, captures what is intended well). force of character of leaders; their occupation of official positions, which have heavy bureaucratic backing. 10 These arguments permit of much other interesting variation. Wolff s original argument, for instance, precedes from authority as The defining mark of the state', with authority defectively explicated as 'the right to rule' (p.18). Evidently then the middle term, authority, can drop out, and the argument can be formulated along the following lines: VI. The state has the right to rule (without question, its citizens, more or less as it pleases). V2. An autonomous person rejects any (sweeping) right to rule. Therefore VC1. An automonous person rejects the state. Further variations may be obtained by amending the middle term, "right to rule without question" (which effectively replaced "exercise of close authority") to reflect other features of the state, for instance that it can simply tell its citizens what to do, that is has a right to coerce its citizens, rights to institute state monopolies, and so on. Under some variations "autonomous person" should be correspondingly replaced. For instance, if VI is specialized from a right to command and control to the right to send citizens to war, then V2 may be adjusted to apply to the person of conscience, of peace, or similar. As Wolff seeks a grander conclusion than VC1, which might be merely taken to reveal that there are but few autonomous actors about, he invokes a further premiss V3. Autonomy is a (even the) primary obligation. From there, it is an analytic shuffle to the more impressive conclusion VC2. The state ought to be rejected. The arguments are as vulnerable as their premisses. What gets especially contested in the first argument is Wl, concerning the autonomous person. For all the surface reasonableness and even open-door aspects of a more liberal state, W2 holds; it swings into effect as soon as the going gets tough. As Dahl puts it, To obey the authority of the state ... means doing what the you do it'? While there may be a little scope for light and reson as regards more flexible minor officials, that scope is officials of the state tell you to do simply and soley ( t/z^y small; the wall of closed authority can be quickly encountered, particularly with judges and law enforcement officers. If W2 did not hold the state would risk sliding into a voluntary organisation, out of which citizens could opt. In the end citizens are expected to act in a variety of ways (fill in form, take out licences, pay taxes, etc.) because the state tells them to, just because, or else face punitive action. The argument to Wl depends heavily on the meaning of gMfono/ny. Here is one way it can be presented (following Dahl): An autonomous person is self determining. Such a person is not under the direction or choices of another item. While the person may do what another tells him 9 See p.92..Dahl's reconstruction of Wolff effectively applies W2, using Wolffs definition of HMf%<?r#y, to obtain VI. This produces a more complex, and defective, argument. G 11 or her, she does not she has been told to do it. Thus the autonomous person does not conform to closed authorities, and does not acknowledge them or assign them recognition (more than recognition that is). While autonomy is one thing, responsibility is quite another; still a critical reason for arriving at autonomy intricates responsibility. ... so long as we recognise our responsibility for our actions, and acknowledge the power to reason within us, we must acknowledge as well the continuing obligation to make ourselves authors of such commands as we may obey (Wolff p.17), i.e. to make ourselves autonomous. A primary moral demand, central to the moral condition, is, according to Kant and Wolff, to 'acknowledge responsibility and achieve autonomy whenever and whenever possible" (p.17). Assuming responsibility in a life is by means the only reason for striving for autonomy: achieving a certain personal freedom (within natural bounds) and operating a life rationally are other crifica/ reasons. A main argument to V3 indicated by Wolff does proceed from responsibility. It is simply that in order to take full responsibility (for one's actions, choices, etc.), which one should, one has to be autonomous. So one should be autonomous. At least as important philosophically as the argument from W1 and W2 is that from Wl' and W2. While the argument to Wl' may proceed through autonomy it may short-circuit it. The philosophical argument for Wl' is well-known, having been repeatedly emphasized from Socrates through to Russell: that a rational person does not accept anything for which there are not independent investigatible reasons and evidence. The pronouncements of a closed authority do not fall into this class. By revamping the arguments especially that from autonomy as directed against authority, many objections to Wolffs arguments are fairly autonomically voided. Firstly (contrary to Dahl p.47), the arguments are not (any longer, if they ever were) arguments against 'authority of any kind". Not merely was Wolff concerned with the authority of the state; further as Dahl points out next page, the type of authority concerned is that of 'doing what someone tells you to do fo ^Zo if, that is a closed form. A rational person can of course acknowledge an open authority who can offer reason and evidence for prono^cements. For similar reasons, experts, guides and guardians, of open character, are not excluded. Accordingly the arguments does not cut "too broad a swath""; while it properly cuts out closed authorities like absolute rulers, states and similar, it does not mow down open authorities. In like fashion, much of Miller's parallell criticism of philosophical anarchism is voided. Things go astray (in Miller's chapter 2) from the very outset, from the slack formulation of "the principle of authority"", which is chauvinistically formulated, 'no man can ever rightfully exercise political authority over another, that is have a right to issue directions which the other has an obligation to obey' (p.15), and which is then intended to apply to the relation of a state 12 and its officials to its citizens. The formulation has both to be expanded to include persons and organisations as subjects of the relation, and sharply contracted to delimit the kinds of authority and rights concerned. For the explanatory (that is) clause offered reaches far beyond (closed) political authority; it would wrongly rule out contractual relations such as those of freely arranged employment, parental relations, and so on. The counterexamples Miller designs to Wolffs arguments also depend upon shifting ground from closed authority like the state to more open arrangements, such as contracts an autonomous person may have entered into freely. Plainly there will be a limited range of such contracts that a rational person will enter into; long-term future bondage or slavery will not be among them, and Miller's examples may border on the rationality dubious. In any case, in one, an agent morally concerned to relieve poverty enters into authoritarian arrangements, imagined unavoidable for successful action, in which it becomes obligatory for the agent to act under authoritative instruction (p.28). Firstly, the authorities are not closed, they have to be pursuing means directed to poverty relief, else an autonomous agent will not enter into such ". * arrangements Secondly, while contractual obligations, and therewith certain directives of open authoritarian cast, may constitute reasons for action, the situation with the state is very different. There is no contract, and no reasons of contract (also lacking are spotless reasons justifying entering into such a contract). Examples like Miller's arrangements and contracts can be inflated into stock flawed arguments, from consent to the state. Unremarably, Dahl attempts to patch up again these well- worn arguments, but in two mutually inconsistent ways. Second, he proposes that To opt for a democratic state' is The most responsible way of exercising our moral autonomy', and reasonable and rational as ways of maximizing our autonomy (p.49). Insofar as there are any arguments for such wishful conclusions, they depend upon familiar fantasy-world assumptions about the blackness of nonstate arrangements presumed to impact utterly unfavourably on autonomy and the contrasting whiteness of democratic states. That those states are at best a pretty dirty gray, Dahl's first more honest considerations suggest. There he asks, What is so great about autonomy? 'Why not sacrifice some moral autonomy?' As 'unlimited autonomy is impossible', why not settle for autonomy within reasonable state limits? (cf p.48). Compare: why not sacrifice some resistance to homocide and settle for reasonable killing of humans for reasons of state? The moral importance of autonomy Wolff has already explained nicely (pp 14- 17). Autonomy is a primary oM/ganon of rational persons, a constraint, not what Dahl converts it utilitarian-fashion into, a supreme value, to be questioned then traded off against other values. Because of its importance for rational practice the obligation should not be weakened; nor is there good reason to do so. There appear no grounds for forfeiting autonomy to closed 10 Compare Wolffs discussion (on p.15) of relations with one's doctor. 13 authorities, such as the state. It is doubtful that there are even grounds for what Wolff allows, forfeiture of some autonomy to one s doctor, hopefully no longer a closed authority, rather than retaining autonomy and freely following the doctor's advice. Autonomy is not like freedom in limitations; it can in principle always be exercised by a rational person. Submission to the state is a gross forfeiture of that autonomy. While an autonomous agent may place itself under guidance of leadership of another for limited purposes, and may indeed enter into certain sorts of contracts, it will not surrender its whole future life or extensive parts of it to a directorate that may well proceed in suboptimal, subliminal or even irrational ways. Yet that latter is what expected acceptance of the state implies. Accordingly an autonomous person cannot recognise the state; nor can a fully rational one, as it is irrational to place oneself indefinitely under a closed authority. It may be objected that it is unfair to treat Dahl, Miller and others in the preceding fashion, which changes the dialectical playing field. They were attacking Wolff and his over-extended arguments, not a refinement of Wolff which singles out the philosophical nasty elements in authority, and accordingly destroys their counter-examples which operated at the rational open end of authority relations. But that was not all that they were doing. They were using Wolff as a vehicle to draw quite conclusions about the unviability of principled anarchism (e.g. Dahl p.50, Miller p.29), and accordingly should have taken account of simple revampings of arguments like those of Wolff. Nor is this the only respect in which their practice is methodologically unsound. A principle—like that of closed authority, that such authority is legitimate—does not stand because someone's attack (e.g. Wolff s) against it is unsuccessful. Yet this is Miller's methodological procedure against philosophical anarchism (p.26, p.29). This is Popperian falsificationism gone rampant and badly astray. For Popper at least required sustained and strenuous testing and adequate variation; not a few select and easy examples. But of course a Popperian approach by archists is unsatisfactory; the onus of argument is the other way around. An archist has to establish that political authority, such as that the claims and exercises, is rightful. That Wolff intended to work with something like closed authority should have emerged both from Wolffs emphasis on the place of 'grounds and sources' in legitimate authority (p.9), and his flirtation with unanimous direct democracy. What Wolff is exercised about is not compliance with a authority or obedience where there are good or independent reasons for it, but blind, or closed obedience: doing what you are told because you are told to do it (p.9). (Yours not to reason why, yours but to do ....) While these points exonerate Wolff from some overzealous criticisms, they immerse him in others, namely his attempt to combine authority with autonomy under unanimous direct democracy. A major problem is that this combination, 14 so far as it is workable^, appeals not to the closed authority of the state, but to open autonomous arrangements which do not conform to requirements of the state (as Dahl remarks on p.48, the "authority" here is not the "authority" of his earlier definition'; and as Miller observes on p.27, *it is ... arguable whether this state of affairs [under unaminous direct democracy] involves the recognition of Autonomy and freedom tell not merely against the exercise of opaque authority, but against use of coercion. This connection affords the basis for a parallel argument to that against closed authority, to the desirability of a sharp decline in deployment of coercive methods. But parallels between coercion and closed authority do not proceed very far. * Coercion, an impermissible activity. Coercion is very different from exercise of authority. All four places, 1 to 4, in a cross­ classificatory matrix are regularly occu Died: actions coercive authoritative 1 non-authoritive 2 non 4 coercive 3 Place 1 is well occupied given the State, and is widely exemplified in not only state-citizen relations, but also in authorized domination relations. Place 2 is illustrated in a range of operations which the state often tries to repress such as banditry, piracy, protection rackets, but also in a variety of interpersonal relations. Place 4, that clear indicator of unqualified anarchism, is well exemplified through voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. Place 3, characteristic of many work-place and educational situations, can be easily illustrated through advanced ( education. Coercion, unlike authority, is action. That is why comparisons are with .... of authority; authority may sit, like power, unused, but coercion cannot. Like all action it is a process, a state to state transition, but actively changing or maintaining state. It is a transitive action relation having both a doer, a coercer, and done-tos, coerced, all normally creatures. The transitions include a wide range of more determinate actions such as constraining, restraining, securing, moving, pushing, pulling and so on; and thus coercion (the abstract) includes forcible constraint and compulsion. An essential feature of coercion is that state transitions are effected A/<Z or attempted by coercers through force or genuine threats of force. No such force, no coercion. NY- Defective definitions of coercion are liable particularly to neglect this feature. Thus e.g. Fridman 11 Wolff himself concludes it is not except under highly improbable conditions. Indeed the conditions are more onerous those Wolff allows: required are humans who having consented do not change their minds, etc. _________ /e /6 L < s _ _ z^<^4^-f ___' / ^ry^- /i, <^___ . 15 p.xviii, according to whom being coerced is 'not being left alone'. Perhaps in one special sense, but a person who chooses to have a constant companion is not being thereby coerced. Pressuring someone to do something without attempts or threats to apply force is not coercion. Similarly persuasion is not coercion; censuring, withholding support, applying peaceable sanctions, are so on, are not. All this proves important in meeting objections to anarchist methods. Coercion is not a success notion; a coercer may well not succeed in obtaining what was sought through coercion. This will prove important in explaining why appeal to the state does not automatically resolve political dilemmas. To coerce is maintain or change states, normally of another creature, by implied force (i.e. force or accepted threat thereof). The state transition or statis includes the full range of relevant actions such as constraining, restraining, securing, moving, pushing, pulling aa so on, and thus coercion (the abstract) includes forcible constraint and compulsion. Coercion, by contrast with * exercise of authority, entails potential use of force, force furthermore which will characteristically tum into violence if resistance is attempted. Therein lies a main reason why coercion is so objectionable; its intrication with force and immediate potential for violence. For violence is generally undesirable.^. It follows therefrom that coercive arrangements are generally undesirable and, devolving therefrom, If social organisation can be achieved without them, usually so much the better, certainly the more ethical. A main onus to show that coercive arrangements, such as the state characteristically incorporates, are inevitable, unavoidable or the like, thereupon falls upon archists. 'Since coercive power is self-defeating' and worse, a general theory of 'non-coercive authority' is presented as a 'pressing problem of this stage of history'.13 Unfortunately, the general theory has obtained but little development. But functionalism, in such forms as demarchy (to be transformed below), has gained some elaboration, by some in the peace movement. 14 Worse, Merrifield arrives at the "pressing problem" on the strength of the need for Rt/M? of solution to the authority problem': thesources, methods, and ends of authority (p.724). This "problem" is presumed by way of the following large (anarchist) assumptions: Authority is a requisite of all social life, since in its absence it is both psychologically and physically impossible to coordinate human behaviours so that the ordinary social processes can continue to operate and flourish (p.729). The main claim is an important part of what is at issue between anarchists and archists and is at best highly dubious. Moreover the reason offered in its support is false and should be rejected (a range of counter models and counter examples have been indicated or will be). Furthermore, Merrifield goes on (on the next page) to adduce information on organisations of a sort which 12 13 14 Sec wp in. Merrifield p.724 alluding to the wording Notably B. Martin A/Z&) -sy-Mezn of political functionalism. 16 serve to cast severe doubt upon his claim and its supporting reason. There are various nongovernmental organisation (NGOs), and some intergovernmental organisation (IGOs), which rely upon voluntary, permissive or non-coercive motivations ... to accomplish their functional purposes. ... They may explain, demonstrate, justify and argue, but they cannot usually coerce. The role of functional NGO's is even more pronounced. Lacking any coercive power, they must rely on the validity and demonstrability (p.725). Some of the organisation rely, or need rely, not at all on closed authority. Like the voluntary support and participation basis, so too the organisational structure is voluntarily maintained. There is no hard authority, and no conspicuous authority problem. Coercion, in this respect authority, is also open to objection on rational grounds. Namely, ways of controlling, governing, or getting rational creatures coercive methods are not to do things. Rationality—not the undesirability and demeanment of force not, or not just, freedom—is the ground of this objection. The analysis of coercion admits of immediate fruitful application to (internal) criticisms of anarchism. In the first place, it has been argued that anarchism does not avoid coercion but incorporates coercive elements—which would render it inconsistent (as normally characterised). Further, because of these coercive elements anarchism is incompatible with liberty, thereby multiplying inconsistency, as liberty constitutes one of its main goals. These alleged problems derive from the reliance of anarchism on public censure, and like methods, to control social behaviour. According to Ritter, for example, who makes much of the second problem^, anarchists have the following goals: an (admirable) commitment to liberty, and a heavy reliance on public censure. But these goals are incompatible. For such a 'social scheme relies so much on coercive public * censure (p.10, also p.l). However, the argument to incompatibility is invalid; it makes an illicit insertion of 'coercive * * 'coercive (as the quote above illustrates; in fact the prejudicial slipping in of and 'coercion * occurs right through Ritter's discussions; see e.g. p.25 top and bottom). The social scheme as described involves only public censure in a free setting; such censure does not imply coercion, as no use of force need be involved or even contemplated. Secondly, connectedly, there is a widely exploited false dichotomy between voluntary and coerced activity, under which it supposed that all activity which is not purely voluntary is coerced. To the contrary, the range of actions is more satisfactorily diagrammed as follows: Voluntary vs coerced activity In a first chapter short-tided 'Liberty and pubiic censure', particularly on a muddled p.2. ,u„ ZL.. 17 hard pressured ! soft pressured ) ! (entirely) free ) influenced encouraged (fully) coerced <Actions -* In most standard arguments for the state only the outer bounds are considered.^ But noncoercive methods can include a wide range of influenced or pressured actions, which are less than entirely free. The interesting argument that Dahl draws from anarchism, directed against the state, turns upon on the undesirability, indeed the intrinsic badness, of coercion. In essence (leaving out support offered for the premiss as) the argument is as follows: Pl. M? one Zs obZZg#R?6? to -report or o&ey a sfafe. P2. A// sfafes ore coercive. P3. Coercion Zs intrin-nca/Zy bnJ. P4. A society wit/iont a state is a yeasi&Ze aitemative to a society with a state. This conclusion derives fiom these premisses ('assumptions' as he calls them) Dahl draws Ave conclusions' (p.41). As these are not the most direct or pointed conclusions, let us sharpen the conclusions: Cl. AZZ states are necessariiy &aJ. ^rom P2 and P3 (equivalently recast as: all coercive items are intrinsically bad items), given that intrinsicaZZy so implies necessariZy so. Dahl prefixes Cl by the conjunct, 'because all states are necessarily coercive'. Not only does Cl not require that support; we do not have it (e.g. in P2). While coercion may be taken as defining of the state, or an essential characteristic of it, as Dahl does, however states are defined it is continently true that all of them are coercive. C2 No one has an o&ZZgahon fo, Zs o&ZZgafed to, to support or obey any state. From Pl and Cl. Again Dahl unnecessarily prefixes his analogue of C2 (as for Cl above). Insofar as political obligation is obligation to the state, C2'. 77iere Zs no poZZtZcaZ obZZgatZon; political obligation lapses. Conclusions Cl and C2 specialize, because democratic states are states, to democratic states (that is effectively Dahl's fourth conclusion, p42). Dahl, like Wolff, senses a democratic escape through unaminity procedures, and reaches towards a fifth conclusion, which we will subvert. P5. Unanimity decision practices (can) escape coercion. 16 See for instance Taylor's presentation of game-theoretic arguments. 2^ 18 P6. Democracy can operate through unanimity procedures. These procedures and democracy are presumed to apply to some society, community or association. C51. prac/zc&y (can) escape -yfafcF. C52. Democracy can operate wif/zoaf any .sfafe. This last conclusion is interesting because Dahl regularly assumes, as against anarchism, that democracy must operate through the state, and that democracy is therefore in compatible with anarchism. As conclusion C52 reveals, these assumptions are astray, on grounds Dahl himself supplies (the inadequacy of these assumptions will be independently investigated subsequently). It is worth noting that, irrespective of the merit of premisses P5 and P6 (e.g. because unanimity wears off, because of the rareness of unanimity), the conclusions do not follow without other lesser presumptions. For C52 the transitivity of opcrafc wifAoMf (doubtfully a universal linkage) is presumed, and perhaps some modal shuffles as well. For derivation of C51 from P5 what is presumed is that what escapes coercion escapes the state, which requires a strengthened P2 (already encountered), that states necessitate coercion (as well as a little of the logic of escapism). Dahl's third conclusion, after detachment of (three) because-clauses, is C3D. A// PMg/tf a? A minimal inference scheme enabling derivation of C3D from previously derived statements is this: P3D. where an item is necessarily bad and there is a feasible (less bad) alternative to that item, the bad item ought to be abolished. Then C3D follow from (strengthened) P3D. These are important arguments, both for principled anarchists and for archists, and Dahl rightly invests detailed study to certain of the premisses, those he imagines he can dispose of, most notably P2 concerning the coerciveness of states. It is not that other premisses and steps are not highly controversial; they are. The very first, Pl, yields at least the stock debate as to whether one is obliged to support or obey a bad law; for a state can be viewed as a structure of laws. Instead of an argument for Pl, Dahl offers a thumbnail history of its status, a genetic '^justification". Other justifications there are, rendered easier if P2 is strengthened (as it may be without upsetting the arguments dependent upon it) by replacing 'bad' by 'evil' or 'immoral'. Then initial support for strengthened Pl is that political obligation, likewise legal obligation, is a type of obligation, justified by considerations of obligation generally, and accordinging triumphed by ethical obligation. The detailed arguments for these themes gets down to fundamentals, to the justification of obligations through values. Briefly, obligations obtain only towards items which normally exhibit a sufficient level of positive value. An item like an evil state that condition. So no obligation obtains towards such a state. 19 To escape such an outcome, archists contend that certain states are not evil, for instance Dahl will claim that 'a democratic state is not an evil state" (p.40). Anarchists will by contrast assemble a great deal of evidence that democratic states, like others, are evil (see next chapter). The immediate issue is, however, whether states are evil in principle, by virtue of their coercive features. Now Dahl does not contest 'so elementary a proposition" as P2, the universal coerciveness of states. 'Like any state, a democratic state would use coercion to enforce democratically enacted laws ..." Accordingly, to make his escape, Dahl is bound to dispute P3, and does; coercion is instrumentally justified as a means 'essential to a good purpose , a democratic state (p.40). * As to supposed (second-rate) justifiability of coercion. A conionplace claim, which Dahl advances, is DI. Even though coercion is intrinsically bad, its use is sometimes (reasonably) justified (p.44). Which times?, on which occasions? will turn out to be a critical issue. As against Dahl, it will be contended that its use is never woraZZy justified. However in moral dilemma situations, where all other feasible alternatives have been exhausted, its use can be given a "secondary"" secondrate justification. Such a secondary justification, in very limited circumstances, gives no succour to the state, which depends upon and makes widespread use of much more coercion. That is, DI itself does not justify the sfaR?'.? use of coercion. The first argument Dahl offers is overtly dilemmatic. There is a 'recalcitrant wrongdoer , ( who simply will not refrain from doing serious harm to others. Despite the best efforts of his associates, neither reason, argument, persuasion, public opinion, nor the final sanction of social octricism dissuades him from doing harm. His associates finally conclude that he will persist in harming others unless he is forcibly restrained or threatened with severe harm (that is, coerced) (p.44). Why should that stop him, threats in particular (it does not deter young alienated men in contemporary states)? With ali due respect^the gentle best efforts cited by no means exhaust nocoercive methods available. But let us grant not merely that there are situations where coercion occurs (plainly it is presently a frequent occurrence), but that there are dilemmatic situations where a person may have no alternative in preventing violence but to resort to coercion, for instance in preventing or limiting assault upon another, in self-defence, and so on. In such circumstances, 'coercion would be employed—either by the wrongdoers or by those who restrained them" (p.44). Granted, it is employed. The issues however are whether it is morally permissible, and who may be justified. Certainly the wrongdoers are not justified, and what they do is impermissible. More controversially, what the restrainers do is also morally impermissible; even so their actions may be justified. Given the fixes they were in, where all alternatives were forbidden, still what 20 they did may be situationally justified, as a satisfactory actions in the dilemmatic circumstances.*7 Such situational justification is not what Dahl and other consequentialists are seeking; they want coercion justified without impermissibility strings attached. There is no reason, or need, to accede to their desires. Such a reasonable, and practiced, approach to moral dilemmas (which Dahl himself subsequently takes in his discussion of whether to always obey laws of a democratic state p.4950) here escapes notice. And Dahl introduces two difficulties he incorrectly presumes fatal to 'alternative position ... [that] violence and coercion are absolutely forbidden" (p.45). Firstly, given that coercion is employed, 'the position in self-contradictory". Wrong. For that coercion occurs, whether perpetrated by wrongdoers or by those trying to prevent wrongdoers, does no? imply that coercion is morally permissible (i.e. p -f Pp). Nor does the impermissibility of incompatibles imply self-contradiction, for the covering deontic functors cannot be deleted (i.e. -Pp & -P-p is no contradiction; of course given, what gets rejected, -Pq -* -q, contradiction would ensure). Also wrong, then, is what Dahl takes to emerge from such self-contradiction, no 'guidance for the most elementary choices", said to be an 'indefensible" position (p.95). For coupled with the story concerning moral dilemmas are suggested procedures for making choices (often far from elementary choices) from within the dilemmas. Secondly, Dahl wrongly supposes that so rendering coercion absolute makes it 'a supreme value that eliminates all other ends" including justice, freedom, etc. It does not. No hierarchy of principles (or values), this or another, is adopted, which is one reason why dilemmas occur. As in ordinary ethical practice, ^he principles stand, they are not simply prima they are not ranked, there are no 'trade-offs". It may have become apparent, what requires only a little between-lines interpretation, that Dahl is playing a rather familiar utilitarian game underneath the surface moral concern. Render 'the objection to coercion as a means ... not absolute but contingent on consequences". So weaken absolutist prohibitions on coercion and violence that generous room can be made for an institution which routinely practices them, and to which we can trade up with consequential advantage. Given that coercion occurs without the state, indeed may be quite widespread in the absence of the state, then there might be gains in installing a coercive imitation 'to restrict [!] and regulate coercion". Moreover, if 'on balance the gains from creating a state are likely to exceed the costs, then from a utilitarian perspective it would be reasonable to opt for a state" (p.45). There are two critical gaps in this utilitarian state-pleading. Firstly, impressive evidence for the conditional antecedent that the gains from the state exceed the costs has never been assembled, but rather evidence points in the opposite direction (as we shall see in the next 17 This controversial story has been told before, that for coercion resembles that already related for violence. The general theory of moral dilemmas (in MD) is applied to the issue of violence, control of pacifism (in WP TV). 21 chapter), so detachment from the antecedent is not warranted. Secondly, the performance even of better states in coercion is utterly unimpressive; these states foo amplify coercive practices, do not regulate basic cases, and so on. The state appears to exacerbate the levels, both in extent and intensity, of coercion, over the low levels genuine moral dilemmas would yield. It is unnecessary to contend, however, as Dahl asserts anarchists contend, "that if states did not exist coercion would soon disappear or decline to a tolerable level' (p.45). That judgement, which is not exactly an 'empirical' one, depends very much on the character of alternative societies. An individualistic society might enjoy high levels of coercion owing to the activities of its public-like protective agencies. By contrast, a well-organised society may be afflicted with comparatively little coercive behaviour, rendering Dahl's uncompleted utilitarian argument extremely difficult to complete, ever. Interlarded with the dulcet utilitarian approach, under which they beneficent, ^states will provide us with all those promised superior values many millions are still awaiting — freedom, justice, equality, and so on — lies a more sinister argument; that to the gangster state. That evil state is not so far removed, some may think, from many states that are presently recognised. Without the strong state, the gangster state looms, so Dahl insinuates. So adopt the state, or worse will eventuate. That sort of decision theory argument (itself unpleasantly coercive and out of the same big stable as utilitarianism) depends on some (derived) principle such as choose a least bad alternative, and accordingly fails unless another independent argument to the state succeeds. For otherwise superior stateless choices remain on offer. Yet nothing more than the po&H&iZi/y that a small gang of wrongdoers may pool resources, andwhat results may evolve into a "gangster state" is floated (similarly for claim 2, p47, that some group wng/tf manage to create a highly oppressive state, which is as true in many a state as in stateless conditions). There is a complex evolutionary path, with many obstacles and hitches, from a small gang, through growing rival gangs and protection rackets, to a single one, and thence to a state. It is moreover a path that is rather easily blocked at early stages in an organised society, as simple counter examples show (one such example, that of the Inuit, Dahl introduces on the very next page). Apart from the inconclusive utilitarian considerations, Dahl offers a further page, under the boldface heading 'On the Need for the State' (a strikingly minimal effort in a book of about 400 pages most of which are premised on the assumption that the state is a needed item). He concedes, what seems to put a large dent in his bold claim, that preliterate societies, like those of the Inuit, have subsisted, over long periods, without the state. But that is past history, the world has advanced, the state is here, there, and everywhere. Granted it is; that does not show it is needed. Many gadgets that are now produced are not needed. Consider Dahl s reasons why a return to societies without states is 'if not impossible, highly undesirable (p.46). First, the world is already too densely populated to provide much space for autonomy (p.46, less than a 22 page after the utilitarian promise of a satisfactory state maximizing 'freedom and justice'; similarly p.51 etc.) But there are many regions where autonomy could undoubtedly be increased by expansionary or imperial states backing off (not merely in East Timor, on the West Bank, etc., but in the lands of the Inuit, the Micronesians, etc.). Further, the denseness of human population, hardly affords a reason. For one thing, the excessive human population is highly concentrated; most parts of the Earth carry, by comparison, sparse populations. For another, autonomy does not depend, so directly, on available space. 'Thirdly, virtually the entire globe is now already occupied by states'. Similar points apply: for instance, such an accomplished fact does not establish a need, or the impossibility of change. While not true 'throughout recorded history', but a very modem phenomenon, it is no doubt recently confingenfZy true that 'small autonomous groups of people have been extraordinarily vulnerable to conquest and absorption by larger states', and that it is presently doubtful that 'states would permit any small, independent group to exist anywhere [much] on earth'. Such present yizcfo political power relations do not demonstrate a need, still less impossibility of alternative, still less undesirability of changes. Consciousness change could come very rapidly, furthermore, with a welcome change in popular attitudes in large democratic states to oppression of minorities elsewhere (in Europe this seems to be happening). These points also serve to destroy Dahl's second reason, that 'a multiplicity of interdependencies cannot be snapped apart without enormous costs that few people would accept.' The break-up of states in Eastern Europe shows that substantial changes can occur very rapidly; the costs involved were much higher than they should have been because of the attitudes of states, not attitudes of their peoples by and large. In sum, then, all Dahl has accumulated is evidence of the repressive grip of the present regime of states, rendering local change pragmatically very difficult. Such evidence does nothing to establish a need for states, nothing at all to establish the undesirability of stateless societies. Accordingly the main assumptions fail with which Dahl claims support his 'conclusion that if woM/J &^ff^r fo fry fo cr^afg a mfz^/acfory jfafe f/ian f/y io ^xAff in a .soci^fy wif%OMf o sfaf^' (p.47). As it happens, the failed assumptions also fail to support such a conclusion—without suppressed material, of the utilitarian cast already criticised. All the assumptions would indicate, werf they granted, is the practical undesirability of trying to set up small stateless associations in a regime of states like mot prevailing today exc^pf that the states are satisfactory. But the assumptions should be scuttled. * Aggfnsf Jowfnaffon Domination is an important type of power relation. It is a comprehensive relation: persistent over a period, not simply once-off or occasional, pervasive, extending over a range of action and behaviour. It offers confro/ in a spread of cases. In such cases, if the dominator exercises control (e.g. adjusts the appropriate controls, pulls requisite levers) then the dominated normally responds. A significant form of control within extended human affairs is that of A 23 command or ability to command. Of course the creature commanded, the servant, the domesticated animal, the subdued or subjugated person, has to be able to understand what is commanded. But domination operates in significant spheres where such conditions for commanding do not obtain: in particular, but not only, in the domination of nature, its parts and elements, such as animals that do not understand commands, biota that do not recognise manipulation, and so on. Domination originated with (what the etymology of the term reflects) lord-subjects and master-servant relations, which remain paradigmatic for this power relation. It was soon and easily extended to cover owner-slave relations, where control was much more extensive, God­ human relations, human-working animal relations, and so on. It has long covered parent­ children and husband-wife relations, as well as certain class relations; and as classes have changed with political restructuring, industralisation and the rise of cities, so have domination relations. Those of higher classes or castes tend to dominate those of lower ranking, similarly for those higher in new hierarchies. Domination of nature and its parts is a relatively recent addition to the varieties of domination, since the acclaimed success of "the war against Nature" (still going on last century) before which technological humans (lacked the considerable level of power they have now acquired over natural systems.^ An aim of softening or removing forms of domination links social and environmental objectiv&with anarchism. These aims are united in green social anarchism. Opposition to all forms of domination, is yet another extension of certain types of anarchism, perhaps incompatible with other types of anarchism (e.g. communal anarchisms which assume that affairs should be organised along strict patriarchal lines, which accordingly not altogether coherently oppose social archy only to retain or even reinforce a tribal or familial archy). There may by now be some confusion concerning the variety of extensions of anarchism encountered. More exactly these "extensions" are subextensions, which isolate the principle of some type or ( key feature of anarchism and generalize it. generalisation of principled subtype with distinguishing principle. 18 Intellectual vandals have been at work on dondnahon also, stretching it from a relation from ensembles of actors, the dominators, to whole structures, systems or institutions (what might be called by partial analogy with the vandalism worked on .sTrHctund domination). Stretched dominators include the capitalist economy, market forces, the economy, the state, and so on. Under the stretching, /to (structural) dondnadon is said to imply, what straightforwardly is right enough, no subordination of the people to market forces, or even, what is impossible to avoid in a sophisticated society, no influences on members through the operation of its economy. A  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 17, Item 1005: Draft chapters of Towards green anakism: eucratic political investigations Subject The topic of the resource Typescript draft, with handwritten emendations and annotations, and handwritten notes. Description An account of the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 17, Item 1005 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [61] leaves. 143.55 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:818a421">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:818a421</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Lake George - Floor - Pile 8 Box 17: Green Projects in Progress Lake George House Lake George House > Floor > Pile 8 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/5cb229c3d9affba38077a07c721b6799.pdf 864475d38dc9bafca72f1f6da54ba711 PDF Text Text �������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 17, Item 1264: Characterizing anarchism Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten on scrap paper. Description An account of the resource Verso of leaves not digitised Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 17, Item 1264 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [8] leaves. 4.58 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:709ee89">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:709ee89</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Bookcase - 1st on Right - 3rd Shelf Down - First Pile Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Bookcase > 1st on Right > 3rd Shelf Down > First Pile Box 17: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/46d18761af348ef21c37dca2628582a9.pdf 49ee38d32c731ad154d8fa5f39e25dea PDF Text Text /*/^/ R. SYLVAN (ng Routley) In the background for much of the year has been a sustained treatise on But the recent foreground has been dominated by bits and pieces on anarchism. science and environmental matters. PUBLICATIONS 2 and ROUTLEY, R., guest editors, Studia Logica, vol. 43, special PRIEST, G. double issue on paraconsistent logic. 2 and ROUTLEY, R., "Introduction", PRIEST, G. Studia Logica, vol. 43, pp. 1-14. 2 PRIEST, G. and ROUTLEY, R., On Paraconsistency, Research Series in Logic and Metaphysics, No. 1, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 235 pp. ROUTLEY, R., "The American plan completed: alternative classical style semantics, without stars, for relevant and paraconsistent logics", Studia Logica, vol. 43, pp. 129-156. ROUTLEY, R., "Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament", Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 10, numbers 3-4, pp. ROUTLEY, R., "Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 14, pp. 167-188. ROUTLEY, R., guest editor, Logique et Analyse, nos 103-104, (1983), special issue on non-classical logic. ROUTLEY, R., Maximising, Satisficing, Satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms, Discussion Papers in Environmental 1 �Philosophy, No. 10, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 27 pp. ROUTLEY, R., "On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity, and fanaticism of pacifism", Inquiry, vol. 27, pp. 117-148. ROUTLEY, R., "Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action", in R. Elliot and A. Gare, editors, Environmental Philosophy: collection of readings, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, pp. 260-293. ROUTLEY, R. "People vs the land: the ethics of the population case", in R. Birrell and others, editors, Populate and Perish?, Fontana, Sydney, pp. 325-351. ROUTLEY, R., MEYER, R.K., BRADY, R.T. z 1 and PLUMWOOD, V. , Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, I, Ridgeview Publishing Company, Atascadero, Calif­ ornia, 460 pp. ROUTLEY, R. and PLUMWOOD, V.^, Moral Dilemmas and the Logic of Deontic Notions, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 6, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 42 pp. SYLVAN, R., Windows on Science. beyond the Actual, and 2. 1. How Science and Myth and Fiction Step Science on Science, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 1, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 53 pp. SYLVAN, R., Windows on Science. 3. A Cosmo-Logical Synthesis, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 2, Philosophy Department, RSSS. ANU, 40 pp. 2 a �SYLVAN, R., Philosophy and Pluralism, Relevant Models and Arguments, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 3, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 35 pp. SYLVAN, R., A Critique of Deep Ecology, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 12, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 59 pp. SYLVAN, R. and PLUMWOOD, V.^, An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 7, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 36 pp. 3 . �ANNUAL REVIEW OF PERFORMANCE OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF TENURED ACADEMIC STAFF INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES Report by R. SYLVAN ( Department of Philosophy, RSSS) for the period 1981-4 inclusive 1. Research conducted and future plans for research My research has ranged over a wide area in philosophy — metaphysics, logic, philosophy of science, ethics, social and political theory, extending to environmental concerns. My work overlaps the three areas upon which research in the Philosophy Department, RSSS, concentrates: logic; metaphysics and epistemo­ logy; and social and political theory. The work extends into other disciplines as well, in an examination of their fundamental assumptions. For example, my current work includes the metaphysical principles in cosmology, realism and relativism in science, and the philosophical assumptions of economics. This philosophical investigation of the foundations of other disciplines is a research trend which is likely to increase. Uy research over the next few years will also include certain large projects, already underway. These include a treatise on anarchism, which will likely be several years in preparation, and an in-depth work on process theory and nondeductive logics with particular emphasis on nonmonotonic logics relevant to computing and information processing. 2. Publications during 1981-4 BOOKS, MONOGRAPHS AND JOURNAL, written and edited Environmental Philosophy, Department of Philosophy Monograph Series #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, (edited with D. Mannison and M. McRobbie). Reprint, with minor correction, 1982, 394 pages. Relevant Logics and Their Rivals I. The basic semantical theory (with R.K. Meyer, V\ Plumwood, and R.T.Brady), Ridgeview,California, 1983, 460 pages. Nonclassical Logic, (guest editor), special double issue of Logique et Analyse 103-4, 1983, devoted to nonclassical logic in Canada. On Paraconsistency (with G. Priest), Research Papers in Logic #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 321 pages; reprinted with minor revision in Research Series in Logic and Metaphysics #1 1984, 235 pages; to appear in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. with G. Priest and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1986. Paraconsistent Logics (edited with G. Priest as guest editor), with contributed introduction, Studia Logica 43 (1984), 220 pages. .../2 �-2- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) ARTICLES: 'Necessary limits to Knowledge: Unknowable truths', Essays in Scientific Philosophy (ed. E. Morscher and others), Comes-Verlag, 1981, pp. 97-118. 'An alternative angle on the humanities', Cooperative Education Newsletter, University of Victoria (Fall 1981), pp. 2-3* 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future' (with V. Routley), Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics, (ed^ E. Partridge), Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1981, pp. 277-301. 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs and intentionality to animals', Inquiry 24 (1981 ), pp. 387-417. 'The inadequacy of the actual and the real: beyond empiricism, idealism and mysticism', Language and Ontology (ed. W. Leinfeller and others), Verlag Holder-Pitcher-Tempsky, 1982, pp. 49-67. 'An impressionistic survey of paraconsistent positions and theories', Collected Papers of the 1982 Foundations of Logic Conference, University of Waterloo. 'On the philosophical basis of relevant logic semantics' (with V. Plumwood, R.K. Meyer and E.P. Martin), Journal of Non-Classical Logic 1 (1982), pp. 71 -105. 'Negation and contradiction in Wittgenstein', Language and Ontology (ed. W. Leinfeller and others), Verlag Holder-Pitcher-Tempsky, 1982, pp. 471-4. 'World rainforest destruction - the social factors' The Ecologist 12 (1982), pp. 4-22. (with V. Routley), 'Disjunctive Syllogism seen as a fallacy of relevance', Bulletin of the Section of Logic, Polish Academy of Sciences (1982). 'Nuclear power - ethical and social dimensions' (with V. Routley), And Justice for All (ed. D. Van der Veer and T. Regan), Rowman and Littlefield, 1982 'In defense of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism' Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1982, 47 pages. 'The irrefutability of anarchism' (with V. Plumwood), Social Alternatives 2(3) (1982), pp.23-8. 'Unravelling the meanings of life?' (with N. Griffin), Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy j^3. Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1982, 49 pages; to appear in Studies in Analytic Philosophy: a comparative Approach (ed. B. Matita1 and J. Shaw), Reid el, Dordrecht, 1984; rescheduled. 'On what there is pp. 151-77. not', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1982), .../3 �-3- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) 'Lessons from Pseudo-Scotus', Philosophical Studies 42 (1982), pp. 189-99. 'Algebra^analyses of relevant affixing logics, and other Polish connections' (with R.T. Brady, R.K. Meyer and C. Mortensen), Research Papers in Logic #16, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 56 pages; to appear in Relevant Logics and their Rivals II, 1986. 'Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania: its brief history and its present state', Research Papers in Logic #14, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983; condensed version to appear in Ruch Filozoficzny. 'Semantical foundations of value theory' pp. 441-56. (with V. Routley), Nous 17 (1983), 'Nihilisms and nihilist logics', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #4, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 53 pages; shortened version to appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986. 'Relevant logics and their semantics remain viable and undamaged by Lewis's equivocation charge' (with R.K. Meyer), Topoi 2 (1983), pp. 205-1 5. 'Moral dilemmas, and the logic of deontic notions' (with V. Plumwood), Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 42 pages; to appear in Paraconsistent Logic, (ed. with G. Priest, and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1985. 'On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #9, 1983, 31 pages; also in Inquiry 27 (1984), pp. 11 7-28. 'The role and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action', Environmental Philosophy. A Collection of Readings (ed. R. Elliott and Al Gare), University of Queensland Press,1983,pp. 260-93. 'Relevantism and the problem as to when material detachment and the disjunctive syllogism can be correctly used', Research Papers in Logic #12, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 24 pages; revised version in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1984), pp. 167-88. 'The American plan completed: alternative classical-style semantics without stars, for relevant and paraconsistent logics', Studia Logica 43 (1984), pp. 125-56. 'How science and myth and fiction step beyond the actual and sometimes beyond the possible', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #1, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 33 pages; appear in revised German translation, 1986. .../4 �-4- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) 'Science and science: relocating Stove and the modern irrationalists', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #1, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 20 pages; to appear in Critical Philosophy, 1985* 'Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #10, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 27 pages. 'War and Peace I: On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political fall-out', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 80 pages. 'People vs the Land: the ethics of the population case', Population Growth and Resources in Australia: The Intensifying Conflict (ed. R. Birrell, D. Hill, and J. Neville), Fontana, Sydney, 1984, pp- 325-57. Manucripts accepted or prepared (those accepted for publication are starred) BOOKS *Paraconsistent Logic (contributing editor, with G. Priest and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1984, 540 pages; several articles appear in this text. ^Directions in Relevant Logic (contributing editor, with J. Norman), Reason and Argument series, Nijhoff, Holland,1986, 350 pages; several articles appear in this book. *Soil Degradation in Australia: The Future of our Land (contributing editor), Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1986. j *The Philosophy of J.C.C Smart (edited with^J. Norman), Blackwell, 1986. ARTICLES 'A non-triviality proof for dialethic set theory', typescript 1981. 'Nuclear energy - ethical, social and political dimensions', typescript 1981, 50 pages. 'More general da Costa and dual-intuitionistic logics', typescript 1982, 14 pages. .../5 �-5- 3. Manuscripts accepted or prepared (cont) -those manuscripts accepted for publication are starred 'Starred semi-lattice semantics for full Urquhart systems', typescript 1982. 'Conditional probability as the probability of a conditional', typescript 1982, 26 pages; read at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 1982. 'The irrefutability of anarchism - enlarged', typescript 1982, 45 pages. 'Simple probabilistic sanantics for non-normal modal logics', typescript 1982; presented at Logic Workshop, University of Victoria, Canada, 1983. 'Non-classical probability theories', typescript 1983. 'A neglected goal of philosophy - wisdom', typescript 1983, 36 pages; read to the Philosophy Department, The Faculties. 'World order, cultural convergence and regional culture', typescript 1983, 6 pages. 'Culture and the roots of political divergence: The Australia/American contrast', typescript 1983, 32 pages; expanded to 121 pages 1984. 'On non-deductive reasoning I. Non-monotonic logics', typescript 1984. 'Myths concerning rationality', typescript 1984, 11 pages; read at University of Queensland, 1984. 'Nature JLs closed to mind: typescript 1984. Whitehead, deep ecology, and the theory of objects', *'Towards a cosmo-logical synthesis', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1985, 42 pages; to appear in Grazer philosophische Studien, special anniversary issue, 1985. ^'Introducing polylogue theory', to appear in Philosophia, 1985, 21 pages. ^'Negation and contradiction' (with V. Routley), to appear in Proceedings of the Third Latin-American Logic Symposium, Columbian Society of Mathematicians, Bogata, 1985. *'Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament', to appear in Philosophy and Social Criticism, February 1985. 'Moral Issues in Nuclear War' (with L. Sylvan), typescript, 1984; read at ANU Summer Studies Workshop on Peace, Disarmament and Development. �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy [1983?] research output report (8 pages) Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy 1985 research output report (8 pages) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document /*/^/ R. SYLVAN (ng Routley) In the background for much of the year has been a sustained treatise on But the recent foreground has been dominated by bits and pieces on anarchism. science and environmental matters. PUBLICATIONS 2 and ROUTLEY, R., guest editors, Studia Logica, vol. 43, special PRIEST, G. double issue on paraconsistent logic. 2 and ROUTLEY, R., "Introduction", PRIEST, G. Studia Logica, vol. 43, pp. 1-14. 2 PRIEST, G. and ROUTLEY, R., On Paraconsistency, Research Series in Logic and Metaphysics, No. 1, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 235 pp. ROUTLEY, R., "The American plan completed: alternative classical style semantics, without stars, for relevant and paraconsistent logics", Studia Logica, vol. 43, pp. 129-156. ROUTLEY, R., "Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament", Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 10, numbers 3-4, pp. ROUTLEY, R., "Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 14, pp. 167-188. ROUTLEY, R., guest editor, Logique et Analyse, nos 103-104, (1983), special issue on non-classical logic. ROUTLEY, R., Maximising, Satisficing, Satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms, Discussion Papers in Environmental 1 Philosophy, No. 10, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 27 pp. ROUTLEY, R., "On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity, and fanaticism of pacifism", Inquiry, vol. 27, pp. 117-148. ROUTLEY, R., "Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action", in R. Elliot and A. Gare, editors, Environmental Philosophy: collection of readings, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, pp. 260-293. ROUTLEY, R. "People vs the land: the ethics of the population case", in R. Birrell and others, editors, Populate and Perish?, Fontana, Sydney, pp. 325-351. ROUTLEY, R., MEYER, R.K., BRADY, R.T. z 1 and PLUMWOOD, V. , Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, I, Ridgeview Publishing Company, Atascadero, Calif­ ornia, 460 pp. ROUTLEY, R. and PLUMWOOD, V.^, Moral Dilemmas and the Logic of Deontic Notions, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 6, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 42 pp. SYLVAN, R., Windows on Science. beyond the Actual, and 2. 1. How Science and Myth and Fiction Step Science on Science, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 1, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 53 pp. SYLVAN, R., Windows on Science. 3. A Cosmo-Logical Synthesis, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 2, Philosophy Department, RSSS. ANU, 40 pp. 2 a SYLVAN, R., Philosophy and Pluralism, Relevant Models and Arguments, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, No. 3, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 35 pp. SYLVAN, R., A Critique of Deep Ecology, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 12, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 59 pp. SYLVAN, R. and PLUMWOOD, V.^, An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, No. 7, Philosophy Department, RSSS, ANU, 36 pp. 3 . ANNUAL REVIEW OF PERFORMANCE OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF TENURED ACADEMIC STAFF INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES Report by R. SYLVAN ( Department of Philosophy, RSSS) for the period 1981-4 inclusive 1. Research conducted and future plans for research My research has ranged over a wide area in philosophy — metaphysics, logic, philosophy of science, ethics, social and political theory, extending to environmental concerns. My work overlaps the three areas upon which research in the Philosophy Department, RSSS, concentrates: logic; metaphysics and epistemo­ logy; and social and political theory. The work extends into other disciplines as well, in an examination of their fundamental assumptions. For example, my current work includes the metaphysical principles in cosmology, realism and relativism in science, and the philosophical assumptions of economics. This philosophical investigation of the foundations of other disciplines is a research trend which is likely to increase. Uy research over the next few years will also include certain large projects, already underway. These include a treatise on anarchism, which will likely be several years in preparation, and an in-depth work on process theory and nondeductive logics with particular emphasis on nonmonotonic logics relevant to computing and information processing. 2. Publications during 1981-4 BOOKS, MONOGRAPHS AND JOURNAL, written and edited Environmental Philosophy, Department of Philosophy Monograph Series #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, (edited with D. Mannison and M. McRobbie). Reprint, with minor correction, 1982, 394 pages. Relevant Logics and Their Rivals I. The basic semantical theory (with R.K. Meyer, V\ Plumwood, and R.T.Brady), Ridgeview,California, 1983, 460 pages. Nonclassical Logic, (guest editor), special double issue of Logique et Analyse 103-4, 1983, devoted to nonclassical logic in Canada. On Paraconsistency (with G. Priest), Research Papers in Logic #13, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 321 pages; reprinted with minor revision in Research Series in Logic and Metaphysics #1 1984, 235 pages; to appear in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. with G. Priest and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1986. Paraconsistent Logics (edited with G. Priest as guest editor), with contributed introduction, Studia Logica 43 (1984), 220 pages. .../2 -2- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) ARTICLES: 'Necessary limits to Knowledge: Unknowable truths', Essays in Scientific Philosophy (ed. E. Morscher and others), Comes-Verlag, 1981, pp. 97-118. 'An alternative angle on the humanities', Cooperative Education Newsletter, University of Victoria (Fall 1981), pp. 2-3* 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future' (with V. Routley), Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics, (ed^ E. Partridge), Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1981, pp. 277-301. 'Alleged problems in attributing beliefs and intentionality to animals', Inquiry 24 (1981 ), pp. 387-417. 'The inadequacy of the actual and the real: beyond empiricism, idealism and mysticism', Language and Ontology (ed. W. Leinfeller and others), Verlag Holder-Pitcher-Tempsky, 1982, pp. 49-67. 'An impressionistic survey of paraconsistent positions and theories', Collected Papers of the 1982 Foundations of Logic Conference, University of Waterloo. 'On the philosophical basis of relevant logic semantics' (with V. Plumwood, R.K. Meyer and E.P. Martin), Journal of Non-Classical Logic 1 (1982), pp. 71 -105. 'Negation and contradiction in Wittgenstein', Language and Ontology (ed. W. Leinfeller and others), Verlag Holder-Pitcher-Tempsky, 1982, pp. 471-4. 'World rainforest destruction - the social factors' The Ecologist 12 (1982), pp. 4-22. (with V. Routley), 'Disjunctive Syllogism seen as a fallacy of relevance', Bulletin of the Section of Logic, Polish Academy of Sciences (1982). 'Nuclear power - ethical and social dimensions' (with V. Routley), And Justice for All (ed. D. Van der Veer and T. Regan), Rowman and Littlefield, 1982 'In defense of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism' Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1982, 47 pages. 'The irrefutability of anarchism' (with V. Plumwood), Social Alternatives 2(3) (1982), pp.23-8. 'Unravelling the meanings of life?' (with N. Griffin), Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy j^3. Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1982, 49 pages; to appear in Studies in Analytic Philosophy: a comparative Approach (ed. B. Matita1 and J. Shaw), Reid el, Dordrecht, 1984; rescheduled. 'On what there is pp. 151-77. not', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1982), .../3 -3- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) 'Lessons from Pseudo-Scotus', Philosophical Studies 42 (1982), pp. 189-99. 'Algebra^analyses of relevant affixing logics, and other Polish connections' (with R.T. Brady, R.K. Meyer and C. Mortensen), Research Papers in Logic #16, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 56 pages; to appear in Relevant Logics and their Rivals II, 1986. 'Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania: its brief history and its present state', Research Papers in Logic #14, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983; condensed version to appear in Ruch Filozoficzny. 'Semantical foundations of value theory' pp. 441-56. (with V. Routley), Nous 17 (1983), 'Nihilisms and nihilist logics', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #4, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 53 pages; shortened version to appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986. 'Relevant logics and their semantics remain viable and undamaged by Lewis's equivocation charge' (with R.K. Meyer), Topoi 2 (1983), pp. 205-1 5. 'Moral dilemmas, and the logic of deontic notions' (with V. Plumwood), Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 42 pages; to appear in Paraconsistent Logic, (ed. with G. Priest, and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1985. 'On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #9, 1983, 31 pages; also in Inquiry 27 (1984), pp. 11 7-28. 'The role and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action', Environmental Philosophy. A Collection of Readings (ed. R. Elliott and Al Gare), University of Queensland Press,1983,pp. 260-93. 'Relevantism and the problem as to when material detachment and the disjunctive syllogism can be correctly used', Research Papers in Logic #12, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1983, 24 pages; revised version in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1984), pp. 167-88. 'The American plan completed: alternative classical-style semantics without stars, for relevant and paraconsistent logics', Studia Logica 43 (1984), pp. 125-56. 'How science and myth and fiction step beyond the actual and sometimes beyond the possible', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #1, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 33 pages; appear in revised German translation, 1986. .../4 -4- 2. Publications during 1981-4 (cont) 'Science and science: relocating Stove and the modern irrationalists', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #1, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 20 pages; to appear in Critical Philosophy, 1985* 'Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: the difference in real and rational behaviour under rival paradigms', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #10, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 27 pages. 'War and Peace I: On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political fall-out', Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984, 80 pages. 'People vs the Land: the ethics of the population case', Population Growth and Resources in Australia: The Intensifying Conflict (ed. R. Birrell, D. Hill, and J. Neville), Fontana, Sydney, 1984, pp- 325-57. Manucripts accepted or prepared (those accepted for publication are starred) BOOKS *Paraconsistent Logic (contributing editor, with G. Priest and J. Norman), Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1984, 540 pages; several articles appear in this text. ^Directions in Relevant Logic (contributing editor, with J. Norman), Reason and Argument series, Nijhoff, Holland,1986, 350 pages; several articles appear in this book. *Soil Degradation in Australia: The Future of our Land (contributing editor), Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1986. j *The Philosophy of J.C.C Smart (edited with^J. Norman), Blackwell, 1986. ARTICLES 'A non-triviality proof for dialethic set theory', typescript 1981. 'Nuclear energy - ethical, social and political dimensions', typescript 1981, 50 pages. 'More general da Costa and dual-intuitionistic logics', typescript 1982, 14 pages. .../5 -5- 3. Manuscripts accepted or prepared (cont) -those manuscripts accepted for publication are starred 'Starred semi-lattice semantics for full Urquhart systems', typescript 1982. 'Conditional probability as the probability of a conditional', typescript 1982, 26 pages; read at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 1982. 'The irrefutability of anarchism - enlarged', typescript 1982, 45 pages. 'Simple probabilistic sanantics for non-normal modal logics', typescript 1982; presented at Logic Workshop, University of Victoria, Canada, 1983. 'Non-classical probability theories', typescript 1983. 'A neglected goal of philosophy - wisdom', typescript 1983, 36 pages; read to the Philosophy Department, The Faculties. 'World order, cultural convergence and regional culture', typescript 1983, 6 pages. 'Culture and the roots of political divergence: The Australia/American contrast', typescript 1983, 32 pages; expanded to 121 pages 1984. 'On non-deductive reasoning I. Non-monotonic logics', typescript 1984. 'Myths concerning rationality', typescript 1984, 11 pages; read at University of Queensland, 1984. 'Nature JLs closed to mind: typescript 1984. Whitehead, deep ecology, and the theory of objects', *'Towards a cosmo-logical synthesis', Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy #2, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1985, 42 pages; to appear in Grazer philosophische Studien, special anniversary issue, 1985. ^'Introducing polylogue theory', to appear in Philosophia, 1985, 21 pages. ^'Negation and contradiction' (with V. Routley), to appear in Proceedings of the Third Latin-American Logic Symposium, Columbian Society of Mathematicians, Bogata, 1985. *'Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament', to appear in Philosophy and Social Criticism, February 1985. 'Moral Issues in Nuclear War' (with L. Sylvan), typescript, 1984; read at ANU Summer Studies Workshop on Peace, Disarmament and Development. The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy [1983?] research output report (8 pages) Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy 1985 research output report (8 pages)  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 72, Item 2: Sylvan/Routley annual report for 1984 and the Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy research output reports for 1983? and 1985 Description An account of the resource Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy reports redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 72, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:13116c5">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:13116c5</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant n/a - unlisted in manuscript finding aid Box 72: Unlisted and Untitled Boxes https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/5e8415bb76024d67ded6d6e3977f7eb3.pdf 96f3e6a4de450fe22ae29f31689e350e PDF Text Text ON EXTIRPATING WAR: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ ( SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war – on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level ( SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ ( SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them – but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) – not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken �to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special �dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the militarypractices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology – implying that war is far from all right – and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on – implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through �deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. �Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: �Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. �Deep-green chart: dilemma input Arguments to incompatible prescriptions § Processing of dilemma, directive situational procedures output Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output input It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deepgreen theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of �action. Therefore, �every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a onesided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modern technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable? 1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just war for party d’.) �unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p.152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socioenvironmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism. 2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neoDaoism, see UT. �2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they – those of the theoretical residue – are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep-green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game – in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on – carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set-up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life-style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modern times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the �technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted – misdirected – in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken ( LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. �capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of politicaleconomy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses (the thrive in fields ...). the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. ( LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. �It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination ( LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep-green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deepgreen theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. �Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war – finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars – though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf �Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ill-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) �• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced ( LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength ( LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, ‘In order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, ‘In order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ ( LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices �paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p.197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non-interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. �right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished. 6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve selfreferential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. �second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace – and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position – it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:- • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Arnauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... – and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts – sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. �Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non-violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.7 While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. AI, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In AI this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. �could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in AI p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p.153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold – yet ... pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine ... (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized – JWS “activism” is hardly trivial – as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. �accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. AI p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (AI p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted ( MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations, ... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) �There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p.153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p.153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as AI tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non-violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage �routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities – even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order ) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral – in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in AI ). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to �peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence. 9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan10* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in AI, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. 10 * Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) �supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as AI. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic); referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ON EXTIRPATING WAR: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ ( SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war – on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level ( SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ ( SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them – but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) – not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the militarypractices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology – implying that war is far from all right – and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on – implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: dilemma input Arguments to incompatible prescriptions § Processing of dilemma, directive situational procedures output Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output input It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deepgreen theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a onesided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modern technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable? 1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just war for party d’.) unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p.152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socioenvironmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism. 2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neoDaoism, see UT. 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they – those of the theoretical residue – are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep-green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game – in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on – carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set-up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life-style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modern times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted – misdirected – in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken ( LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of politicaleconomy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses (the thrive in fields ...). the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. ( LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination ( LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep-green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deepgreen theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war – finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars – though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ill-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced ( LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength ( LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, ‘In order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, ‘In order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ ( LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p.197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non-interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished. 6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve selfreferential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace – and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position – it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:- • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Arnauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... – and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts – sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non-violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.7 While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. AI, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In AI this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in AI p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p.153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold – yet ... pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine ... (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized – JWS “activism” is hardly trivial – as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. AI p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (AI p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted ( MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations, ... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p.153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p.153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as AI tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non-violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities – even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order ) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral – in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in AI ). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence. 9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan10* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in AI, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. 10 * Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as AI. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic); referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 77, Item 1: Draft of On extirpating war: Tao and deep-green pacifism Subject The topic of the resource Previous title of paper: War and peace IV: Tao and deep-green. Description An account of the resource Paper from floppy disk containing 21 files. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 77, Item 1 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:3c66dd9">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:3c66dd9</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant n/a - not listed in manuscript finding aid Box 77: Untitled and Unlisted Boxes https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/8b7e8d66d0e9ea5ede0b0b74abc38bfe.pdf 437b0835703278585d832d8eec97184e PDF Text Text PACIFISM P.4 Those who would abolish war, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much subrational abuse but with plenty of criticism and some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs and enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Do so cannot be uncomplished without violence, i.e. in effect given the types of violence involved without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.1 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not continue far. This paradox does not involve self-referented features, and is easily broken. For let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitar. However, while the outcome is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the second premiss. Outlining the deep-green case against war. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimerous: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. As there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily. But there was always a rival positive perspective in wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against nature (but the short-term accesses are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsucessful war against poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as 1 Brian Mullin who forcefully prpounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially atternative, though. An other puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following immitent trivial: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetrial to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty to the repressive but liberating solvation overthrowing capitalism. �the supreme testing ground of men. These picture of war, finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars, though no larger in assendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Deep-green theory accepts the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out inmoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. There should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemperary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a jsut defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this stretch wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth. Two troubles are really intentioned here: conceptual difficulaties with too narrow a nation of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, environments were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a do-trines of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly deeloped doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literaly different from modern wars, that is contemporary technicological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened Military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. There should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the informative accumulating on what ward do to �natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments on what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied to mechanism of a technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bull dozers from tanks, etc. There is little Tao linking war and ecology. (But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made using neo-Duoism, an updating Taoism in conformity with deep ecology, which however also includes but little on war: see UT.) APPENDIX I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. Prime Minister hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the0 war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – riteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may have have yielded, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved unless backed by the the other is not explained. Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has changed. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document PACIFISM P.4 Those who would abolish war, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much subrational abuse but with plenty of criticism and some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs and enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Do so cannot be uncomplished without violence, i.e. in effect given the types of violence involved without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.1 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not continue far. This paradox does not involve self-referented features, and is easily broken. For let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitar. However, while the outcome is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the second premiss. Outlining the deep-green case against war. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimerous: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. As there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily. But there was always a rival positive perspective in wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against nature (but the short-term accesses are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsucessful war against poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as 1 Brian Mullin who forcefully prpounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially atternative, though. An other puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following immitent trivial: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetrial to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty to the repressive but liberating solvation overthrowing capitalism. the supreme testing ground of men. These picture of war, finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars, though no larger in assendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Deep-green theory accepts the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out inmoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. There should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemperary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a jsut defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this stretch wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth. Two troubles are really intentioned here: conceptual difficulaties with too narrow a nation of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, environments were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a do-trines of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly deeloped doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literaly different from modern wars, that is contemporary technicological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened Military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. There should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the informative accumulating on what ward do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments on what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied to mechanism of a technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bull dozers from tanks, etc. There is little Tao linking war and ecology. (But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made using neo-Duoism, an updating Taoism in conformity with deep ecology, which however also includes but little on war: see UT.) APPENDIX I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. Prime Minister hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the0 war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – riteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may have have yielded, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved unless backed by the the other is not explained. Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has changed.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 77, Item 2: Pacifism p.4 Description An account of the resource Paper from floppy disk containing 21 files. Directory and file name: war and peace I V\pacifism.pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 77, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [3] leaves. 99.11 KB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:68b7b8f">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:68b7b8f</a> Box 77: Untitled and Unlisted Boxes https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/9d2cb1366bf43e4d6fa3297d8399ddd8.pdf 2826984189904e731ada17347bd52c28 PDF Text Text WAR AND PEACE IV: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ ( SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war – on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level ( SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ ( SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them – but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) – not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken �to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special �dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the militarypractices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology – implying that war is far from all right – and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on – implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through �deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. �Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: �Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. �Deep-green chart: dilemma input Arguments to incompatible prescriptions § Processing of dilemma, directive situational procedures output Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output input It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deepgreen theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of �action. Therefore, �every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a onesided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modern technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable? 1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just war for party d’.) �excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p.152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socioenvironmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism. 2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neoDaoism, see UT. �generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they – those of the theoretical residue – are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep-green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game – in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on – carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set-up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life-style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modern times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted – misdirected – in one way or another to �this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken ( LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. �advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses (the thrive in fields ...). the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. ( LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. �doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination ( LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep-green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deepgreen theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also �facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war – finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars – though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of �value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ill-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting �enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength ( LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, ‘In order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, ‘In order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ ( LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices paradox). 5 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why �The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p.197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non-interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. �profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished. 6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve selfreferential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. �Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace – and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position – it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:- • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Arnauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... – and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts – sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent �demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non-violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.7 While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. AI, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. 7 In AI this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. �The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in AI p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p.153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold – yet ... pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine ... (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized – JWS “activism” is hardly trivial – as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. �is, as previous explained (e.g. AI p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (AI p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted ( MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations, ... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p.153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than �populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p.153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as AI tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non-violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities – even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be �somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order ) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral – in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in AI ). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence. 9 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in AI, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. �To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan10* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The aptly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that 10 * Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) �‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as AI. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic); referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document WAR AND PEACE IV: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ ( SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war – on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level ( SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ ( SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them – but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) – not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the militarypractices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology – implying that war is far from all right – and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on – implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: dilemma input Arguments to incompatible prescriptions § Processing of dilemma, directive situational procedures output Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output input It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deepgreen theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a onesided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modern technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable? 1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just war for party d’.) excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p.152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socioenvironmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism. 2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neoDaoism, see UT. generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they – those of the theoretical residue – are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep-green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game – in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on – carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set-up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life-style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modern times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted – misdirected – in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken ( LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses (the thrive in fields ...). the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. ( LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination ( LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep-green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deepgreen theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war – finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars – though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars – the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military – the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modern wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modern technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ill-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength ( LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, ‘In order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, ‘In order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ ( LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices paradox). 5 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p.197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non-interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ˚ But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished. 6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve selfreferential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it – designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace – and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position – it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:- • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Arnauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... – and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts – sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non-violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.7 While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. AI, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. 7 In AI this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in AI p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p.153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold – yet ... pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine ... (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized – JWS “activism” is hardly trivial – as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. is, as previous explained (e.g. AI p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (AI p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted ( MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations, ... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p.153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p.153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as AI tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non-violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities – even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order ) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral – in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in AI ). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence. 9 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in AI, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan10* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The aptly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even – in what was effectively a declaration of war – reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it – through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that 10 * Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as AI. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic); referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 77, Item 3: Draft of War and peace IV: Tao and deep-green Subject The topic of the resource Later title: On extirpating war: Tao and deep-green pacifism. Description An account of the resource Paper from floppy disk containing 21 files. Directory and file name: war and peace I V\War and Peace IV.pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 77, Item 3 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [27] leaves. 200.82 KB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:e39d951">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:e39d951</a> Box 77: Untitled and Unlisted Boxes https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/b87130a29f9b52af42c4cef275532629.pdf b0bf742ca1521f0e62f99c840366ccf4 PDF Text Text I I 1 / I PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION 23 May 1983 Professor Peter Karmel, Vice-Chancellor. Dear Professor Karmel, Publi .. Affairs Conference: The consequences of nuclear war. I have to advise you that I have serious concerns about several aspects of this conference, which takes place next Monday-Tuesday 30-31 May. Despit the unusual amount of time that it has taken in an attempt to establish and agree upon the programme, and an unprecedented level of involvement_ of the Assistant Vice-Chancellor in an attempt to enlist more senior authority to hold the programme to what is agreed, it has not proved possible for the Centre for Continuing Education effectively to be responsible for the programme, or indeed even to be sure what the programme is. I respect and personally happen to be in agreement with Dr Denborough in his commitment to the cause of peace and prevention of nuclear war. The large enrolment of the conference (well in excess of 300) is due to his very considerable efforts in publicising it as well as to its intrinsic contemporary interest and importance. His commitment however is such as to override all normal conventions of cooperative behaviour, and it leaves me unable to give assurances that the conference will be ah activity proper and appropriate to the University. The programme as it now appears to be is the result of a succession of compromises extracted through pressures of various kinds. Those involved in the Centre are by no means happy with the result, and fear that it has now become over-crowded, as we have been nbliged to honour agreements entered into, as I believe, illegitimately on behalf of the University. The likely high level of interest and energy among those taking part, and the frustration of a crowded programme and little opportunity till late on for floor contribution, may well make for an explosive situation. Much of this I have accepted, as I believe has the Assistant Vice-Chancellor, reluctantly and finding the alternatives still less attractive. As the programme now reads, my most serious concern is that Dr Denborough is to chair the final session. I believe that he is too dedicated to a point of view, and too embedded in the whole emotional side of the subject, the planning and the conference, to be able to take this part satisfactorily. I am also concerned that Dr Millar is apparently being limited in his participation to chairing the session at which Dr Ball is to speak. I consider that a strong chairperson and a well balanced panel are very important for the final session to be satisfactory from a University point of view. The various kinds of moral and other blackmail that have been employed may make this impossible, but in this and some other respects the conference remains, for all the efforts of CCE to retain balance and authoritative presentations, highly volatile. One reason for writing is to alert you to this, as even now it may not be too late to enhance the quality of what at any rate is certain to be a high profile event. The other is to anticipate and if possible avert a consequence of any embarrassment which might be caused by the conference: a natural reaction away from attempting any other important but controversial theme in public affairs and extension conferences. The cornmi ttee which was developing thi_s conference came to be replaced by one man, and the attempt of Mr Plowman and myself, with CCE colleagues, to fill the vacant place naturally proved less than satisfactory. The lesson should be not again to allow any member of the University with a particular personal commitment of this kind to capture � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document I I 1 / I PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR CONTINUING EDUCATION 23 May 1983 Professor Peter Karmel, Vice-Chancellor. Dear Professor Karmel, Publi .. Affairs Conference: The consequences of nuclear war. I have to advise you that I have serious concerns about several aspects of this conference, which takes place next Monday-Tuesday 30-31 May. Despit the unusual amount of time that it has taken in an attempt to establish and agree upon the programme, and an unprecedented level of involvement_ of the Assistant Vice-Chancellor in an attempt to enlist more senior authority to hold the programme to what is agreed, it has not proved possible for the Centre for Continuing Education effectively to be responsible for the programme, or indeed even to be sure what the programme is. I respect and personally happen to be in agreement with Dr Denborough in his commitment to the cause of peace and prevention of nuclear war. The large enrolment of the conference (well in excess of 300) is due to his very considerable efforts in publicising it as well as to its intrinsic contemporary interest and importance. His commitment however is such as to override all normal conventions of cooperative behaviour, and it leaves me unable to give assurances that the conference will be ah activity proper and appropriate to the University. The programme as it now appears to be is the result of a succession of compromises extracted through pressures of various kinds. Those involved in the Centre are by no means happy with the result, and fear that it has now become over-crowded, as we have been nbliged to honour agreements entered into, as I believe, illegitimately on behalf of the University. The likely high level of interest and energy among those taking part, and the frustration of a crowded programme and little opportunity till late on for floor contribution, may well make for an explosive situation. Much of this I have accepted, as I believe has the Assistant Vice-Chancellor, reluctantly and finding the alternatives still less attractive. As the programme now reads, my most serious concern is that Dr Denborough is to chair the final session. I believe that he is too dedicated to a point of view, and too embedded in the whole emotional side of the subject, the planning and the conference, to be able to take this part satisfactorily. I am also concerned that Dr Millar is apparently being limited in his participation to chairing the session at which Dr Ball is to speak. I consider that a strong chairperson and a well balanced panel are very important for the final session to be satisfactory from a University point of view. The various kinds of moral and other blackmail that have been employed may make this impossible, but in this and some other respects the conference remains, for all the efforts of CCE to retain balance and authoritative presentations, highly volatile. One reason for writing is to alert you to this, as even now it may not be too late to enhance the quality of what at any rate is certain to be a high profile event. The other is to anticipate and if possible avert a consequence of any embarrassment which might be caused by the conference: a natural reaction away from attempting any other important but controversial theme in public affairs and extension conferences. The cornmi ttee which was developing thi_s conference came to be replaced by one man, and the attempt of Mr Plowman and myself, with CCE colleagues, to fill the vacant place naturally proved less than satisfactory. The lesson should be not again to allow any member of the University with a particular personal commitment of this kind to capture  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 17, Item 1: Richard Routley? to Professor Peter Karmel, Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University, 23 May 1983 Subject The topic of the resource Letter missing pages. Possibly written by Richard Routley (later Sylvan). Routley writes to Professor Peter Karmel, Vice-Chancellor of ANU, about his concerns of the university's involvement in the Public Affairs Conference (30-31 May), in relation to the consequences of nuclear war and Dr Denborough, the conference chair. Typescript letter, written on Australian National University (ANU) Centre for Continuing Education letter head. Marked private and confidential. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered manuscript from collection, item number assigned by library staff. The rightsholder for this work cannot be identified, or is identifiable but cannot be found, after a reasonable good faith search. If you believe you have a valid claim to the rights in this work, please contact us by email copyright@library.uq.edu.au Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 17, Item 1 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource May 23, 1993 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Richard Sylvan Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Letter, 1 leaf [962.77 KB] Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7af99ef">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7af99ef</a> https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/e697a58c0c0eb658f0859e812161a780.pdf 6e6025285db216731a09bd2dbbf3c02f PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 139, Item 1: Richard Sylvan to Tom Cahill, Editor, Anarchist Studies, 5 Jan 1993 and peer review of paper Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten letter with peer view by Sylvan. Paper titled Research on 'creating cooperative autonomy', author not identified. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 139, Item 1 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 5, 1991 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Letter, [4] leaves. [2.34 MB] Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a892974">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:a892974</a> Box 139: Anarchy https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/16947195a878ecb196bb09099f17f712.pdf 3db2c0baa2c3c95fd45969180538a40b PDF Text Text ���� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 120, Item 102: Richard Sylvan to John, c1983 to ? Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten letter to John from Richard Sylvan, letter isn't signed. Sylvan writes about a UNESCO Asia-Pacific meeting held in 1983 and discusses John's report on philosophy in New Zealand. The meeting is possibly the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Teaching and research in philosophy in Asia and the Pacific held in Bangkok, 21-25 February 1983. The letter is also possibly addressed to John Patterson who attended the UNESCO Asia-Pacific meeting and presented a paper on philosophy in New Zealand. (Information from UNESCO (1984) Teaching and Research in Philosophy: Asia and the Pacific, UNESCO). Description An account of the resource Note, one of two papers digitised from item 102. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 120, Item 102 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Letter, [4] leaves. [12.73 MB] For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:d21b575">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:d21b575</a> Box 120: Philosophy Wisdom to Wowserism Como House Como House > Green Table > Pile 5 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/8a962b5798d431ed7a49e3c965d3293d.pdf 3793cc17bc61a17cc2d746104329864a PDF Text Text '"T__ / <'Y J /x X<X X I z / //. / c f-vX' ‘'t Xr" Y ( <lr~ / <■ Ye t e tZ<? Z C z4 /X/ Xi /z- a / r /XX «) - YY/XX e X X'X xC <?— C" Z j>ctYe^_Z^Z l -■ X-^—y X—- I X .X i/x /l t tC c X * /7Z’’' <j Y^X ft J X<>-^ XX Y C'U1 Y c^ 7 XYy / // Y X n ?-/ ^i/'^ /q /’*■ XX 3 2- /< Y'1^ Xr^x 6 ,’ 'A/' C ■"' z// '- 7/XxY . 1 ��:) 2. 2 f.y; �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Computer printout, draft paper with emendations and annotations, Intrinsic value, quantum theory, and environmental ethics by J. Baird Callicott. Includes annotation addressed to Professor Routley from J. Baird Callicott. (37 pages) Paper published, Callicott J B (1985) ‘Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, 7(3): 257275. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19857334 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document '"T__ / <'Y J /x X<X X I z / //. / c f-vX' ‘'t Xr" Y ( <lr~ / <■ Ye t e tZ<? Z C z4 /X/ Xi /z- a / r /XX «) - YY/XX e X X'X xC <?— C" Z j>ctYe^_Z^Z l -■ X-^—y X—- I X .X i/x /l t tC c X * /7Z’’' <j Y^X ft J X<>-^ XX Y C'U1 Y c^ 7 XYy / // Y X n ?-/ ^i/'^ /q /’*■ XX 3 2- /< Y'1^ Xr^x 6 ,’ 'A/' C ■"' z// '- 7/XxY . 1 :) 2. 2 f.y; The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Computer printout, draft paper with emendations and annotations, Intrinsic value, quantum theory, and environmental ethics by J. Baird Callicott. Includes annotation addressed to Professor Routley from J. Baird Callicott. (37 pages) Paper published, Callicott J B (1985) ‘Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics’, Environmental Ethics, 7(3): 257275. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19857334  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 14, Item 1765: Letter, Richard Sylvan to J. Baird Callicott, 25 Oct c1985 ; Draft of Intrinsic value, quantum theory, and environmental ethics by J. Baird Callicott Subject The topic of the resource Computer printout of draft paper with emendations and annotations. Includes annotation on title page, addressed to Professor Routley from J. Baird Callicott. Paper published, Callicott J B (1985) 'Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics', Environmental Ethics, 7(3): 257-275, https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19857334. Description An account of the resource Note, one of two papers digitised from item 1765. Paper by J. Baird Callicott redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 14, Item 1765 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 25 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [40] leaves. 1.73 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f77bd00">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:f77bd00</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Second Shelf - Bottom Shelf Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Second Shelf > Bottom Shelf Box 14: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/74c5918ce1775b9771b6ab241d1cfda9.pdf d64b9b726171c91b2c89e43f71832e29 PDF Text Text ✓ f / / Z ) The Australian National University ■The Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy reference Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables natuniv Canberra Telex aa 62694 sopac 'telephone 062-49 $111 22 July 1983 John Martin 10 Alamein Avenue WARRACKNABEAL VIC 3393 Dear John, Thank you for the July 83 copy of The Deep Ecologist. I certainly think that such a network newsletter is a fine idea (and my sub. follows under separate cover). I should confess, however, that I was alarmed by the extent to which shallow ecology - which already has an excellent press had crept into the issue. In particular, the centerpiece article, purportedly on wilderness (signed P. Conroy) contained themes directly antithetical to deeper ecology, some of which I shall note. I really hope the article was intended as some sort of test or as a spoof; but I fear it wasn't. 1. 'The wonders of creation exist in the minds of humans'. The three step argument to this, from the granted 'Nature is wondrous, ...' is quite fallacious. For one thing, it smuggles in the assumption of a creation. Deep ecologists don't have to buy into creation, or (what Conroy goes on to, in a version of the argument from design I suppose) God(s). More important, the wonders of nature are not confined to, and do not require, the minds of humans. A core theme of deep ecology is that some natural things are intrinsically valuable, worthwhile in themselves, independently of any creatures, including humans. An alpine gentian does not owe its value, its importance to humans. For similar reasons the deep ecologist, who may embrace some one of the more orthodox religions but need not, rejects both parts of Conroy's supporting comparison: 'As light needs our eyes to give it reality, so [nature] around us needs our constant assent', human affirmation. There was light, as an element of nature, before humans evolved; there will be light, and still some wonders of nature, when humans are gone, for instance after nuclear annihilation. It is the same on the genesis account as it is on deep ecological assumptions: nature and light were real, and also good, before man appeared on the scene (on the seventh day). 2. Admittedly some deeper ecological themes are picked up by Conroy, for example 'the importance of relationships', especially those of ecosystems. Unfortunately Conroy almost at once tries to 2/... �2. undermine this theme (a theme that runs counter to a main thrust of Western philosophy, concerning the eliminability or secondary character of relations) and in a human chauvinist way: 'Let us not delude ourselves as to the basis for this'. Relations too are alleged to answer back to humans, and owe their importance to them: again shallow, and surely mistaken, anthrocentricism. But Conroy wants us to proceed to a strong form of this‘shallow doctrine: 'To recognise the importance of our environment is to recognise the importance of ourselves'. No; and certainly not on deeper thinking. Environments free of humans, such as pure wilderness, can be important; worlds devoid of humans beautiful, or ugly. 3. 'Humans do hold dominion over the earth'; 'recognise your kingship of the earth'. The dominion position, with which Conroy gets quite carried away, is only one of various positions that the shallow ecologist can adopt; others (delineated by Passmore) are the stewardship and the perfectionist positions. It is however the position most antithetical to the concerns of deep ecology. 4. Conroy repudiates the theme of biological (or biospheric) egalitarianism, often taken to be an ingredient of deep ecology, in a decidedly arrogant way: 'To pretend we can treat ourselves as equals with other organisms in our cohabitation of this planet is to show an ignorance of the inevitable forces that continue to shape human destinies everywhere' (it reminds me of the worst reaches of German Ubermensch philosophy, Nietzsche to Hitler). An egalitarian theme was tendered by Naess in his introduction of deep ecology, and has certainly been built into the West Coast understanding of the notion. And as Singer's work on "equality of consideration", and other nonutilitarian work on respect has made plain, the theme can be given relatively palatable construals. It remains however something of an open question whether the theme is an essential ingredient of deep ecology. My view is also that it is not; but I should not want to have anything much to do with Conroy's human chauvinist (and sometimes human fascist) case for ditching the theme. Regrettably Naess's more recent account of deep ecology, in terms of asking 'deeper and deeper questions', has further muddied what started out by being d valuable and sufficiently clear notion. Now a nuclear engineer who asks deeper questions, or any shallow ecologist who 'probes the deepness of the human psyche', stands a fair chance of passing perself off as a deep ecologist. I hope however that Ths Deep Ecologist can maintain a deep relationship with deep ecology. Best wishes, Richard �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, John Martin to Richard Sylvan, 30 July 1983 re Martin replies to Sylvan's letter and comments on an article published in The Deep Ecologist. (1 leaf) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ✓ f / / Z ) The Australian National University ■The Research School of Social Sciences Department of Philosophy reference Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables natuniv Canberra Telex aa 62694 sopac 'telephone 062-49 $111 22 July 1983 John Martin 10 Alamein Avenue WARRACKNABEAL VIC 3393 Dear John, Thank you for the July 83 copy of The Deep Ecologist. I certainly think that such a network newsletter is a fine idea (and my sub. follows under separate cover). I should confess, however, that I was alarmed by the extent to which shallow ecology - which already has an excellent press had crept into the issue. In particular, the centerpiece article, purportedly on wilderness (signed P. Conroy) contained themes directly antithetical to deeper ecology, some of which I shall note. I really hope the article was intended as some sort of test or as a spoof; but I fear it wasn't. 1. 'The wonders of creation exist in the minds of humans'. The three step argument to this, from the granted 'Nature is wondrous, ...' is quite fallacious. For one thing, it smuggles in the assumption of a creation. Deep ecologists don't have to buy into creation, or (what Conroy goes on to, in a version of the argument from design I suppose) God(s). More important, the wonders of nature are not confined to, and do not require, the minds of humans. A core theme of deep ecology is that some natural things are intrinsically valuable, worthwhile in themselves, independently of any creatures, including humans. An alpine gentian does not owe its value, its importance to humans. For similar reasons the deep ecologist, who may embrace some one of the more orthodox religions but need not, rejects both parts of Conroy's supporting comparison: 'As light needs our eyes to give it reality, so [nature] around us needs our constant assent', human affirmation. There was light, as an element of nature, before humans evolved; there will be light, and still some wonders of nature, when humans are gone, for instance after nuclear annihilation. It is the same on the genesis account as it is on deep ecological assumptions: nature and light were real, and also good, before man appeared on the scene (on the seventh day). 2. Admittedly some deeper ecological themes are picked up by Conroy, for example 'the importance of relationships', especially those of ecosystems. Unfortunately Conroy almost at once tries to 2/... 2. undermine this theme (a theme that runs counter to a main thrust of Western philosophy, concerning the eliminability or secondary character of relations) and in a human chauvinist way: 'Let us not delude ourselves as to the basis for this'. Relations too are alleged to answer back to humans, and owe their importance to them: again shallow, and surely mistaken, anthrocentricism. But Conroy wants us to proceed to a strong form of this‘shallow doctrine: 'To recognise the importance of our environment is to recognise the importance of ourselves'. No; and certainly not on deeper thinking. Environments free of humans, such as pure wilderness, can be important; worlds devoid of humans beautiful, or ugly. 3. 'Humans do hold dominion over the earth'; 'recognise your kingship of the earth'. The dominion position, with which Conroy gets quite carried away, is only one of various positions that the shallow ecologist can adopt; others (delineated by Passmore) are the stewardship and the perfectionist positions. It is however the position most antithetical to the concerns of deep ecology. 4. Conroy repudiates the theme of biological (or biospheric) egalitarianism, often taken to be an ingredient of deep ecology, in a decidedly arrogant way: 'To pretend we can treat ourselves as equals with other organisms in our cohabitation of this planet is to show an ignorance of the inevitable forces that continue to shape human destinies everywhere' (it reminds me of the worst reaches of German Ubermensch philosophy, Nietzsche to Hitler). An egalitarian theme was tendered by Naess in his introduction of deep ecology, and has certainly been built into the West Coast understanding of the notion. And as Singer's work on "equality of consideration", and other nonutilitarian work on respect has made plain, the theme can be given relatively palatable construals. It remains however something of an open question whether the theme is an essential ingredient of deep ecology. My view is also that it is not; but I should not want to have anything much to do with Conroy's human chauvinist (and sometimes human fascist) case for ditching the theme. Regrettably Naess's more recent account of deep ecology, in terms of asking 'deeper and deeper questions', has further muddied what started out by being d valuable and sufficiently clear notion. Now a nuclear engineer who asks deeper questions, or any shallow ecologist who 'probes the deepness of the human psyche', stands a fair chance of passing perself off as a deep ecologist. I hope however that Ths Deep Ecologist can maintain a deep relationship with deep ecology. Best wishes, Richard The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, John Martin to Richard Sylvan, 30 July 1983 re Martin replies to Sylvan's letter and comments on an article published in The Deep Ecologist. (1 leaf)  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 14, Item 1765: Correspondence between Richard Sylvan and John Martin, 2 letters, Jul 1983 Subject The topic of the resource Letter 1: Typescript on a Australian National University letter head. Letter dated 22 July 1983 to John Martin, Warracknabeal, VIC 3393. From Richard Sylvan, The Research School of Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy, The Australian National University. Sylvan sends feedback to Martin about an article published in The Deep Ecologist (July 183). John Martin was the founding editor of the Australian based newsletter, The Deep Ecologist. One of three copies of letter held in collection, two copies with annotations: Deep ecology notes ; Fred, please return newsletter [?]. Thanks for your comments, [?] things. [Richard?]. Letter 2: Handwritten letter dated 30 Jul 1983 to Richard Sylvan. From John Martin, Warracknabeal, VIC 3393. Martin replies to Sylvan's letter and comments on an article published in The Deep Ecologist. Description An account of the resource Note, one of two papers digitised from item 1765. Letter from John Martin redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 14, Item 1765 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 23, 1983 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [7] leaves. 1.43 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:4660a51">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:4660a51</a> Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Second Shelf > Bottom Shelf Box 14: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/8d68b6d2b8fc13d2658f8bcec5033f90.pdf 133736fbbf882cc36899905ee9ec3212 PDF Text Text ON EXTIRPATING WAR: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level (SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) — not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special �2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns thfc conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao �3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: �4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: Processing of dilemma, Arguments to dilemma incompatible input prescriptions situational procedures -» > directive output ■ X. Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Bok rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- �5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may b£ unavoidable z/ unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just wxfor party d’.) �6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. �7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the �8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading" that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LTp.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence" of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. �9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...),. When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. �10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. �11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive vjsi, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf �Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) �13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices �14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu- wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. �15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ° But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. �16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons: • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. �17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. �18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p. 13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p. 10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. �19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p. 152) �20 There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage �21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the natural order is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral - in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to �22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) �I 23 followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)’, referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT. ��2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them.... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao �3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: �4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: Arguments to Processing of dilemma, directive dilemma incompatible situational procedures output input prescriptions Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- �5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even z/that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just vwcfor party d’.) �6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. �7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they — those of the theoretical residue — are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the �8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinition al strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. �9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...). When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p. 181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessaTy, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. �10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. �11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars — though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf �12 Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) �13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices �14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu- wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. �15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ° But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. �16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration,... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. �17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.^ While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. �18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. �19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS P-152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) �20 There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage �21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to �22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) �23 followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)', referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, SoczaZ Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ON EXTIRPATING WAR: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level (SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’ (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) — not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special 2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns thfc conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao 3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: 4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: Processing of dilemma, Arguments to dilemma incompatible input prescriptions situational procedures -» > directive output ■ X. Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Bok rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- 5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may b£ unavoidable z/ unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just wxfor party d’.) 6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. 7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the 8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading" that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LTp.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence" of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. 9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...),. When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. 10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. 11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive vjsi, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) 13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices 14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu- wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. 15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ° But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. 16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons: • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. 17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. 18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p. 13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p. 10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. 19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p. 152) 20 There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage 21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the natural order is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral - in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to 22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) I 23 followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)’, referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT. 2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them.... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao 3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: 4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”. Deep-green chart: Arguments to Processing of dilemma, directive dilemma incompatible situational procedures output input prescriptions Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- 5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even z/that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just vwcfor party d’.) 6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. 7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they — those of the theoretical residue — are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the 8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinition al strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. 9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...). When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p. 181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessaTy, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. 10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. 11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars — though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf 12 Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) 13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices 14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu- wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. 15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. ° But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. 16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration,... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),... . In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. 17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism.^ While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. 18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p.10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. 19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS P-152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) 20 There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage 21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to 22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) 23 followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one, enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that ‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted; practice has scarcely changed at all. REFERENCES W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963; referred to as ST. W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963; referred to as LT. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1989. R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)', referred to as MD. R. Routley, ‘War and Peace I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear-deterrence and the political fall-out’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, #5, Research School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984. G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980. J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University, 1989. R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, SoczaZ Philosophy, for Nuclear Conference, University of Queensland, 1985. R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1990; referred to as UT.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 680: Two drafts of On extirpating on war: Tao and deep-green pacifism Subject The topic of the resource Two computer printouts of draft paper. Second copy, first page is missing and reference page has handwritten annotation. Previous title: War and peace IV: Tao and deep-green. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:c8da24a">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:c8da24a</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Como - Cupboard - Pile 3 Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/df8ea475ec2b745964d399c943fb6566.pdf e7cd3be667c873fe9f41ed27b4a5ce46 PDF Text Text WAR AND PEACE IV: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level (SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB P-212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu' (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) - not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much �2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao �3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which ij manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: �4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved,”. Deep-green chart: Arguments to Processing of dilemma, directive dilemma incompatible situational procedures output input prescriptions Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is i. indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- �5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all hunqpns as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically* 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just wax for party d’.) �6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then z/it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. �7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game — in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warnng) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension,.between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the �8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party’s territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war qf liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. �9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...). When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. �10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. �11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf �12 Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modem wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modem environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) �13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices �14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wwwei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. �15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. 0 But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. �i 16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),.... In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. �17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. �18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p. 10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. �19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) �There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage �21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to �i 22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modem humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modem quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document WAR AND PEACE IV: TAO AND DEEP-GREEN Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and towards deep-green theory. 1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism. War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions: for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no net benefit at any level (SB p.227). What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB P-212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu' (Chan, p.154, p.17.) But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war, militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils. Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works, a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism. The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) - not so much however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much 2 more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done. • Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful) conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle paradox. Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war and militarism. One key pasage runs: Fine weapons are instruments of evil They are hated by creatures Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ... Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler. When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best principle Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy, For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men. He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ... For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies (LT p.154). Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil. They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes unavoidable (also p.152). Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils. Such discourse, obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao 3 does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death. Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories, underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses), an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects. Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking: It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17). ‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties. These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps overlapping, set of reasons). A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is the fashion in which ij manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show: 4 Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved,”. Deep-green chart: Arguments to Processing of dilemma, directive dilemma incompatible situational procedures output input prescriptions Corresponding Taoist chart: Black directive Box output It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory, e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is i. indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to deep ecological theory (see UT). We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality (or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account, see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued. So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil (typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided, through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained, through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc. Through a typology of wars (coming up) that conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs. Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other types of war. But, more generally, try this:- 5 Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore, every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable. Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor, an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions. The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided. Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is “unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes. State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example, be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith which depicts all hunqpns as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine be unavoidable?1 In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate. Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically* 1 Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter; coherence requires relativization to ‘just wax for party d’.) 6 unavoidable. Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e. excessive ethical costs such as extermination. Let us explain deontic unavoidability analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical costs. Then z/it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is also justifiable, on pacific grounds. Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition. The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized: Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow. Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152). And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a military objective, with environmental security. The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and similar. This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters. But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”). 2 But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT. 7 2. On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism. Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep­ green theory begins to diverge from Taoism. In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game — in the generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the contestants, (warnng) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set­ up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object, construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities. Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life­ style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns. An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures, races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or, perhaps by extension,.between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and virtually all the worst wars. While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the 8 technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure (indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to this effort). Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An offensive war is one which ventures off a given party’s territory or recognised pad, “invading” that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded. Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor, which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory, e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken (LT p.152).3 The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.) Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place (whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy) democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive. Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is represented as a war qf liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones, such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market 3 There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation: I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive: I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222). These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting. 9 capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion. The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu: When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to fertilize (the fields ...). When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs. There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181). But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for cessation of such practices. The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15 years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth, the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years (the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite targets. Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism. A main distinction is between • conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals, and • social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4 4 Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin. 10 It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether. Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism. For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep­ green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference. A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include • elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and • force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in • contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in • elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation. Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust facts. 11 Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities) and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components into the industrial engine. With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength. Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs; likewise conquest. Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be strengthened, through the following syllogism: All wars should be fully just wars. Modem wars cannot be fully just wars. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that available this century. The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation or chemical or biological weapons around. From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf 12 Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of value, of what counts. The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension, neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars are typically environmental atrocities. Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama. Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity. Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism: All wars should be environmentally sound wars. Modem wars cannot be environmentally sound. Therefore, there should be no modern wars. The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them. The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the technology for, modem environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity and cruelty. 3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence ‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’ strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism? Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling. The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include • seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222) 13 • surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics: marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’ (p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194). • advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233). • coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices the charge of deviousness looks feeble. The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general, unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving ‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and weakness turned hardness and strength. The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted (p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices 14 paradox).5 The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence. To force the growth of life means ill omen. For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence (LT p. 197). One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wwwei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony. To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non­ interference that are excluded. However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite 5 Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible. A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of war, above all from irresponsible state power. As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out; there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness, itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size, such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off: reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs. 15 right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates, profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the machines of war industry stop. Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent paradox concerning war and nonviolence: • War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an anachronism. • Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war. 0 But then war cannot be abolished without war. Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6 This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far. For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the 6 Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it - designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative, thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism, revolved around the following inconsistent triad: • capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained. • capitalism cannot be removed without repression. • repression is antithetical to liberty. The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist” action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing capitalism. i 16 second premiss. 4. Standard and moral pacifism. Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart defensive wars. • It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance through the watershed thesis P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles. Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism, notably European forms. Is deep green? There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war. The most prominent contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use. As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly. They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix). Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery can be thwarted in this way. Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation, arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g. of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),.... In brief standard pacifism is opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means. 17 Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military (using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g. turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident, then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item: ‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non­ violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest. Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries, of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions. They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism (unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim. Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”, “fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism 7 In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism: overcomprehensive might have been better. 18 could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and many ordinary women, but much more extensively. The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details of both see MD p. 10). Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation. This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8 Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and 8 JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his criticism, I don't know. 19 accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle, pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a radical doctrine. As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it. A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38). Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism, sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed. A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to “second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray. After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find ... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152) There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes. There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153). This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts, providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153). Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence. What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is ‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The ‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper bound on level of force. As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced, hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed. To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non­ violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world. Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage 21 routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly. More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended, be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus, for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the “natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route: The natural order is not an immoral order The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence. Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral (neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far). The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable, ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to i 22 peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably modified P2 results: MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9 To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modem humans; it sets too high a moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively: Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced. Richard Sylvan* Appendix I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the modem quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic? President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to 9 The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use vandolence. Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in JWS)  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 680: Draft of War and peace IV: Tao and deep-green Subject The topic of the resource Computer printout. Later title: On extirpating war: Tao and deep-green pacifism. Description An account of the resource Note, one of four papers digitised from item 680. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 680 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [22] leaves. 14.62 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:16694a5">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:16694a5</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Como - Cupboard - Pile 3 Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/ccd54bbcfae9fe07cf40299850560203.pdf fe931fcce3b13680c46d5ca17790a70d PDF Text Text AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE PHILOSOPHY: Further investigations of the nonexistent. ‘The opinions of philosophers, with regard to the conditions of the possibility of a public peace, shall be taken into consideration by states armed for war’ (Kant, ‘A [the only!] secret article for perpetual peace’, p.158 - a surprising article, flattering no doubt to philosophers, but neglecting their dominant bellicose tradition). A defence philosophy is much more than a defence policy, just as a philosophy of technology comprises much more than a technology policy. A policy can be given merely by a list of directives as to what do in various circumstances; even at its best it need only involve practical wisdom. By contrast, a philosophy goes deeper and requires theoretical wisdom, integration of the policy into a theoretical setting, which looks, among other things, at the central arguments and key concepts involved: here, security, stability, control, protection, defence, interests, national interests, intelligence, war, etc. Defence philosophy is thus a branch of political and social philosophy, and has long been treated as such, though under such more familiar and honest headings as “of war” and “of peace”. Like most parts of philosophy, it can be applied, for instance in shaping policies, in regional ways among others. A defence philosophy should integrate appropriate defence arrangements and approaches to war and peace, not merely or superficially into “foreign policy” or assumed “international relations”, but into the way and intended way of life of a country, both into on-going culture and into the intended or planned cultural arrangements. A defence policy typically takes prevailing socio-political arrangements and power structures for granted; a defence philosophy again penetrates deeper, questioning or rejecting features of these structures, enquiring as to the merits of things and institutions of which defence is planned, asking what sort of society should be defended by what sort of appropriate methods and at what lengths. What, for instance, is Australia, what are Australians, defending, concerned to defend, aiming to defend? Here in Australia? In the region? Abroad? How much of what others have, or what we have, is worth defending, preserving? Does Randwick Racecourse, or Pine Gap, merit defending? Would anyone stage a last stand for Oaks Estate, one of Canberra’s dreariest suburbs? If the Indonesians made a lightning strike in Australia just to remove Bjelke-Petersen,1 should we resist? Few of the necessary prerequisites have been adequately thought about in Australia, where unplanned muddling through from immediate problem to immediate problem - reactive contingency “planning”, if you want to be generous - is the main style of political life , and, along with the traditional political game of “follow the leader”, of defence planning. Australia �2 does not yet have a defence philosophy. Some of its critical philosophers could help to supply it with the rudiments of one or more, and to inject some depth into broader defence theorizing. What follows is intended as a modest beginning: much of what is attempted, unearthing arguments and assumptions, followed by analysis and criticism, and some elaboration of alternative principles, falls squarely within the domains both of applied philosophy and traditional philosophical practice. 1. Australia’s inappropriate. defence “policy”: incoherent, obsolescent Australia seems to lack even a clear and coherent defence policy. American, This is a commonplace charge (made even by friends of Defence, interested in obtaining extra public funding for defence and elements of C3I).^ The reasons concern not merely the major unsolved issues of exactly what is being defended, what things and objects and what interests, and whose, what freedoms and values, and what role American defence facilities in Australia are supposed to have in this. They concern the status of present treaty arrangements, such as the “cornerstone”/“millstone” ANZUS treaty, signed between Australia, New Zealand and the US, now in disarray (still ’‘maintained” by New Zealand, whom the US has unilaterally announced expelled), and of subsequent associated memoranda of understanding (some secret, involving the local storage of US nuclear weapons, entry of American personnel, etc.). They also concern a range of more detailed lucunae such as: lack of clearly-defined priorities on what needs defending and how it is to be accomplished; doubtful capacity of present defence forces to handle low-level contingencies in and to the north of Australia and in maritime zones; and unsatisfactory (or no) arrangements and planning for “defence-in-depth”, for civil defence and use of civil infrastructure, mobilisation, wartime administration, protection of key facilities and areas, and post-nuclear organization. And, equally damaging, if its policy makers do have a coherent policy it is nowhere satisfactorily revealed to the peoples of Australia.It is left to journalists and newspaper­ watching academics to winkle out what local defence installations may be for and to make various conjectures as to what the policy may be. Of course there are many administrators and policy makers who think that is the way it should be; the public should not be informed, but kept satisfied with some “generalised” statements.As to coherence, Australian policy makers have only recently found out that Australia has a (purely) regional defence role, not a global one. This they were told by the Americans in Washington in talks allegedly designed to clarify commitments under treaty arrangements with the USA. It thus begins to look as if Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is still as much determined abroad, by US policy makers, as it is locally in Australia. �3 Much circumstantial evidence can be assembled to confirm the claim that Australia’s vague defence policy can now be stamped Made in USA, as it used, before the last World War (and British abandonment), to be stamped Made in UK. For one thing, Australia has had a bipartisan defence policy, so it is claimed. That “policy” has however been essentially shaped by the Liberal party, which has governed most of the time (as senior partner in a coalition). But the Liberal party simply took over US arrangements for Australia (as planned in Washington for ANZUS) and still does. For instance, the latest package® from the Liberal Party “Defence and Foreign Policy Unit” consists largely of US Defence Department material packaged under a local cover. The Strategic Basis Papers, endorsed by the Labor Government, give virtually unqualified support to US military practices and to the American view of the global strategic situation, and commit Australia to supporting, without any due reservation, American positions in world forums.' The same dependent-policy conclusion can be reached by more devious arguments. regional defence role? When, for example, did Australia find out it had a After the Americans had found that they could no longer afford to police the world on their own and would have to delegate some of that role and offload some of the heavy associated costs, on reliable dogs-bodies; and also after Labor took some faltering steps towards developing a broader foreign more independent policy with some indigenous elements (Australian Minister Hayden was promptly flattened by US heavies such as Schultz). Australian defence and foreign policy copies American policy in main respects, but lags it. The Australian defence policy presented by the Labor government, to the extend that it is visible, is conservative; it coincides with older American defence policy, and diverges from the new (post-Reagan) American war policy. For Australian Labor defence policy supports what the American administration supposedly used to support, namely DI. Multilateral nuclear disarmament (within the framework of series of treaties and agreements), and D2. Deterrence in the interim, deterrence through mutual assured destruction (i.e. MAD). The presence of American military facilities in Australia is supposed to be justified in the framework of these assumptions. For they are to assist in making deterrence under D2 effective, and to provide verification for the arms reduction arrangements under DI (both stabilizing functions). There is much evidence indicating however that American policy makers have now abandoned both Dl and D2 and any serious attempts at nuclear arms control8. Certainly they have moved on to the following highly destabilizing doctrines: Nuclear war-fighting, Limited nuclear wars, and Star-Wars (i.e. Strategic Defense Initiative). While this American war policy may well be accepted by the next Liberal coalition government, all of these military doctrines are explicitly rejected by the 1985 Labor government. Since the American “joint” facilities in Australia also facilitate the rejected �4 objectives, the problems concerning these dubious facilities are much aggravated. The Government’s approach concerning them - withholding information concerning the full range of their functions, and particularly their war-fighting roles from parliament and the public - is certainly unsatisfactory, as several of its members realise; and as a result the Government appear in not atypical disarray, further grist for the incoherence theme. If there is perhaps a coherent Australian global defence approach somewhere away from public exposure, it is most likely then an old abandoned American policy.9 But in that case it certainly lacks - what it in any case appears to lack - justification. For Australia, in supporting US defence policy and activity, for instance in world forums, is supporting present offensive American policy, not what it reputedly adheres to, deterrence (through MAD). The point holds good whether or not American global policy still includes such deterrence as a proper part10; for it certainly involves other very different and dubious strategies. The commonplace, but increasingly feeble, justification given for Australian’s tagging along after America is that Australian interests are the same as American11. American interests by no means coincide with Australian . However Consider, for instance, such matters as enriching Americans, making conditions favourable for American business, promoting Americans and things American. Consider, differently, American practices in Latin America, from undercutting Allende’s government in Chile to its practices against Nicaragua, to its extensive export of arms and violent methods, there and elsewhere in the world. Thus America, like Russia, is busy meddling in Africa, but ‘Australian security interests are not directly involved’ (SB, p.24). Consider, differently again, escalation of the nuclear arms race. Or consider American strategic planning, and all the game- and decision- theoretic models which concern just USA and its adversary USSR, perhaps occasionally adding Europe as part of the monolithic West, but rarely or never considering the Southern Hemisphere - so that either Australia is part of America as Poland may be of Russia or it is nothing. Or consider American interests not merely in Soviet and communist containment, but in containing socialism such as might (under more auspicious conditions) flourish in Australia. An American policy answering to American interests is accordingly inappropriate for Australia, inappropriate for Antipodean socialism. Australians should do their own defence thinking and work out a policy appropriate for Australia. (That applies also to Australian political representatives, who should stop parroting implausible American views and begin developing some genuinely local and original ones.) Should Australia be tagging along after the Americans in support of installation of their style of free-enterprise capitalism everywhere feasible (i.e. that the state socialists don’t already heavily control)? What they quite seriously call ‘keeping the free world free’? Of �5 course freedom has, in this sort of context, multiple meanings and associations (as well as multiple inconsistencies, appearing information” and the like). overtly in subsidized “free trade”, selective “free Significant parts of what mainstream American culture admits under the freedom umbrella, mainstream Australian culture would exclude: for instance, active opposition to and undermining of social and socialist programs and governments, bullying of small countries that impose barriers to US business or military practices (all part of “free enterprise”), etc. What of those intangible freedoms the cultures supposedly agree about, civil liberties, freedom to information, to live and work where one chooses, to travel, and so on? These are certainly important freedoms, better upheld in some parts of the unaligned West (e.g. Sweden, Switzerland) than in most parts of the Eastern Block. But such freedoms, which run counter to dependent policies, hardly require defence subservience. influenced state practices are fast reducing freedom. Moreover, military- Many of the older freedoms have vanished this century, such as freedom to travel, to work and live abroad, etc.; now one requires permits, licences, passports, ... . And many more former freedoms are being or have been eroded; soon it will be identity documents, restricted zones, ID cards, as already in parts of the “free West”. Now nuclearism in Europe ‘is devouring the very freedom it is said to protect: [the Greens] point to the new laws proposed in 1983 designed to keep citizens from assembling to protest deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles’ (Capra and Spretnak, pp.58-9). Further structural changes required for the security of the state, imcompatible with democratic freedoms, include ‘secrecy, lack of commentability, permanent emergency, concentration of authority, peacetime militarism, extensive apparatus of state intelligence and police’ (Falk, in Feith p.24). Nuclearism is not a smart strategy to preserve remaining freedoms. 2. Inherited other-reliance, and the populist and elitist cases for patronage and subservience. Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is furthermore inherited rather than regularly (re)thought through. But that procedure - essentially the legal method of precedence, whatever its very limited satisfactoriness in legalistic decision making - is defective when applied in politics or to defence, especially where immediate independent action is required. For precedence methods are extraordinarily slow, as well as characteristically conservative, and as in defence exclude significant and rather urgent alternatives. The unsatisfactory decision-making practices to be revealed in the case of defence are by no means restricted to defence but are typical of the kind of advanced age capitalism Australia operates under, or rather labours under, down under. In setting down those �4. 6 features of aged capitalism (‘of the Corporate State') that the New Left and Alternative Australia movements were reacting against, Cock neatly summed up these practices: Decisions were made from the top and on the basis of vested political interests, rather than by rational goals and means that served public interests. The people were rarely consulted effectively before a decision and often only partially informed afterwards. Planning was based on a mere extension of the present. ... activists felt they were given little opportunity to choose how they lived or worked. The availability of space, time, trees and air was also determined by others ... (p.18 italics added).14 As it was and is with one’s defence, military and civil, so it is with the matter of whether one lives in a nuclear target zone or not, and so on (though immigration policy, uranium and woodchip export policies, etc.) In these areas planning remains top-down, with at best consultative elements. No real choices are offered to people. A major inherited assumption is that of other reliance, that Australia’s defence depends on other more powerful allies. That ally was firstly Britain, and since World War II America; but in any event the assumption is that to be safe Australia needs a powerful patron, a protector. A corollary is that Australia adopts a suitably submissive relation to its patron, making expected concessions. And for the most part it has; however such a defence insurance policy does not come cheap.15 It costs not only money and resources, but quality of life, freedom and independence. The assumption of other-reliance is however unsound, for several reasons. Most important, it characteristically depends upon the following themes, all of which lack solid foundation: 1. Australia is threatened - or at least 1A. Australia is likely to be threatened in the near future. 2. Australia cannot defend itself. 3. Australia can however depend upon its patron (or ally), i.e. upon the USA. These three themes in fact make up what has been called the populist case for the ANZUS alliance.16 It is very different from the elitist case for ANZUS, said to hold sway with the Australian government, which, while insisting upon premiss 3, essentially rejects 1 and 2 and claims instead 4. Australian has a vital interest in global stability. 5. Global stability is under threat (constantly) by an expansionist Soviet Union. 6. Only USA can contain the Soviet threat and hold the global balance. Some of techniques the US deploys for holding global balance operate through dependent states and a network of alliances like ANZUS. But obviously further premisses are required to reach the intended conclusions that Australia should be participating in any such �alliance, and what is more, hosting US defence facilities and exercises. A first such premise is the no-shirking theme, that Australia should be contributing its part to “holding the balance’’ (cf. Bell). Even this first further step is pretty shaky; as we shall see, one shaky step in a rather ramshackle case, since premisses 5 and 6 are decidedly dubious (and 4 may involve equivocation). For it can be plausibly argued that Australia’s vital interests are not guaranteed by US techniques, which threaten to upset the whole applecart, and can be obtained by alternative more satisfactory means outside of such soft alliances as ANZUS. In any case, it is unclear that local contributions enhance global (nuclear) stability (see e.g. Mack and Davidson). But first, there is more pernicious regionalist version of the elitist position to be considered, what might be called the offshore elitist position. This position grants 2A*. Australia can defend itself against regional threats, and can look after itself regionally. But it does not (as indeed other qualified elitist positions may not) grant 1A. What the offshore position insists upon is 1AI*. Australia’s interests could be threatened in the near future. Since these interests - perhaps concerned with trade, Australian companies or Australians abroad, or whatever - may have little or nothing to do with internal Australian security, this premiss represents an extremely important shift (a shift not unrelated to the inverse bureaucratic shift from war to defence). It goes further than what has been called forward defence. In extended form the offshore position does call for some sort of global policeman or police force ready to intervene whenever a “free port” anywhere looks like closing its doors. Part of the difficulty in getting to grips with the elitist position is that it tends to slide through to the offshore position (by way of now evident immediate positions). The arguments against both the populist and elitist cases, and indeed against virtually all of themes 1 through 7 are sufficiently familiar to justify but a fairly brief outline of some of the main points involved. Of course just a couple of defections from themes 1 through 7 would serve logically defeat both cases, but there have been some interesting repair attempts, designed to float the arguments on diminished premisses. 3. The brief against the popular populist case; the need for new directions. Contra 1 and 1A. While Australia is not at present under notice of threat, veiled threat or harassment from abroad, a majority of its population appears to believe that it is. As the popular view is not the informed, administrative, or parliamentary view, it is worth inquiring �8 why the popular view persists, as the opinion polls reveal it has. The populace has been deliberately kept in the dark (or even misinformed), because this suits bipartisan government purposes. Although both main Australian political parties are well enough aware that the main assumptions underlying the populist case are false, the reasons for which they support the American alliance (e.g. those of the elitist case) are much more difficult to sell to the public. Accordingly the parties and Government have no political interest in undermining the unsound populist case. In particular they have gone out of their way not to cast doubt upon the connected assumption that US is a reliable guarantor against all threats. Thus long-standing Australian psychological insecurity about security has been allowed to stand, and has not been assuaged by any requisite informational and educational effort. In particular, older attitudes to Asia persist not far below the surface of popular Australia: fear, mistrust and xenophobia, patched over by a pragmatic attachment to trade and tourism. This misplaced insecurity is fuelled by popular misconceptions of Australia and its place in the world: metaphorically, that Australia is a luscious plum ripe for Eastern picking, instead of the Asians view that Australia, so far as they are aware of it at all, is a remote desiccated uncouth place perhaps good for some trade and investment. Or, to get towards more concrete assumptions, Australians apparently tend to their view country as affluent but underpopulated, resource rich but largely defenceless; yet not far to the north are Asian hordes who are impoverished, resource poor, and so on . Such a view is seriously out of touch with reality. Parts of Asia are now at least as affluent (on conventional economic indicators) as Australia. They do not see themselves as overpopulated, in a way that calls for mass exodus; and in those areas which are as overpopulated as Europe, such as Java, bribes and force are required to move people on transmigration programs to relatively unoccupied parts of the Indonesian empire. So far as they require them, they can purchase Australian resources - which are not unique - much more easily and cheaply (because they even carry significant local subsidies) than they could obtain • them by seizure. 1s For these sorts of reasons, and because Australia itself poses no threat, no other state has a genuine interest in attempting to invade Australia. As it is for interests, so it is for capabilities. No regional power has the capacity to launch a successful invasion of Australia, or is likely to have such a capacity in the near future. As the joint Parliamentary Committee concluded, Currently only the United States would have the physical capacity to launch a full scale invasion of Australia, and it clearly lacks any motive to do so (TAS, p.94). �9 As the report also stated, quoting Synnot (former Chief of Defence Staff), ... to raise the sort of force which would be required for a mass invasion of Australia could not possibly be done in under five years by other than the superpowers (TAS). But neither superpower is at all likely to expend effort or resources to such an end. An obvious naive question which at once arises is: Why bother then with much defence? (A later question to entertain is: why not be a free-rider on collectively provided global security, such as it is?) Why not proceed forthwith to unilateral disarmament? Mack for one, having reassembled the now-standard telling case that Australia is not threatened ‘now or for the foreseeable future’, and so having broken the populist argument, is confronted by the awkward option of unilateral disarmament for Australia. He stages a hasty retreat, points to the dependence of premisses 1 and 1A on premiss 2, and proceeds to claim that ‘the populist case for ANZUS is sustained’ even without premisses 1 and 1A. It is however a decidedly problematic retreat. While it is true that the arguments against 1 and 1A may sometimes take it for granted that Australia can look after itself to some extend, put up some resistance, it is far from clear that they depend essentially on assumptions approximating premiss 2. Consider the no­ interests argument, which appears decisive given the (estimated) very limited invasion capabilities of potential invaders. The main consideration adduced appears to depend in no essential way, indeed in no obvious way at all, on Australia’s dynamic fighting forces. Australian mineral resources, to repeat one of the more sensitive examples involved, can be obtained more readily and cheaply by trade methods than military ones. What all this seems to show is that a rather minimal streamlined force, if any, would presently meet Australia’s military requirements. It is not as if Australia is ‘entirely defenceless’ without a conventional military force, like a babe-in-arms. The whole apparatus of nonmilitary defence is available on a continent well suited to its use, though lacking a population trained in its techniques. But even without requisite popular training in defence methods, Australia would be a difficult place to govern, Australians a difficult lot to subjugate. It was such features of the Australian character that deterred the Japanese on a previous occasion “If the invasion is attempted, the Australians, in view of their national character, would resist to the end. Also, because the geographical conditions of Australia present numerous difficulties in a military sense, it is apparent that a military venture in that country would be a difficult one” (TAS, p.62). The points still hold good, and could be strengthened. There are several parts to any such �10 program of nonmilitary defence: making it happen, and putting it abroad (ideally with dinkum Australian exaggeration) that it has happened. To the issue of alternative defence we are bound to return. For now, when Australia is not threatened, is a good occasion to reconsider, and begin to adapt, defence arrangements. For example, it looks very much as if enormous sums, which could be valuably directed elsewhere, are being spent, largely to make many Australians feel secure.But a much more effective and inexpensive way to such results would be through requisite popular education and psychological therapy - with, if it were well done, much more satisfactory results, a more secure and better informed people. Contra 2. As a result of post-War developments in weapons systems and C3I capabilities, the military defence of Australia has become much easier. It comes down to enhancing, through new robust and reliable systems, the enormous strategic advantages Australia enjoys by virtue of geographical isolation. In principle, any maritime invading force can now be detected well in advance of arrival, through modern radar warning systems, and destroyed by precision guided munitions. And any invaders that did manage to gain a foothold on Australian soil would face severe logistic problems, and be subject to disproportionate responses from local defence. Standard discussions (as in Dibb, Mack) proceed to introduce a great deal of “Boys’ Own War Games” stuff concerning contemporary weapon and C3I systems; the essential point is that these could serve to turn Australia into a pretty unvulnerable armed fortress, and into an extremely difficult territory were the oceanic moat crossed and the fortress entered (see especially D. Martin). Under such armed neutrality and (differently) fortified Australia defence scenarios, even invasion from outside the region by an inimical world power could be resisted with reasonable prospect of success. There is no power at all likely to mount such an invasion; there is apparently (as noted above) only one power that could, that good ally the USA (reckoned however a likely invader by 6-7% of the Australian population!). Nonetheless the threat of a Soviet invasion is taken seriously not only by the larger populace but by committees of their elected representatives. But the Soviet military has never undertaken such a long-range massive force projection, is ill-equipped to do so, and lacks any plausible reason to try such a stunt (for details see, e.g., D. Martin; also SS, ST). The only credible Soviet threat to Australia is in the context of a superpower war, when American facilities in Australia and perhaps Australian cities, would be struck at by intercontinental missiles. While this would be bad enough, it is highly unlikely that it would be followed or accompanied by an invasion. Soviet forces are once again not sufficient, and not thought sufficient by the Soviets for that sort of diversion; they would be required elsewhere in a superpower war; and they would be devastated, unless USA is militarily even more incompetent than sometimes depicted. �i. 11 Contra 3. What will be argued is not the negation of 3, that the Americans cannot be relied upon, but rather that 3 is dubious, and that it would be rash to place excess reliance on American protection. That being so, and other patrons being even less promising, Australia should look more to its own resources, as the American administration is kindly advising. Especially since the American “Vietnam debacle” and the fall of Saigon, things have changed in important ways which cast doubt on the reliability of American patronage. First, the relative economic and military strength of the USA has declined significantly. It no longer has such a large share of world product(ivity); as a connected matter of policy, US world warfighting aspirations have been reduced. Its ability to act as, and afford to be, global policeman has also markedly declined/ Secondly, the willingness of Americans to engage in remote foreign wars has correspondingly tumbled. Although the American administration includes more than enough hawks, to be sure, the people and Congress are not longer in a mood for gratuitous foreign adventures, especially when the fun may not appear to be in American interests. Since Vietnam, US opinion polls regularly show strong popular opposition to overseas military involvement. This “Vietnam syndrome” has served as a major constraint on US military policy and foreign involvement. An important manifestation of these changes is the Guam Doctrine, calling upon US regional allies to take primary responsibility for their own defence in regional conflicts. Another important outcome is Defense statements to the pointed effect that before US troops are committed abroad there must be reasonable assurance of Congressional and popular support (Weinberger, reported in PC p.14). As Mack comments, ‘such assurance is impossible to guarantee - especially for remote countries where no US vital national interests are at stake’. Certainly no more is assured under the ANZUS treaty which provides only that each signatory ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’ (article 4). All the treaty strictly requires is consultation; there is no undertaking or commitment. Isn’t the treaty backed up by informal verbal reassurances? None that are not undermined by others, in American administrative multiple-speak. Even the elite view is that Australia has to ‘work ... to maximize the prospect of US support’ and that the Americans cannot be counted upon. For ‘the threshold of direct US combat involvement could be quite high, and circumstances at the time could significantly limit US willingness or ability to help Australia in other ways?. ‘... we cannot rely upon US support in a defence emergency arising within our own neighbourhood’ (SB, pp.29-30). However a special case has been made for American reliability in Australia’s case - as �12 opposed to examples of American abandonment of earlier military undertakings (in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran) - on the basis of permanent friendship, common interests, and shared values and democratic traditions. There are two difficulties with this type of special pleading: first, as to the basis, and, second, as to the adequacy of such a basis in by-passing Congress, the American people, and slow constitutional processes. Historical evidence hardly sustains the adequacy of the basis in analogous cases. And here, as already indicated, the basis is shaky. For there is not a common culture shared by Australia and America: rather values diverge significantly on quite crucial issues. Even less are interests always common, as the matter of subsidised agricultural produce reveals, and as missile testing and nuclear ships issues in the South Pacific have recently confirmed. Interests diverged, for instance, when Australia toyed with opposing Indonesia’s claim to West Papua. So it is dubious at least that American interests would coincide with Australian in disputes or confrontation with Asian nations to the North, e.g. with Indonesia or Japan. Of course if the special case argument did hold water, Australia and America really were mates, then the treaty would be otiose. There was in fact no treaty in operation in 1942; but by then American interests in countering the Japanese were independently aroused. 4. Other-reliance and regional self-reliance A major problem with other-reliance for defence is then that it cannot be deemed entirely reliable, yet precisely here unreliability can hardly be tolerated. When the Indonesians are rolling into Brisbane it won’t do for Defense to call up with a message like that from local Services, "We can’t get there till tomorrow’’, or “until after Congress meets”, or “Sorry, Mate!”. More seriously, handing defence over to others means handing control of our lives over to others; and given nuclear defence, which too many Antipodean administrations have opted for, it quite likely means literally handing our lives over for many of us. Another problem of other-reliance is thus its adequacy. A further problem is its cost. In principle, if a State hires out its defence it would no doubt look, other things being equal, for the cheaper bidder - if, that is, defence is a commodity of a sort, like national shipping, meterological services, etc. The trouble with global defence is that the market is monopolistic, with currently only one supplier of the right complexion22, who accordingly can exact a very high price, and has - making the whole country a nuclear target and demanding substantial subservience. Similar points make part of the case, well-enough appreciated, for not trying to press defence, plainly a collective good, into a marketable commodity. When a country can supply its own defence, it therefore makes very good sense for it to do so, since it normally has a stronger interest in its own proper defence than most other parties. Should it also be cheaper in costs that matter, then self-reliance not just makes good sense but pays; other-reliance does not. But in that event, it surely does not need nuclear �13 patrons, or to farm out some of its defence. Such self-reliance undermines an important part of the older case based on other-reliance for alliances such as ANZUS. However newer bipartisan approaches to defence try to combine them (thus e.g. Australian minister Beazley as reported by Davidson) - approaches which thus begin to empty ANZUS of what little content it had, and remove much of the apparent point of such older alliances. Since the ANZUS arrangements contain no clear commitments beyond consultation but are merely vague articles of understanding, a simple course is of course to allow them to be emptied of content, so that the alliance, an expensive and outdated “insurance” policy, dies a natural death. It may however be death by seizure or convulsion should American defence facilities be closed or internationalised and passage of American nuclear equipped or powered transport be excluded from Australia. That would no doubt sacrifice the deterrence and other advantages the treaty supposedly affords , while making way for the greater advantages of friendly nonalignment, of no longer being a nuclear target, or so on. But self-reliance pure and simple is insufficient. The world does not consist of separable isolated pieces, as becomes increasingly evident. Most dramatically, Australia will not escape the effects of nuclear winter. The picture is much the same as for other dynamic subjects, such as plants which are not internally self-sufficient but depend crucially on their environment - and indeed as for States themselves. The question then is what form the additional holistic component of policy should take? Put this way, it is almost obvious that the appropriate move is not taking sides (as in a kids’ war game or tug-of-war game that is already set up) and doing one’s bit for confrontation. For that will not contribute to stability, to a proper holistic approach, but rather to sectionalism and fragmentation, and to bringing nuclear winter closer. Other-reliance and self-reliance typically present a false contrast, and certainly do with pure self-reliance - a false contrast like that of holism and partism (EE, p.223), and of dependence versus isolationism. In between lie a range of positions, one of which - favoured by a long line of peacefully-disposed philosophers from Rousseau and Kant onwards - might be called integrated reliance or federated reliance. The elitist case, insofar as it were to call for such reliance (e.g. in assumption 4), could hardly be faulted. But it doesn’t; and is satisfied with much less. Integration may reach only certain inadequate levels, the level of modern alliances and alignment, which are essentially coupled with opposition to an other side, e.g. the monolithic East (or West). It is into just this trap that elitist arguments fall. �14 5. The decline and fall of elitist arguments. Premisses 4 and 5 of the elitist argument turn around the crucial notion of stability, as related arguments revolve around that of security. But stability and security are value-laden terms, which are not cultural invariants. What stability comprehends in American administrative perception is very different from what highland villages take it to include. In each case a system is stable if it returns to a given stationary state under perturbations of sufficiently small magnitude. But both the relevant states and the stationary among them are relative to given frames of reference; for instance, what is stable at a macrolevel may well not be at a microlevel. As Trudeau has said of the superpowers, ‘they share a global perception according to which even remote events can threaten their interests or their associates’ (p.10) and disturb stability. But lesser states or regional people, not counting remote business or military interests as relevant, report no instability. Bureaucrats invariably view bombs as necessary to stability, and the nuclear fix as stability; by contrast, gentle people increasingly see bombs as tools of terrorism and as characteristically antithetical to peace. ad 4: Of course Australia has a vital interest in global stability and security: what sizeable nation does not? But the determinable motherhood interpretation (of italicised terms), while no doubt diplomatically convenient, conceals crucial differences, highly material to the argument. For one global stability means something different in USA from what it means in Costa Rica and likely what it intends in Australia. Certainly vital interests are different. America is interested in containing socialism (in Australia as elsewhere), and it tends, in more popular rhetoric at least, to equate containing socialism with containing communism and both with Soviet containment. A continental swing to socialism (or Non-Soviet communism) in Latin America, or in Africa, would upset global stability, on American perception, and would indeed have significant effects on US business or investment; but it would not on its own upset or affect most Australians or directly threaten Antipodean stability, and it certainly need not affect nuclear stability. Australians generally are not opposed in principle to socialism or notably interested in containing its spread (indeed perhaps the opposite). Australia is not interested in (and oughtn’t to be charmed by the idea of) defence of the (American) “free enterprise” system, or in the defence of uglier forms of capitalism wherever they are presently initiated or opposed (cf. Chomsky and Herman). Contra 5. It can be conceded, without granting the main thrust of the premiss, that the Soviets are expansionistic, at least in that they are interested in extending their influence where they can. So also are most empires, including American and Indonesian (so for that matter are many academics and most sales-people). But the Soviets have an ideological �15 message to spread, Marxism-Leninism, an ideology they used to anticipate being installed everywhere. But the Americans also have a message, a capitalist message, Free Enterprise Inc, which they are working to sell pretty much everywhere accessible to them. And they need to be expansionistic to have it adopted, whereas the Russians and Chinese need simply wait for history to take its allegedly determined course (though a little assistance - reflecting legitimate doubt about this determinism? - would surely spread their disconcertingly different forms of “progress” without interfering). But surely the Russian message is pernicious? All these messages are pernicious (for familiar reasons: see e.g. Erlich). The proper question is whether on its own Soviet international activity threatens, in some damaging way, global stability. Undoubtedly Soviet-American confrontation, as in the Cuban missile affair, does threaten global stability; though not in a way that has any bearing on Australian defence. In fact no Russian expansionary tendency, military or otherwise, has an untoward direct effect on Australia, little of significance reaches into the Antipodes (see Dibb SS). So what is the local excitement about? In large measure the excitement has been drummed up by the political right, East European expatriates, and pork-barrelling politicians. The effect of Soviet expansionism is much exaggerated and overexploited (Mack ST). Viewed from the Antipodes it is hardly a problem, unless the Soviets should get locked into military confrontation with USA - a real problem to be addressed. With that problem however, the Antipodes can better assist as part of a third nonaligned group which helps to referee and to prize apart the heavies, not by seconding and inciting the USA. But confrontation apart, Soviet internationalism, hardly a great success story, does not seriously disturb global stability, as seen from Australia. For a proper assessment of Soviet internationalism, types of expansion should be distinguished - military, potential military, influence with military access, and mere influence. In actual military expansion and involvement since W’orld War II, the Russian record is hardly striking by comparison with the USA or several other states. The one conspicuous case involving control of new territory, that of Afghanistan, has actually had little effect on global stability. The usual Western apprehension concerns not anything the Soviets have accomplished, but what they might attempt militarily, especially in Europe. But the idea of Soviet military adventure in Europe is a Western invention and bogey, lacking in plausibility. The Soviet military lacks the force ratio needed to be assured of military success in Europe, both by their own standards of what is required and by Western strategic standards. And the Soviets have no good reasons or interests in undertaking such an exercise which would draw them into nuclear war. They already face enough economic difficulties and troubles with East European client states which they cannot control satisfactorily. �16 The extension of Soviet influence has largely been in the Third world. But it has hardly been successful, with as many failures and losses to record as Soviet “gains” - gains which add to the imperial burden since they involve countries wracked with problems, such as Vietnam. The Third World exercises are marred by Soviet inaptitude and limited by the state of their own economy. They scarcely displace the global structure enough to test its stability; and they produce no shock waves or even significant ripples in the Antipodes. Contra 6. The main current threat to world stability appears to come not from one of the dancers in the East-West dance of death, but from the escalating confrontation, easily ignited, between the lead dancers. With this US policies and practices have at least as much to do as USSR ones. Recent US practices are more destabilizing than Soviet ones, and indeed highly destabilising, because of new weapons and weapons systems, because of rejection of arms control and Soviet proposals, and because of “star wars” preparation which both accelerates the arms race on earth and begins a new one in space. A vast increase in tension and suspicion accompanies the “arms race” which is in large measure due to US intransigence and US war-fighting doctrines, new weapons systems, with built-in incentives for pre-emption, and deliberate abandonment of arms control (see PR). Such considerations, duly assembled, demolish the received (but nonetheless crazy) theme that an alliance or alignment with USA helps increase stability. American practices are to be resisted as much as Soviet. 6. The East-West balance argument: American alignment versus friendly independence The need for Australian alignment with the USA is supposed to be shown by the East-West This politically-important balance argument, which shares key premisses nr with the related elitist argument, runs as follows : balance argument. 7. Global stability is the key to world peace. 8. Stability of the international order is a matter of maintaining a global balance. But 5. The global balance is constantly threatened by an expansionist USSR. 6A. The threat is [only] checked by the USA, which (6A.1) guarantees an open and pluralistic international order. 9. Australia’s primary security concern, indeed most vital interest, is this stability. Hence 10. Australia’s role is to help America maintain the balance. The rest of Australia’s intervolvement with American military arrangements is then taken to follow. But there are many reasons for halting the argument before it reaches this stage of practical (and allegedly moral) detail. The balance argument assumes much that has already been rebutted, for instance that the Soviet threat thesis is correct (i.e. 5) and that US �17 policy is stabilizing (part of 6A). It also takes for granted, what now is at least in serious doubt, that American policy is directed at balance and deterrence, rather than what the American administration appears to be aiming at, superiority. But in that event, Australia is not really engaged in some longer term balancing feat, so much as in helping USA prevail in nuclear race, contradicting the goal of world peace of premiss 7. Contra 10. and its derivation. The derivation is inadequate: it does not follow that Australia’s role is such a lackey’s one. If the balance of strength is leaning in America’s direction, as most less-biassed evidence indicates, then Australia should surely be throwing its slight weight in with the Eastern team (that is what such images as the balanced tug-of-war would suggest). Presumably premiss 6A.1 is designed to exclude this deplorable thought, of Australia teaming up with totalitarians. Nevertheless Australia should be putting its slight weight where it is effective, given its own broader objectives, interests, principles and supposedly pluralistic ideals. There are several different roles Australia could fulfil which would enable it to make a more satisfactory, less passive, contribution to world peace, among them de-escalation through active nonalignment, appropriate aid, and so forth. Thus 10 is hardly well-supported or evident. A more direct approach would be better than throwing Australian weight unreflectively on one side of the balance. As a little reflection attests, the balance image and argument point not in the direction intended, but towards nonalignment. Contra 6A (and 6). The theme that US maintains the balance, and hence preserves the peace, is of course false. For again, it takes two to tango. While it can be granted that the USA is interlocked with and checks the USSR in this munitions dance, the history of the dance reveals that the pace-escalation has flowed from the interaction of the one partner with the other. That is, but for the USA, the USA would not be required to check the USSR (the interaction is two-way as with Hegel’s famous master-slave relation). In any case, it looks as if, on a different historical trajectory, the main states of Western Europe could match the Soviet Union militarily (for they have comparable combined GNP, technological resources, etc.; cf. note 20) Thus it is doubtful that the current Soviet build-up, produced in interaction with the USA, could only be, or have been, checked by the US. ad 6A.1. As the premiss is only of marginal relevance to the argument, it is enough to observe that the international order the USA helps maintain leaves very much to be desired. In its intervention, militarily, economically and indirectly, USA has assisted substantially in reducing plurality and openness, is well as in establishing or propping up rotten regimes, etc. The negative side of American imperialism as well-enough documented, if not widely enough read or known by Americans themselves (cf. again Chomsky and Herman). Only under scandalously low redefinitions of ‘open’ and ‘pluralistic’ is the present “free” world order �18 either open or pluralistic. ad 8, and the damaging equivocation on ‘the balance’. While balance is one way of maintaining stability in the world arrangements that have presently come to pass, the balance structure can only carry so much loading. Add too much weight (of arms tension, and so forth) to both sides and the precarious structure will fail, probably catastrophically. increasing probability of catastrophic breakdown, for a variety of reasons The (accident, miscalculation, computer error, human interference, etc.), has been argued elsewhere (e.g. WPI). While a certain neither overloaded nor overstressed balance may serve for stability, the present increasingly stressed balance will probably not. The balance argument, however, neglects this dynamical situation, illegitimately switching from a (certain post) balance in premiss 8 to the (on-going) balance in subsequent premisses. The balance argument itself breaks down through equivocation. What the dynamic picture also indicates is the importance of removing some weight from the balance, most obviously by arms limitation and tension reduction. It points too to a different role for Australasia, to a less aligned position genuinely directed at stability. It is to the emerging case for a different role for Australia, and to action for achieving this different role, that the positive argument will now begin to swing. The inadequate East-West balance argument is typically combined with attacks upon proposals for a different role for Australia than American alliance and. service. effect of these additions is to generate extra confusion and dust. The main For the additions are inessential to the argument, and do not serve to repair it or reinforce it. For example, against nonalignment or neutralism is set the alleged pervasiveness of nuclear winter. We might as well be aligned (it’s good for trade and other economic perquisites), so it is sometimes argued from up top, because if the central balance fails we are all dead. This is a conspicuous nonsequitur^, worse than ex nihilo quodlibet (because it also suggests that balance is a prerequisite for stability). But, in the main, the attack is irrelevant, because the point of nonalignment is to help remove overload and to break down confrontation and its escalation to war; it is a thing to do now, be fore winter descends, to delay or halt its descent, and most important, to reduce its extent and severity. Australia’s weight may be slight, another irrelevant addition goes, but psychologically it is important for the West. Any further spread of the “Kiwi disease” (from New Zealand) would show the weakening of Western resolve, and give the green light for Soviet expansionism. Bell, a leading exponent of the balance argument, virtually gives the impression that if Australia dropped out of American alignment, the Russians would be on the �road down through the isles to Australia tomorrow/ Much of this sort of rhetoric is reminiscent of the baseless fear-mongering of an earlier pre-Vietnam time. The Russians have no such military interests, or present capabilities. And if they were to gear up and set out, they would be met by substantial resistance along most of the route, resistance obtaining Western assistance. For America, for one, has major interests, different from Australia’s, in both Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as elsewhere in East Asia. The addition, so far from strengthening the argument, depends, in its “green light for expansion” comparison, on the previously faulted premiss 5 of Soviet expansionism. In fact most of the further case for American alignment of one sort or another - when it is argued-, often nonalignment and neutrality are simply denounced in good old-fashioned authoritarian style - turns upon already-faulted assumptions. Catley, for example, another exponent of “central balance”, presents the following ‘consideration’: ... whatever the Swedes or Swiss may think about the matter, Australia is locked by considerations of culture, economics, and political philosophy into the defence of the Western world. It has both an obligation and a duty to contribute its share to that defence if necessary by hosting facilities which cannot easily be located elsewhere (p.15). The premiss is false for reasons essentially indicated: and the premiss in no way sustains the conclusion, the argument involving among other things, the prescriptive (is-ought) fallacy. Consider the premiss. Australia is not, unless Catley has information withheld from most of the rest of us, locked into Western nuclear defence, but in principle independent and free to reconsider and rethink its options. (American use of the “facilities” is not irrevocable, and shortly comes up, in principle at least, for reconsideration.) How do culture, economics and political philosophy provide locks and chains for Australia but not for nonaligned Western European states? They do not: Australia is not a part of USA or altogether a client state; and the cultures, interests, economic frameworks and political philosophies of the two nations are significantly different (for details, see CPD). But even if the ideological frameworks were much more similar than they are, that would not entail similar defence practices (as, e.g., ANZUS in all its weakness shows), nor any such defence obligations. Most of the arguments against nonalignment are of Catley calibre - or worse. Fortunately, then, such arguments are examined in detail elsewhere, notably by D. Martin in his examination of counter-arguments to Australian armed neutrality, the legally-recognised non-belligerent form of nonalignment he favours. Virtually none of Martin’s counter-case depends for its success on features of neutrality, which is not advocated here. Virtually all of Martin’s argument is moreover couched in negative form; his positive brief is very brief. It �20 reduces to this: alignment or alliance with the USA 'cannot make us secure against such dangers as we may one day have to meet, while it needlessless exposes to other dangers, including nuclear war (p.l, italics added). While the message is correct enough, and in need of wide propagation, it does little on its own to support neutrality, and it by no means exhausts the positive case for weakening alignment. In particular, there are more positive arguments of much theoretical interest, to be drawn from systems theory and from the burgeoning theory of collective goods and action. 7. Contributions towards stability: free-riding, enlarging group size, and increasing variety. The strategic world situation we now confront can be viewed as a game with more than 100 players, counting in nation-states and leaving out (for convenience) major organisations such as the largest 100 transnational companies. These organisational players align themselves around two large poles, East and West, as indicated: NON-ALIGNED N N WEST EAST India NATO States Japan, Israel Sweden* Switzerland* NZUS: Australi I Ireland1* ^Most Latin ' American States I Tanzania Costa Rica** State capitalist Key: N: *: **: State communist Nuclear weapons states Neutral states Nonmilitary states There are various - a great many - games these state players are playing, some of which are practically important for peace and for stability. Some of these games, such as World Empire and Chicken (already played under one representation), are played essentially between the East-West superplayers. There are several problems about East-West games: for instance, what representation they have, the repeatability of the games (clearly some nuclear games �21 may, like Russian roulette, end after one round, as they will with the Big One), and the negative sum characters of some games. And the monolithic East/monolithic West dichotomy is misleading, and, as will appear, discards crucial detail (in the way simplifications may). So game-theoretical modelling will be approached differently and more obliquely. World Security, like regional and local security, is a collective good (technically, an item, quality unspecified, in joint supply and precluding exclusion). That is not of course to say that there are not conditions under which security may leave much to be desired, for instance where security is guaranteed by a narrow and intolerant despotism; but then, so it can be argued, the trouble lies with the provisioning, not the particular product. collective good G for the collection of N nation-states. It is a It is, furthermore, a collective good which permits the possibility of free-riding by nation-states. Looked at from this perspective the recent American complaint about its allies, Japan for example, and their insufficient expenditure on defence, is a complaint about their free-riding. Within the balance of power framework the conditions for free-riding are satisfied, for instance by unaligned and unilaterally disarming states. For 1. G is available to all N members of the collective if it is available to any, and the achievement (or maintenance) of G by any will make every member better off. 2. G is achieved iff some number m (no larger than that of group K) contribute towards its provision, where under the balance of power assumption Il C K C N and II = {USA, USSR}. 3. The expected value of contributing to G or its maintenance is less than the expected value of not doing so, i.e. likely costs of contribution exceed likely benefits - except perhaps for members of II given that G is largely provided by II. There is what can be called a pegged (or asymmetric) free-rider problem, pegged by members of II for whom the free-rider option is not open - within the confines of the balance of power assumption - and for whom condition 3 is only satisfied under certain ways of looking at the matter (e.g. there will be a war 10 years down the road so the expected costs each year exceed the expected benefits). For most members of N, by contrast, the benefits of G are available even should they reduce their contributions. There is a straightforward case (in narrow game-theoretical terms) for recommending Australian, and regional, free-riding on the balance of power provision of G. Some arguments, beyond or adding to those already in effect presented, are these:- Either stability breaks down catastrophically and there is a large-scale war or it does not. If it does then the region is �22 better off than it would be if (strongly) aligned because it is unlikely to be (so heavily) targetted. (Here the dreadful new argument that nuclear winter means that the Antipodes might as well be involved gets challenged and rejected: as to how see e.g. MF and B. Martin). If, alternatively, stability doesn’t break down then the region has the benefits in any case, without the costs. For there is no clear evidence that our alignment and cooperation with the USA enhances global stability, etc.; indeed, as remarked and will be further argued, the evidence points to the contrary. As regards Australasian regional weight in the Western block, do we seriously believe it is significant? That the Australian voice, though useful for propaganda purposes, makes much real difference in the halls of Northern power? We shouldn’t: and if we do we’re living in a delusional framework. Australia has been left out of the picture in virtually all major strategic planning exercises, most difference-making peace initiatives, etc.,etc. Now Eastern block countries would hardly object to Antipodean free-riding, rather than no offering support (however trifling), comfort and incitement to their opposition/ Furthermore free-riding is how the Americans, on their theoretical principles, would expect Australia to act, the rational self-interested procedure (see CPD). It is how lesser nations should act. For it is economically rational; contributing is not. But won’t the US make things economically dear for Australia? In threats and theory, yes; but in practice, no more than it has already done with subsidized wheat deals to the Soviets, no more than it threatened to do already in the case of New Zealand over the nuclear-ships issue. For except for short term aberrations, America will never give up trade or business arrangements: one gets the impressions that America would trade with the Devil Himself, if doing so would open some new markets in Hell. Despite its political stigma, free-riding need be no problem, or in any way immoral or irregular. Perhaps the buses are free; perhaps there is a voluntary payment system, to which only some need contribute, etc. With the nuclear fix, free-riding is indeed the moral course; contributing is not.29 Free-riding, though often protrayed as a problem, is only a problem in certain cases of collective provisioning, where the good involved is sufficiently desirable and will not be provided because of too many free- riders. This is not the situation with global security, which will be provided, in the curious and precarious way that it is, whether or not Australia stays on the escalating treadmill or gets off and rides free. Australia's free-riding may be a problem for America; it is not for Australia. Interests diverge again. What is more, judicious free-riding can increase stability. In pictorial terms, the stability of a structure is typically increased up to a certain point by securing it more �23 adequately; for example, if it is a wind tower or similar building, by increasing its rigid ties or supports to the ground. Then a tripod (or better still a quadrapod) tower is much less likely to topple than a bipedal one, and requires less guying to stay up. Increasing the diversity, or variety, of supports increases stability. The theme that diversity correlates with stability has been sharpened and confirmed in ecology, for instance in the theory of “spreading the risks” (see EW). The related theme, that a certain variety increases stability, has been elaborated in cybernetics. The core eco-systemic idea to be developed is that Australia’s free-riding in defence, and consequent nonalignment, could help to enhance diversity and variety, and accordingly to increase stability (especially if done in concert with other client and suppliant states). Two interlocked supports in tension, East and West, well dug in but hardly well guyed, are inadequate for the long-term stability of the precarious structure of world peace. What makes engineering sense is not however adding weight to the structure, or even strengthening the supports that are there, helping the East when the balance is disturbed by the more powerful West’s surging ahead and likely overburdening the structure. What makes more sense is increasing the variety of supports, enlarging and diversifying group size, as significant independent grouping could do. The monolithic East/monolithic West picture is much more than a convenient simplification, for instance for strategic thinking. It may force damaging mistakes in conceptualisation, mzsconceptualisation perhaps convenient for some larger players. One main reason for mistakes concerns group size. Whereas 11+ = {West, East} is a small group, the number N of nation-states is not, but is considerably larger. But the collective behaviour of large groups differs in theory from that of small groups; group size is a highly significant factor (though its precise import remains contentious). The group N of nation-states is a large group, of essentially self-interested parties, indeed of substantially economic actors. collective action applies: So we may expect that the American theory of that the groups will behave in a counterintuitive way. Though expected to act in the common interest, to obtain security in particular, the collection will not. On this account (that elaborated by Olson), the common interest can only be guaranteed by outside influence or imposition (coercion in Olson’s rapid thinking). But with the collective of nations, there is, as experience has shown, no outside mediator or influence of sufficient authority to ensure attainment of the collective good. The prognosis looks very gloomy: this most important (though far from unique) collective good will not be provided. Fortunately the reasoning, like much of the “logic” of collective action, has been too �21 swift. The group, though large, is highly privileged, in containing several actors for whom costs of war exceed benefits (note the shift in perspective from the earlier free-riding condition 3). Indeed an important economic effect of the knowledge of an ominous nuclear winter is that virtually all actors involved should now be in that position; for (subjectively) expected costs of nuclear war have become very high. To go back to basics, Olson's grand theory is based on the accountants’ tautology (defining ‘net’) net agent benefit = gross agent benefits - gross agent costs, i.e. in symbols, for each agent or o actor i (in collective N), A- = V-Cj. A group is privileged if Aj is positive for some i in N. It needs little argument to show that for vulnerable European nation-states the net benefits of global security are decidedly positive (e.g. with a nuclear war their respective future GDPs would expectedly fall to near zero). The fact that the group of nation-states is privileged does not however imply that the collective good involved, security, will be supplied, particularly in the longer term. The simple logic is not dynamic; it takes no account of mistake, error, or the like, or of stability achieved through superiority or intermediate instability. An improved modelling - which can take some account of group size and of the dynamics, through iterated games - is gained by returning to game-theoretic grounds. A free rider “problem” is tantamount to a dilemma of some sort; according to the conventional wisdom, it is a prisoners’ dilemma (cf. Pettit, but contrast Taylor and Ward). The argument can go this way:- a free rider problem or issue is defined in terms of the provisioning of a collective good; but the theory of collective goods is equivalent to that of a .QI, generalised prisoners’ dilemma. Certainly the global nuclear situation appears to present a dilemma; as much is a commonplace claim. Elsewhere (e.g. WPI) it is argued in detail that it does indeed present a moral dilemma. Here the argument - which can proceed through the theoretical route just sketched above or in the more piecemeal way to be indicated - is that it is also a prudential dilemma (for many members of N).°2 Consider first, since these have obtained some investigation (e.g. Hardin), the range of apparent two party games being played by the US and Soviet Union administration (labelled US and SU respectively) in 1985 as regards the moves of further nuclear armament, A, or nuclear disarmament, N. (It is supposed, naturally, that the game is set in some background context, e.g. nuclear disarmament is not considered in isolation from on-going French and Chinese nuclear armament). It is important here, as other places, to distinguish the administration - which for the most part calls the shots - from the society and the people. It is administrations or governments that generally take people into war; etc. The American people seem rather more inclined towards nuclear de-escalation than their administration; the German people were clearly opposed to the new nuclear missiles their administration proceeded to install. The strategy games involved are then administration games, which we �25 can suppose to be played over successive time intervals, e.g. years; so there is interaction and feedback as the games go on - until the Big Ones explode. Within this simplistic setting, the apparent games being played by US and SU are those diagrammed next: New Initial game Prisoners’ Dilemma Game SU SU D US A Revised Game D 2,2 A 4,1 1,4 3,3 D US A SU D 3,2 A 4,1 1,4 2,3 D US A D 3,3 A 4,1 1,4 2,2 According to Hardin, ‘giving evidence of [his] deformation professionelle’, the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) ‘represents the preference ordering of virtually all the articulate policy analysts in the United States and presumably also in the Soviet Union’ (p.248). While PD may have represented US policy, there is considerable evidence (as already indicated) that it no longer does, that the US administration has shifted to a more aggressive, war-fighting, phase. That is, the US has interchanged its rankings of (D,D) and (A,A), presumably some time between 1978 and 1984 games. The Soviets, who have been much more consistent (and no doubt better censored) in their policy pronouncements, appear not to have changed their game, but have stuck with their form of deterrence and no-first-strike. However they are bound to try to keep up with the Americans, and so are presumably pushed towards the Revised Game shown, which pleasantly restores symmetry. Stable or equilibrium outcomes for each game are circled. An outcome is said to be stable if neither player has incentive to switch strategies unilaterally on the strength of the game, i.e. to alter the outcome except by influencing the other player also to alter strategies. All these games provide dilemmas, in a broad sense, that equilibrium is achieved in an undesirable and dangerous outcome. In all the apparent games, arming is the dominant strategy for each player; yet in the PD game that is even Pareto-suboptimal, whence the economic fascination. But as the other games deliver results which are socially suboptimal (and below a satisfying threshold), all these games are dilemmas. And the same applies to suggested alternative games that might plausibly be taken to represent the superpower situation, and such as Chicken. A recognisably suboptimal outcome is guaranteed by the independent ‘‘stable” strategies. What is worse, iteration of games does not help (as it may in other political circumstances). For there are substantial political and military incentives for the superpower players not to adjust their preferences substantially in socially superior directions after repeated games, but to do what the US at least appears to have done, to make the situation worse. �26 It is important then to attempt to modify or curtail these self-interested superpower games. There are various connected ways of going about this. One is for other parties to combine to limit or discourage these games. Another alternative is for them to try to alter the games. Thus much socially preferable would be a switch to a coordination game of some sort; for instance, to the game which neutrals tend to play (and which Lackey, in contrast to other more bellicose utilitarians, sees utilitarian superpowers playing; hence Hardin’s provocative label for this game, ‘Lackey’s game’). In the coordination game diagrammed, WN represents a western-inclined neutral and EN an Eastern inclined neutral (e.g. Yugoslavia): EN WN D D 1,1 A 3,2 A 2,3 4,4 [Other coordination games, with (D,D) assigned (1,1)] Now the dilemmatic and coordination games are not played in isolation; they come together in international settings such as United Nations’ committees (and elsewhere, since coordination games are frequently peoples’ games as well). Superimposing the games, with coordination games of the first sort applied to previously given US and SU games, leads to the following augmented East (E) and West (W) games: New Game, Augmented Prisoners’ Dilemma Augmented E E A D Revised Game, Augmented A 4,1 2,2 : *4,1' \ : 3^2 ’ D 1 : W ......... 1,4: A 2/3: 2/3; D ; 1 w ........ : 1,4 3,3 ; a 4 ; E D 2/3 • • — •- : 3-3’**: D ; 1 W I 2,3 ; . • 2.3 A D 2/3 2,2 a 4 ■ 4,1* ! . ; : 2/3 J 4 Key: rh represents a sequence of ms, i.e. m, m, m ... for each coordination player; 2/3 a sequence of 2s and 3s in some order. As augmenting games reveals, to play with a superpower is to help reinforce a stable deadlock. But playing an independent coordination game increases variety and can help in breaking the deadlock, in fact in several ways. For one, enough significant players playing a coordination game can alter the overall dominant strategy towards disarmament. For another, much more pressure can be brought to bear on the superpowers. For example, with less support, unilateral action by the US administration on Star-Wars and arms build-up can be exposed. Superpower militarism and power excursions would stand naked and �27 unsupported. Australia’s impact, in particular, would be rather greater as a nonaligned free-rider pressing seriously for disarmament and regional nuclear-freedom (instead of, as at present, white-wash polemics and token ambassadors, undermined by a none-too-tacit policy of US support). The strategy suggested by game-theoretic modelling converges then with that suggested by other approaches, notably regional and ecological approaches. The strategy is that of limitation, of disengagement from escalating US/USSR war games, and progressive alteration of their likely outcomes by defusing coordination moves. In more practical terms, the approaches mean trying to limit and modify superpower games by restricting their games and supporting regional or local coordination of players, in forms of organisations both of nations and of people. Such organisations would work, as many have already been doing, to contract the regions and spheres of influence and access of US and USSR military administrations, and to diminish support for their war-fighting objectives. For example, Antipodean groups could, and should, coordinate to ease the American military out of the South Pacific region, meanwhile resisting any intrusion of Russian military. Then, while the Europeans are doing their coordinated de-escalating, denuclearising things right across Europe, the Russian and American war games are progressively excluded from the entire Southern Hemisphere. An eventual aim geographically is, to send their weapons of war back home, to restrict their (and French and other) global military enterprises to their “own” backyards, where they would not always be so enthusiastically received. Fortunately such an ambitious and optimistic project, so unlikely to come to pass given present nation-state arrangments, can be accomplished piecemeal, from small and significant beginnings, already to be seen. As a result of recent movements in the region, a South Pacific nuclear-free region is now a politically-achievable option. A first token step has already been taken. But next steps, towards genuine nuclear-freedom, require above all cooperation of a less aligned Australia, joining other disengaging “free-riders” in the region. That in turn requires, as a practical component, closure of American bases in Australia as their leases terminate, cessation of American nuclear ship visits and aircraft staging, and an end to uranium mining and sales. As Australia is the only country in the region supplying uranium, and the main location of US bases, such steps would be most significant. Even so, the Pacific regional effect would remain unduly limited, so long as France and the US are based within the region, and transit of nuclear ships is internationally sanctioned everywhere on the shrinking high seas. Plainly there are further more difficult steps on the way to southern Pacific nuclear-freedom and independence, i.e. even for one of the easier oceanic regions. But there is no good reason to �28 expect that removing the nuclear scourge, any more than eliminating other major politico­ social evils, will be easy. Permanent removal and a less dubious “peace” than we presently enjoy is not something that will be achieved by more of what we have witnessed, or even through clever diplomacy and smart technological tricks, such as new defensive weapons; it will take difficult structural and radical design change. 8. On the need for, possibility of, and prospect of appropriate structural change. There is little doubt that certain sorts of structural political change would be highly conducive to peace (e.g. democratic reorganisation of the superpowers), and that certain fundamental changes may even be sufficient for permanent peace. With that in view they have long been advocated - at least from Rousseau and Kant onwards. But it has also been supposed that some such changes are necessary for lasting peace; ‘it is also necessary to transform the structures that lead to war’ (B. Martin, p.12). To render this theme immune to obvious criticisms - for example, that straightforward authoritarian extension of certain established structures could bring an end to war - further desiderata, typically presupposed, are invoked, for instance that certain freedoms, modest material standards of life, and so on, are duly guaranteed, and also the type of necessity involved is wound back to some lower technical level (not excluded however by present practicalities). These adjustments make the necessity theme more difficult to assess, but also more difficult to sustain. There are two parts to its assessment and defence, a negative and critical part, demolishing a range of arguments from determinism, human nature, and the like, to the effect that arrangements have to be more or less the way they are, and a positive part, comprising direct arguments for the theme. The large negative part of this enterprise will simply be illustrated.34 According to deterministic and mechanistic approaches, such as that of (marxist) technological determinism, nuclear weapons, like megamachines generally, are no aberration. They are an integral part of the business of industrial and ecological conquest, a further stage in human intervention which has already involved substantial disruption through pesticides, wastes, etc. The argument tends to the fatalistic. The megamachines of conquest are made, and once made they will be used. No change in political arrangement, which would make any difference, is possible. Sometimes technological enthusiasts push their position and luck, even further, that a weapon or device once invented by humans will be used: there is no stopping progress. But in doing so they overextend themselves. While there is, sadly a fair induction from the manufacture of weapons (of any given type, for many batches are never deployed) to their use, inductions from invention of machines or the like to their manufacture are �c 29 unreliable and subject to many counterexamples (and many machines that do eventually get made have been reinvented or independently rediscovered). But even the good inductions do not show that weapons of various sorts must be used, that a change in background political organisation would not frustrate the inductions. The broader deterministic position is of course that such background changes are not possible either; political arrangements too, like the rest of social life, are technologically or economically determined. But (nonanalytical) determinism, technological and other, is false, so it is argued elsewhere (JB, CPD). Different political arrangements, which alleviate problems, are technically possible, and arrangements would be different in differently evolved worlds. Things did not and do not have to be the way they are, or the social and political sort of way they are. Many routes, none of deductive strength, lead to the conclusion that the dominant political structures of our time, fashioned (with much input from schemes of past philosophers) from feudal institutions, require extensive structural alteration. In particular, they need to be superseded by alternative structures less intricately tied to war, which do not promote or lead so readily to war. Such a theme has been argued directly from the nuclear fix itself (as e.g. WP1, p.47ff.). But suppose, improbable as it may seem, that nuclear weapons all vanished, thereby removing the current nuclear fix; for instance, they turned out to be quietly self-destructing, or a disarmament actually took place. massive thermodynamic miracle occurred, or nuclear The problem of war would not be thereby removed, and even that of nuclear war would only be given some respite. For the structural arrangements for war would remain intact.04 Conventional weapons would remain, along with weapons perhaps as dangerous as nuclear weapons, such as chemical and biological ones. Nuclear weapons, insofar as they were removed (for small caches are easily hidden away), could soon be replaced, especially if nuclear power plants remained intact; and nothing would prevent the development of (Star-Wars) weapons more diabolical than nuclear ones. War cannot be eliminated while leaving the rest of society as it is - by freezing the status quo. ... The structural conditions for war need to be removed - not reinforced as appeals to elites may do - and superseded by alternative structures which do not lead to war (B. Martin, p.12: Martin goes on to indicate the types of structures, and how to reach them). Structural adjustments can provide conditions for lasting satisfactory peace. An initial, somewhat simplistic, Kantian argument for the proposition that peace is possible (presented by Latta, introducing Permanent Peace), runs as follows:- Peace, perpetual peace, is an ideal, not merely of a speculative kind but a practical idea, a moral principle. Hence this ideal ought to be realised, i.e. there ought (morally) to be peace. But ought entails can; therefore peace is possible. �30 From Heracleit.us through Hegel there buzzes an impressive swarm of philosophers"*6 who have rejected the second premiss. Some are even captivated by such extravagant counter-claims as that with peace everything would stop, that competition, with war as one limit, is essential to motion and progress! would now be With the recent shift in philosophical fashions, the second premiss more widely conceded, though often not on Kantian grounds, but consequentialist. Such grounds to support the theme that peace is desirable and ought to be realised, but are more discriminating in that they help indicate what sort of peace. Unfortunately, however it is done, the second premiss does not sustain the conclusion, ought does not entail can, as many moral dilemmas reveal (see MD, WP1). So fortunately, there is a more satisfactory and revealing route to the conclusion that peace is possible, and indeed is feasible. That is the more elaborate method of (semantical) modelling: present in detail scenarios of societies where peace persists (for the sceptical it may be necessary to recall n-human models, with n small). This sort of thing is of course already done, in more pleasing fashion than logicians could hope to emulate, if rather less precisely, by OQ novelists and science-fiction writers, and by activists like the different Martins. What all these scenarios point to, however, are societies considerably different from our own - though not in the people involved, who have their weaknesses, their power drives, and so forth, but because of significant structural alterations in the societies depicted. By way of such modellings we can not merely argue to the feasibility of lasting peace, but push ahead with the argument, that societies of these restructured sorts are desirable alternatives to contemporary military- industrial arrangements. For those of us then who want to move towards such pacific alternatives, the practical inference, from feasibility and desirability is clear: we should begin on the real work of structural change. Peace is possible and desirable, but the prospects are poor (as Heilbroner has said of the human prospect). Present arrangements, though contingent and fashioned in large measure from the schemes of past intellectuals, are thoroughly entrenched, and enforced, both ideologically and by much physical power, often as if along with natural law they were God­ given, though they are no longer appropriate. Even small nonstructural changes look difficult to achieve in present political climates. Through climates have not changed that much, major social improvements have been gained, not instantanously, but in longer-term struggles with government. Such short-term difficulties did not deter social theorists such as Kant, who like Rousseau before him and many after him, were concerned with obtaining lasting peace. The world has changed enormously since the time of Kant’s proposals for peace (of 1795), and even since the time of Veblen’s more cynical additions (in 1917). Hard science and �31 destructive power have grown enormously; and even theoretical knowledge of collective behaviour, especially that admitting of game-theoretic treatment, though still slight, has advanced. But political arrangements and what can be accomplished politically have, in important respects, changed very little, since Rousseau complained (around 1761) that governments were probably too short-sighted to appreciate the merits of his project for perpetual peace. Governments have long been, and been seen as, main obstacles to peace. Thus Veblen rightly maintained that ‘... if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about irrespective of governmental management, - in spite of the State rather than by its good offices’ (p.7).^^ So it has been with most major social changes; for they have involved structural political change disturbing to governmental conservatism. In his search for the indispensible conditions for lasting peace, Kant claimed, as others have claimed since, that peace is not possible under present structural arrangements of an unregulated competing nation-state kind. As times have changed, so, to a limited extent, have state structural arrangements, since Kant compiled his conditions. In particular, there is now, in the shape of the United Nations, a very weak reflection of what Kant looks for, a world (or European!) federation of nations. But crucial ingredients in Kant’s resolution are still lacking:- namely, at the upper level, what is required for a standard resolution of Prisoners Dilemma type situations - some surrender of national sovereignty, especially as regards war, and, at the lower level, “republican” states. Major blockages to adequate arrangements for peace remain at two critical levels of organisation, that concentrated upon of the organisation of collectives of states and, in part by devolution, that of the internal organisation of individual states themselves. Much evidence has now accumulated that more far-reaching changes than Kant, Rousseau and Veblen envisaged are required at both international and nation-state levels if genuine peace is to be secured. Indeed significant changes are wanted even in republician states for peace movements to get their mixed message through already fixed channels to state control systems. For this sort of reason, movements on a single front, such as peace, are unlikely to succeed on their own, but should be linked into a broader plurality of movements, which seek to widen informational and democratic channels, and to alter the character and membership of state systems, and thereby render them much more controllable and accountable.40 Many longer-haul structural changes depend upon diverting nuclear war in the meantime. Thus arguing for more far-reaching changes, for an altered nonaligned Australia, �32 for a nuclear-free South Pacific, for regional structural changes, certainly does not exclude arguing and working for obvious measures for reducing risks of nuclear war. These include: a serious commitment to arms control by the superpowers (whose practices threaten our futures, though most of us lack representation in either); a move away from war-fighting strategies and associated destabilising weapons-systems; moderation of confrontational rhetoric and other tensions-inducing practices by superpower administrations, and improved efforts at mutual understanding (as well some appreciation of the elements of political pluralism); and then, remote though it may appear, significant steps towards nuclear disarmament. Richard Sylvan 41 Bungendore NSW �33 NOTES 1. Queensland premier, with destructive deep-South policies. 2. The point, which has become controversial, is argued in effect in Gilbert. 3. See especially Dibb, as reported in the ANU Reporter, and for a more guarded elaboration, his IAD (e.g. p.163 ‘At present, planning for the defence of Australia lack coherence because there is no clear definition, in priority order, of what needs defending’); see also Sharp, p.l48ff and differently Langtry and Ball, p.575ff., p.6O5ff. The much-heralded Dibb Review of mid-1986 would, if (as already seems unlikely) it were adopted, remove some of the lesser incoherence in Australian policy, that involving details of regional defensive defence (as would also Langtry and Ball, if followed through). While Dibb appears to have demolished what he refers to scathingly as the ‘largely mythical “core force” concept’, a new controversy has sprung up over whether Australia’s more self-reliant defence should be purely defensive defence, Dibb’s ill-named ‘strategy of denial’, or whether it should include an offensive component. Dibb himself has rather rapidly shifted ground on this important issue. In late 1983 he was contending that ‘Australia should have in the force-in-being significant deterrent capabilities, based on present air and naval strike assets, which can mount defensive and offensive operations against attacking forces, their staging bases and lines of resupply’ (IAP, p.166). But in the otherwise conservative Review of 1986 such offensive defence is abandoned; no such forces and equipment for offensive off-shore operations are recommended. Instead ‘the review proposes a layered strategy of defence within our area of direct military interest. Our most important defence planning concern is to ensure that an enemy would have substantial difficulty in crossing the sea and air gap’. The new offensive/defensive defence controversy puts the Review’s adoption in increasing doubt - in which event the local incoherence in strategic planning processes and militational difficulties Dibb alludes to early in his statement will presumably persist. The Review not merely fails to address significant regional issues, as to defence priorities, and as to multiple purpose roles for Australian armed forces given that they will be involved in virtually no military activity other than maintenance and a certain “preparedness” (for on Dibb’s overstatement of the prevailing view of Australia’s very favourable regional security prospects, ‘there is no conceivable prospect of any power contemplating invasion of our continent and subjugation of our population’). But further, the Review is itself vague to incoherent, concerning wider defence issues, vague as to the post-ANZUS situation, and incoherent about Australia’s role in US global “defence” activity. According the Dibb (CT, p.16), ‘there is no requirement for Australia to become involved in United States contingency planning for global war. The presence of the joint facilities, together with the access that we provide to visits by United States warships and the staging through of Australia of B-52 bombers, are a sufficient tangible contribution to the Alliance.’ These contributions are not involvement? That is not how the USSR views the matter: they are the reported sole �34 basis of USSR nuclear targetting of Australia (see Dibb. SS p.13). global stance is left essentially to the USA. And Australia's Amazingly, in the Strategic Basis Papers (SB), Australia criticizes New Zealand because ‘it has still developed no policy for national defence and tends to look to ... the US as its primary source of defence guidance’ (p.29). Note that C3I abbreviates the mouthful, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. 4. See Sharp, p.l46ff. An Australian policy should moreover fit with the genuine needs and shared aspirations of local people - to the extent, presumably, that these are commendable; again the presupposed value framework is critical. 5. Thus e.g. Gray (p.17) on the Reagan Administration’s ‘foolhardy brief willingness to talk publicly about nuclear strategy’, and his distain for public involvement or input. There is some concern, especially among neo-conservatives, about US defence strategies being ‘undermined by well-meaning persons who believe they are helping the cause of peace’ (Bell p.10; similarly Gray). Even those not so far right support partial information releases which maintain public confidence; e.g. Dibb on ‘the release of a generalised statement about ;the] functions of the US bases in Australia ... to give Australians more confidence about their crucial contribution to the Allied cause’ (ISA, p.166). ‘Our defence policy-making process is probably more “closed” than that of any other advanced Western democracy’ according to Langtry and Ball (p.608), who contend that ‘the public needs to be involved much more in our defence planning and operations'. For a justified critique of public exclusion and leave-it-to-the-experts approaches, see B. Martin; also Sharp. 6. The paper was drafted in mid-1985. 7. For those amassing evidence that Australia falls into the inexact class of client states, the following Australian contribution is noteworthy: ‘The US prefers to act as a member of a group, and a contribution by Australia can also assist in demonstrating to Congressional and public opinion that the objectives sought are significant enough to attract allied support’ (SB, p.28) 8. As to DI and arms control, see, e.g. Mack PR and Gray. As to D2, ‘USA has now an announced first-strike nuclear targeting policy’ technologically reinforced, Hayes, p.4; and see also Mack AC, p.111. The goal of the Reagan administration is superiority (a conveniently ambiguous term). Thus e.g. Gray (p.32): ‘it is of course essential that the United States modernize its offensive forces so as to render the Soviet Union genuinely offensive-counterforce incompetent.’ 9. On the major changes in American policy, see e.g. Gray p.118 ff. Though America is now said to have a ‘new national security concept of which SDI is the centerpiece’ it may still lack an ‘arms control policy’ (Gray, p.25,pll). Not only arms control, but American commitment to the security of allies, remain at least decidedly cloudy matters. Thus it is of little avail to contend that Australia does have a coherent secondorder global policy, namely the (discreditable) one of following prevailing American policy. For the US lacks a first-order policy which is sufficiently clear in relevant respects. The American direction of Australian policy had better be away from too much public exposure because Australians, no more than New Zealanders, mostly do not like being pushed around, even by Americans. �35 10. Thus we can avoid the important debate as to whether, and to what extent, deterrence remains part of US global “defence” policy (though it certainly remains part of the policy sold to the American public). As to the philosophical significance of the debate, see Gay, p.l29ff. and Benn. 11. The common-interest theme is often traced to (partly self-interested) American action in the Pacific in World War II. Curiously Australia’s interests are are now said also to converge with those of Japan, but to be diametrically opposed to those of the USSR (despite increasing trade). 12. Nor, though this is a longer story, does Australian culture by any means coincide with American: see CPD. Thus a uniform treatment is entirely inappropriate. Similarly, a single overarching treatment for a monolithic West is thoroughly inadequate: see further below in the text. 13. Australian planning should be looking at strategic models (game-theoretic and other) which include Australia. For, as argued below, abandoning the uniformity assumption of the monolithic West, of the West as one parish, makes significant differences to the results yielded. 14. As Cock goes on: ‘These basic issues increasingly become lost in the array of consumer choices’. 15. ‘The serf societies - more or less willingly - accept the status of “allies”, i.e. protection with rights and duties as in feudal societies. They become client countries’ (Galtung, p.169). 16. So-called by Mack PC. But the formulation presented follows G. Davidson’s more satisfactory account in Canberra Times, Wednesday, May 8, 1985, p.2. Mack considers that what amounts to the elitist case is the ‘altogether more sophisticated argument [which] holds sway ... in government’ (p.l, italics added)! 17. The “Asian hordes” derive from one of the less spoken about successors to the Yellow Peril, from the immediate past days of the Asian communist threat, the Domino theory, and White Australia. 18. As Stephenson argued, less fortunately, 20 years ago. Even when around World War II Japan, did have interest in access to strategic raw materials, the Japanese High Command decided against invading Australia because of the difficulty of dealing with the people - a point of much importance. 19. Of course, such military expenditure is also encouraged by economic forces, e.g. like much Third World hard currency expenditure it helps the American economy along a bit. 20. Heilbroner has traced some of the economic components and consequences of what, with excess exaggeration and insufficient irony, he calls ‘the rise and subsequent fall of the American imperium’ (p.52): it hasn’t fallen that far yet. ‘Empires have always been expensive and the American empire was no exception. ... The sheer military cost ... for the United States alone ... is roughly ten percent of ... GNP for the last 25 years ($2 x 10) in 1972 dollars)’. American imperial spending supplemented by other capitalist countries fueled inflation, enhanced poverty, etc., and was complements by, what it was represented as required by, counterexpenditure and efforts by the USSR. �36 ‘The establishment of an American hegemony [consisted and: resulted not just in very large military expenditures, but in the rapid build-up of American capital investments abroad. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of American-owned plant and equipment abroad leaped from $12 billion to $78 billion’ (p.54). A result of the expenditure abroad was a serious balance of payments problem (negative “capital flows” and balances), and a growing accumulation of IOUs. On this sort of basis, Heilbroner speculates that ‘the mere operations of the American imperium by itself - deemed of such critical importance to preserve the peace and security of the capitalist world - was in all likelihood a sufficient condition for the globalisation of the inflationary phenomena’ (p.57 with insert from p.56). According to Heilbroner, ‘Long before the Vietnam debacle, it was clear that American arms could not prevent the rise of revolutionary governments in the under-developed world’ (p.57). But really very little evidence of collapse is presented by Heilbroner; and seemingly there is little. What there is more substantial evidence for is the marked decline of the American imperium in the period (1973-8) concerned. One piece of evidence is the sharp decline in America’s share of World GDP, shown in the following table of select leading national economies: SHARE OF WORLD GDP (%) POPULATION SHARE COUNTRY RANK 1968 1975 1984 (1984 est) USA 1 35.0 24.3 25.0 5.2 USSR 2 11.1 11.0 13.8 6.2 JAPAN 3 5.2 8.0 9.5 2.7 GERMANY FDR 4 5.1 6.7 5.7 1.5 FRANCE 5 4.6 5.4 CHINA 6 2.9 4.8 4.3 22.6 UK 8 2.8 2.8 2.3 1.3 4.4 1.3 INDIA 12 1.3 1.5 1.1 15.1 AUSTRALIA 15 1.1 1.4 1.0 0.3 �37 The table should also make it clear that if the USA cannot sustain a grand empire, nor can the USSR. A totalitarian Pax Sovietica is even less likely than a capitalistic Pax American was. 21. Although, so the documents continue, ‘neighbourhood contingencies .... are at present assessed as impossible’! The theme that the USA affords no sure guarantee of Australian defence is reiterated in Langtry and Bell, e.g. p.608. They go on there to outline the major points that reliance upon the US has distorted Australian arrangements (with forces better equipped to fight alongside the Americans in Asia than on their own in defending Australia) and has led to neglect of the regional priorities, ‘to defence planning which at least would recently paid little attention to the direct defence of our continent and the protection of our remote communities’ (p.608). 22. The French, who operate a global network second only to the Americans and more extensive than the Russians, with many forces in the Pacific region, have never been seriously considered. Yet in certain significant respects French social and cultural arrangements are closer to Antipodean ones than American arrangements are. In these days of technological warfare, the post-Waterloo loss record of the French should not be given too much weight; we don’t after all look very hard at the American record of defeats and incompetence. Etc. 23. If Australia is not likely to be threatened there is no real deterrence advantage because nothing to deter. Other advantages of the ANZUS alliance such as access to high-level intelligence are not only dubious (see PC, D. Martin), but not always guaranteed by the alliance as the blackout of New Zealand shows. 24. Soviet activity is undoubtedly perceived rather differently by American administrations than Antipodean ones. ‘An agressive, treacherous, ruthlessly self-interested, expansionist increasingly powerful, and hence increasingly threatening state - that is the image of the Soviet Union in America. It is the image which has legitimised the strategic modernation and Star Wars programs’ (to adopt Mack ST, pl). To see that this is indeed the intellectually shoddy route by which these grand and dangerous programs are justified, it is enough to work through fundamentalist sources, such as Gray. It is almost as if Americans had projected some of their own occasionally-manifested worst features into the giant enemy. 25. After some considerable reconstruction, that is. For the argument, curiously referred as that of “central balance” in newspaper-level publications of academics (e.g. Catley, Bell), is never presented in requisite detail - which is one reason why it has proved hard to criticise and refute. 26. As well both the premiss and its usual substitutes are false (see MF). The type of argument exhibited is a good example of prevalent Australian consequentialist thinking. A parallel argument, enjoying unwarranted popularity, runs: We might as well sell uranium (e.g. to France), because if we don’t someone else will - as if motives counted morally for nothing. 27. See also the discussion of Bell’s claims in D. Martin and in Mack PC. 28. Since the New Zealand restrictions on nuclear ships, ‘the Soviet media has been full of gloating references to the prospect of the collapse of the ANZUS treaty’ according to Dibb (SS, p.14). Given the unimportance of the Antipodes to Soviet interests (as Dibb �38 himself explains), Dibb is surely exaggerating, at least, when he later claims that ‘the prospect of the breakup of the AN ZUS treaty would be of enormous benefit to the USSR’s world-wide interests’ (SS p.31). Soviet support for Antipodean independence and for ‘a real nuclear weapon-free zones' in the South Pacific has its disconcerting elements (‘with friends like that ...’); but luckily the quality of ideas does not depend essentially on their sources and supporters. 29. As WPI serves to show. In a different context, Bell objects to Australian free-loading ‘on other people’s risks and burdens. That has certainly not been our tradition, and I hope it will not become so, since it is morally quite indefensible’ (p.7). Not so: bludging, for instance, is a well-established, if disapproved of, part of the tradition; and in some cases it is morally in order. However, free-riding is not being proposed merely for self interested reasons, e.g. to remove the present risks of nuclear targetting; it is being proposed with a view to altering the two great alliance structures that at present dominate international politics. Bell’s objection to such a course is that it ‘would on the one hand tend to increase the tendency of the superpowers to unilateralism, and on the other hand tend to induce many of the minor powers in question (including Australia) to consider acquiring nuclear capacity’ (p.7). The second alternative neglects the non­ proliferation treaty, to which Australia is a signatory; the first appears to assume erroneously that friendly relations with America are foregone; both are pretty minor considerations (and both can be dealt with in other negotiated ways) compared with the major problem of nuclear war. 30. The less than perspicuous symbolism is that used in Hardin (CA, p.20, p.39), but with agents’ costs or contributions, C, duly agent relativized. Hardin misleadingly treats C as a fixed parameter, thus strictly falsifying the tautology. 31. Thus Hardin who (in CA) claims to ‘demonstrate the equivalence of the logic of collective action and the Prisoners’ Dilemma’ (p.4) The demonstration is given on p.25ff. 32. But of course the two types of dilemma interconnect. 33. Even so, significant change in USA looks unlikely. Present arrangements suit not only the American corporate-administrative power elite, which can direct public opinion through its control of the main communications media, but many other fat-cat Americans, rather well. The polarisation of the world into two camps increases US control of the larger and far wealthier camp, yet scarcely reduces US trade or markets. While it does limit the global coverage of US business and multinationals, and somewhat restricts the transfer of other regions’ surplus value to the USA, it ensures the much greater advantage of being able to maintain the US domestic political economy on a military basis. The US and the USSR not only dance together; they were made for each other. Abroad US hegemony is maintained through a series of alliances and economic control strategies. Particularly ominous for the South Pacific are the Trilateral and Pacific Rim arrangements (which, with much local assistance, are helping to send Australia on its present economic trajectory). When advice or persuasion directed at allies and client states fail, economic measures can be resorted to (capital outflows, for instance, being a highly effective mechanism, “aid” a lesser device). For the most part, the imperial war machine can remain in the background. At home updated and improved imperial measures also work well. The mass consumerist society affords a rich and diverting selection of bread (much of it again imported) for a majority of Americans; television �39 and its entertainment variants offer a constant diet of circuses. For passive middle mainstream America, the vast police and security network remains a largely background and even unnoticed phenomenon; what is seen is even welcomed as a necessary shield from that other, dangerous, minority America. American social, educational and media management of opinion is obviously successful. Of present relevance, most Americans have been convinced that unilateral disarmament would be unAmerican. Thus the American administration, being hedged in by opinion they have helped to generate, cannot move in any such directions. For, given popular opinion, it would of course be politically disastrous, as well as undemojl’cratic! In the USSR, where political control is exercised to a much greater extent through overt power, present change of substance appears even less likely. 34. More of the negative enterprise is attempted elsewhere, e.g. a critique of the supposed strait-jacket of human nature is begun in CPD. From Plato through Hegel and into contemporary times it has been erroneously supposed that war, like aggression, is part of human nature, that war is a permanent (and perhaps even desirable) condition of human and social existence. For a refutation, see e.g. Trainer and Waite. 35. As observed by B. Martin, who uses this important form of argument for institutional change to get this thick book started (pp.12-13). 36. The swarm includes some anomalies, such as that somewhat tarnished hero of deep ecology, Spinoza: see e.g. Northedge. 37. Perhaps Kant had some such scenario in view in his theme that peace is empirically possible, which he coupled with his striking claim that peace is morally and rationally imperative. The latter claim, running in direct opposition to the long line of bellicose philosophers, really relies on the correct, but controversial, assumption that states are subject to the same moral relations as individual persons. Both then have an obligation to seek peace derived from forms of the categorial morality, notably from rational autonomy, the universality of maxims, and the ultimate value of persons (or, yet more chauvinistically, of humanity). 38. Veblen argued against the State on the basis that ‘governmental establishments and ... powers ... are derived from feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which in turn, are of a predatory origin and of an irresponsible character’ (p.9), however the Christianfeudal origin of the State provided only one - and a coersive - evolutionary pattern of organisation (pp. 12-13), a pattern much influenced moreover by schemes of intellectuals. Other patterns remain feasible. 39. There are now theoretical arguments for Kant’s claim, as well as practical arguments of an inductive sort. 40. Such is also the new message from America: for the peace movement to get through to the administration, American democracy must be overhauled and revitalised, capitalist democracy superseded by true democracy or “republicanism” (see especially Cohen and Rogers, and earlier Chomsky). But the message, like the US peace movements’ very limited demands for peace, leaves the State, as the bringer of wars, and main source of violence essentially intact; the structural changes suggested, which will be slow to achieve, are much too narrowly conceived. 41. My thanks for information to Andrew Mack and David Bennett, and for comments to �Grover Foley and Russell Hardin. �REFERENCES G. H. Andrewartha and L.C. Birch, The Ecological Web, University of Chicago Press, 1984. W.R. Ashby, Design for a Brain, Second edition, Wiley, New York, 1960. S.Beer, Designing Freedom, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto, 1974. C. Bell, ‘The case against neutrality’, Current Affairs Bulletin 61(4) (1984) 4-10. S.I. Benn, ‘Deterrence or appeasement? or, On trying to be rational about nuclear war’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 1(1984) 5-19. F. Capra and C. Spretnak, Green Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1984. R. Catley, ‘Along with the Bomb ...’ (Review of D. Martin), The Weekend Australian Magazine, 7-8 April, 1984. N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1979. P. Cock, Alternative Australia, Quartet Books, Melbourne, 1979. J. Cohen and J. Rogers, On Democracy, Penguin, New York, 1984. P. Dibb (as reported) ‘Defence Planning “lacks coherence” - researcher’, ANU Reporter, 1983. P. Dibb, ‘Issues in Australian defence’, Australian Outlook 37 (1983) 160-166; referred to as IAD. P. Dibb, ‘Soviet strategy towards Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’ paper prepared for Soviet Strategy Against Asia converence, Tokyo, November 1984; referred to as SS. P. Dibb, Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities, Report to the Minister of Defence, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986; edited text also published in The Canberra Times, 4 June 1986, pp.16-18; referred to as the Dibb Review. P. and A. Erlich, Population, Resources, Environment, Second edition, Freeman, San Francisco, 1976. H. Feith,‘Richard Falk, World order radical’, Peace Studies 24 (1985) 24-5. J. Galtung, There are Alternatives, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1984. W.C. Gay, ‘Myths about nuclear war: misconceptions in public beliefs and governmental plans’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 9(1982) 117-144. A. Gilbert, ‘The state and nature in Australia’, Australian Cultural History 1981 (ed. S. Goldberg and F.B. Smith), Canberra, 1982, pp.9-28. �42 C.S. Gray, ‘The Reagan administration and arms control’, paper presented at The Future of Arms Control Conference, Canberra. August 1985. R. Hardin, Collective Action, Resources for the Future, Washington, 1982; referred to as CA. R. Hardin, ‘Unilateral versus mutual disarmament’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12(1983) 236-254. M.D. Hayes, ‘Defending the sunburnt country’, Chain Reaction 33(August-September 1983) 11-17. R.L. Heilbroner, Beyond Boom and Bust, Norton, New York, 1978. I. Kant, Perpetual Peace (trans, and introd. M. Campbell Smith), Swan Sonnerschein, London, 1903 (first published 1795). J. O. Langtry and D Ball (eds), A Vunerable Country, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1986. A. Mack, ‘Farewell to Arms Controls’, Peace Research 9(1984) 9ff.; referred to as PR. A. Mack, ‘The pros and cons of ANZUS’, Fabian ANZUS Conference, Lome, 4-5 May 1985; referred to as PC. A. Mack, ‘Arms control, disarmament and the concept of defensive defence’, Disarmament 8(3)(1984) 109-119; referred to as AC. A. Mack, ‘The Soviet threat thesis: perceptions, capabilities and interests’ typescript, Canberra, May 1985; referred to as ST. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. B. Martin, Armed Neutrality for Australia, Drummond Books, Melbourne, 1984. F.S. Northedge, ‘Peace, war and philosophy’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed P. Edwards), Volume 6, Macmillan, New York, 1967, 63-67. M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965. P. Pettit, ‘Free riding and foul dealing’, Journal of Philosophy, to appear, J.J. Rousseau, A Project for Perpetual Peace (trans. E.M. Nuttal), London, 1927 (first Published 1761). R. Routley, ‘On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political fall out’, Discussion papers in Environmental philosophy #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984. R. Routley, ‘Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 3/4(1984) 19-34; referred to as MF. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984; referred to as MD. �43 R. Sharp (ed.), Apocalypse No. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1984. P.R. Stephenson, The Foundations of Culture, W.J. Miles, Sydney, 1936. R. Sylvan, ‘Culture and the roots of political divergence’, typescript, Canberra, 1985; referred to as CPD. M. Taylor and H. Ward, "Chickens, whales, and bumpy goods: alternative models of public­ goods provision’, Political Studies 30(1982) 350-370. T. Trainer and H. Waite, ‘Culture and the production of aggression’, in Sharp, ep.cit, 205-226. The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy, leaked extracts published in the National Times, March 30-April 5, 1984, 23-30; referred to as SB. Threats to Australian Security, Parliamentary Joint Committee for Foreign Affairs and Defence, Australian Government Printer, Canberra; referred to as TAS. T. Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, Viking Press, New York, 1945 (first published 1917). � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE PHILOSOPHY: Further investigations of the nonexistent. ‘The opinions of philosophers, with regard to the conditions of the possibility of a public peace, shall be taken into consideration by states armed for war’ (Kant, ‘A [the only!] secret article for perpetual peace’, p.158 - a surprising article, flattering no doubt to philosophers, but neglecting their dominant bellicose tradition). A defence philosophy is much more than a defence policy, just as a philosophy of technology comprises much more than a technology policy. A policy can be given merely by a list of directives as to what do in various circumstances; even at its best it need only involve practical wisdom. By contrast, a philosophy goes deeper and requires theoretical wisdom, integration of the policy into a theoretical setting, which looks, among other things, at the central arguments and key concepts involved: here, security, stability, control, protection, defence, interests, national interests, intelligence, war, etc. Defence philosophy is thus a branch of political and social philosophy, and has long been treated as such, though under such more familiar and honest headings as “of war” and “of peace”. Like most parts of philosophy, it can be applied, for instance in shaping policies, in regional ways among others. A defence philosophy should integrate appropriate defence arrangements and approaches to war and peace, not merely or superficially into “foreign policy” or assumed “international relations”, but into the way and intended way of life of a country, both into on-going culture and into the intended or planned cultural arrangements. A defence policy typically takes prevailing socio-political arrangements and power structures for granted; a defence philosophy again penetrates deeper, questioning or rejecting features of these structures, enquiring as to the merits of things and institutions of which defence is planned, asking what sort of society should be defended by what sort of appropriate methods and at what lengths. What, for instance, is Australia, what are Australians, defending, concerned to defend, aiming to defend? Here in Australia? In the region? Abroad? How much of what others have, or what we have, is worth defending, preserving? Does Randwick Racecourse, or Pine Gap, merit defending? Would anyone stage a last stand for Oaks Estate, one of Canberra’s dreariest suburbs? If the Indonesians made a lightning strike in Australia just to remove Bjelke-Petersen,1 should we resist? Few of the necessary prerequisites have been adequately thought about in Australia, where unplanned muddling through from immediate problem to immediate problem - reactive contingency “planning”, if you want to be generous - is the main style of political life , and, along with the traditional political game of “follow the leader”, of defence planning. Australia 2 does not yet have a defence philosophy. Some of its critical philosophers could help to supply it with the rudiments of one or more, and to inject some depth into broader defence theorizing. What follows is intended as a modest beginning: much of what is attempted, unearthing arguments and assumptions, followed by analysis and criticism, and some elaboration of alternative principles, falls squarely within the domains both of applied philosophy and traditional philosophical practice. 1. Australia’s inappropriate. defence “policy”: incoherent, obsolescent Australia seems to lack even a clear and coherent defence policy. American, This is a commonplace charge (made even by friends of Defence, interested in obtaining extra public funding for defence and elements of C3I).^ The reasons concern not merely the major unsolved issues of exactly what is being defended, what things and objects and what interests, and whose, what freedoms and values, and what role American defence facilities in Australia are supposed to have in this. They concern the status of present treaty arrangements, such as the “cornerstone”/“millstone” ANZUS treaty, signed between Australia, New Zealand and the US, now in disarray (still ’‘maintained” by New Zealand, whom the US has unilaterally announced expelled), and of subsequent associated memoranda of understanding (some secret, involving the local storage of US nuclear weapons, entry of American personnel, etc.). They also concern a range of more detailed lucunae such as: lack of clearly-defined priorities on what needs defending and how it is to be accomplished; doubtful capacity of present defence forces to handle low-level contingencies in and to the north of Australia and in maritime zones; and unsatisfactory (or no) arrangements and planning for “defence-in-depth”, for civil defence and use of civil infrastructure, mobilisation, wartime administration, protection of key facilities and areas, and post-nuclear organization. And, equally damaging, if its policy makers do have a coherent policy it is nowhere satisfactorily revealed to the peoples of Australia.It is left to journalists and newspaper­ watching academics to winkle out what local defence installations may be for and to make various conjectures as to what the policy may be. Of course there are many administrators and policy makers who think that is the way it should be; the public should not be informed, but kept satisfied with some “generalised” statements.As to coherence, Australian policy makers have only recently found out that Australia has a (purely) regional defence role, not a global one. This they were told by the Americans in Washington in talks allegedly designed to clarify commitments under treaty arrangements with the USA. It thus begins to look as if Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is still as much determined abroad, by US policy makers, as it is locally in Australia. 3 Much circumstantial evidence can be assembled to confirm the claim that Australia’s vague defence policy can now be stamped Made in USA, as it used, before the last World War (and British abandonment), to be stamped Made in UK. For one thing, Australia has had a bipartisan defence policy, so it is claimed. That “policy” has however been essentially shaped by the Liberal party, which has governed most of the time (as senior partner in a coalition). But the Liberal party simply took over US arrangements for Australia (as planned in Washington for ANZUS) and still does. For instance, the latest package® from the Liberal Party “Defence and Foreign Policy Unit” consists largely of US Defence Department material packaged under a local cover. The Strategic Basis Papers, endorsed by the Labor Government, give virtually unqualified support to US military practices and to the American view of the global strategic situation, and commit Australia to supporting, without any due reservation, American positions in world forums.' The same dependent-policy conclusion can be reached by more devious arguments. regional defence role? When, for example, did Australia find out it had a After the Americans had found that they could no longer afford to police the world on their own and would have to delegate some of that role and offload some of the heavy associated costs, on reliable dogs-bodies; and also after Labor took some faltering steps towards developing a broader foreign more independent policy with some indigenous elements (Australian Minister Hayden was promptly flattened by US heavies such as Schultz). Australian defence and foreign policy copies American policy in main respects, but lags it. The Australian defence policy presented by the Labor government, to the extend that it is visible, is conservative; it coincides with older American defence policy, and diverges from the new (post-Reagan) American war policy. For Australian Labor defence policy supports what the American administration supposedly used to support, namely DI. Multilateral nuclear disarmament (within the framework of series of treaties and agreements), and D2. Deterrence in the interim, deterrence through mutual assured destruction (i.e. MAD). The presence of American military facilities in Australia is supposed to be justified in the framework of these assumptions. For they are to assist in making deterrence under D2 effective, and to provide verification for the arms reduction arrangements under DI (both stabilizing functions). There is much evidence indicating however that American policy makers have now abandoned both Dl and D2 and any serious attempts at nuclear arms control8. Certainly they have moved on to the following highly destabilizing doctrines: Nuclear war-fighting, Limited nuclear wars, and Star-Wars (i.e. Strategic Defense Initiative). While this American war policy may well be accepted by the next Liberal coalition government, all of these military doctrines are explicitly rejected by the 1985 Labor government. Since the American “joint” facilities in Australia also facilitate the rejected 4 objectives, the problems concerning these dubious facilities are much aggravated. The Government’s approach concerning them - withholding information concerning the full range of their functions, and particularly their war-fighting roles from parliament and the public - is certainly unsatisfactory, as several of its members realise; and as a result the Government appear in not atypical disarray, further grist for the incoherence theme. If there is perhaps a coherent Australian global defence approach somewhere away from public exposure, it is most likely then an old abandoned American policy.9 But in that case it certainly lacks - what it in any case appears to lack - justification. For Australia, in supporting US defence policy and activity, for instance in world forums, is supporting present offensive American policy, not what it reputedly adheres to, deterrence (through MAD). The point holds good whether or not American global policy still includes such deterrence as a proper part10; for it certainly involves other very different and dubious strategies. The commonplace, but increasingly feeble, justification given for Australian’s tagging along after America is that Australian interests are the same as American11. American interests by no means coincide with Australian . However Consider, for instance, such matters as enriching Americans, making conditions favourable for American business, promoting Americans and things American. Consider, differently, American practices in Latin America, from undercutting Allende’s government in Chile to its practices against Nicaragua, to its extensive export of arms and violent methods, there and elsewhere in the world. Thus America, like Russia, is busy meddling in Africa, but ‘Australian security interests are not directly involved’ (SB, p.24). Consider, differently again, escalation of the nuclear arms race. Or consider American strategic planning, and all the game- and decision- theoretic models which concern just USA and its adversary USSR, perhaps occasionally adding Europe as part of the monolithic West, but rarely or never considering the Southern Hemisphere - so that either Australia is part of America as Poland may be of Russia or it is nothing. Or consider American interests not merely in Soviet and communist containment, but in containing socialism such as might (under more auspicious conditions) flourish in Australia. An American policy answering to American interests is accordingly inappropriate for Australia, inappropriate for Antipodean socialism. Australians should do their own defence thinking and work out a policy appropriate for Australia. (That applies also to Australian political representatives, who should stop parroting implausible American views and begin developing some genuinely local and original ones.) Should Australia be tagging along after the Americans in support of installation of their style of free-enterprise capitalism everywhere feasible (i.e. that the state socialists don’t already heavily control)? What they quite seriously call ‘keeping the free world free’? Of 5 course freedom has, in this sort of context, multiple meanings and associations (as well as multiple inconsistencies, appearing information” and the like). overtly in subsidized “free trade”, selective “free Significant parts of what mainstream American culture admits under the freedom umbrella, mainstream Australian culture would exclude: for instance, active opposition to and undermining of social and socialist programs and governments, bullying of small countries that impose barriers to US business or military practices (all part of “free enterprise”), etc. What of those intangible freedoms the cultures supposedly agree about, civil liberties, freedom to information, to live and work where one chooses, to travel, and so on? These are certainly important freedoms, better upheld in some parts of the unaligned West (e.g. Sweden, Switzerland) than in most parts of the Eastern Block. But such freedoms, which run counter to dependent policies, hardly require defence subservience. influenced state practices are fast reducing freedom. Moreover, military- Many of the older freedoms have vanished this century, such as freedom to travel, to work and live abroad, etc.; now one requires permits, licences, passports, ... . And many more former freedoms are being or have been eroded; soon it will be identity documents, restricted zones, ID cards, as already in parts of the “free West”. Now nuclearism in Europe ‘is devouring the very freedom it is said to protect: [the Greens] point to the new laws proposed in 1983 designed to keep citizens from assembling to protest deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles’ (Capra and Spretnak, pp.58-9). Further structural changes required for the security of the state, imcompatible with democratic freedoms, include ‘secrecy, lack of commentability, permanent emergency, concentration of authority, peacetime militarism, extensive apparatus of state intelligence and police’ (Falk, in Feith p.24). Nuclearism is not a smart strategy to preserve remaining freedoms. 2. Inherited other-reliance, and the populist and elitist cases for patronage and subservience. Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is furthermore inherited rather than regularly (re)thought through. But that procedure - essentially the legal method of precedence, whatever its very limited satisfactoriness in legalistic decision making - is defective when applied in politics or to defence, especially where immediate independent action is required. For precedence methods are extraordinarily slow, as well as characteristically conservative, and as in defence exclude significant and rather urgent alternatives. The unsatisfactory decision-making practices to be revealed in the case of defence are by no means restricted to defence but are typical of the kind of advanced age capitalism Australia operates under, or rather labours under, down under. In setting down those 4. 6 features of aged capitalism (‘of the Corporate State') that the New Left and Alternative Australia movements were reacting against, Cock neatly summed up these practices: Decisions were made from the top and on the basis of vested political interests, rather than by rational goals and means that served public interests. The people were rarely consulted effectively before a decision and often only partially informed afterwards. Planning was based on a mere extension of the present. ... activists felt they were given little opportunity to choose how they lived or worked. The availability of space, time, trees and air was also determined by others ... (p.18 italics added).14 As it was and is with one’s defence, military and civil, so it is with the matter of whether one lives in a nuclear target zone or not, and so on (though immigration policy, uranium and woodchip export policies, etc.) In these areas planning remains top-down, with at best consultative elements. No real choices are offered to people. A major inherited assumption is that of other reliance, that Australia’s defence depends on other more powerful allies. That ally was firstly Britain, and since World War II America; but in any event the assumption is that to be safe Australia needs a powerful patron, a protector. A corollary is that Australia adopts a suitably submissive relation to its patron, making expected concessions. And for the most part it has; however such a defence insurance policy does not come cheap.15 It costs not only money and resources, but quality of life, freedom and independence. The assumption of other-reliance is however unsound, for several reasons. Most important, it characteristically depends upon the following themes, all of which lack solid foundation: 1. Australia is threatened - or at least 1A. Australia is likely to be threatened in the near future. 2. Australia cannot defend itself. 3. Australia can however depend upon its patron (or ally), i.e. upon the USA. These three themes in fact make up what has been called the populist case for the ANZUS alliance.16 It is very different from the elitist case for ANZUS, said to hold sway with the Australian government, which, while insisting upon premiss 3, essentially rejects 1 and 2 and claims instead 4. Australian has a vital interest in global stability. 5. Global stability is under threat (constantly) by an expansionist Soviet Union. 6. Only USA can contain the Soviet threat and hold the global balance. Some of techniques the US deploys for holding global balance operate through dependent states and a network of alliances like ANZUS. But obviously further premisses are required to reach the intended conclusions that Australia should be participating in any such alliance, and what is more, hosting US defence facilities and exercises. A first such premise is the no-shirking theme, that Australia should be contributing its part to “holding the balance’’ (cf. Bell). Even this first further step is pretty shaky; as we shall see, one shaky step in a rather ramshackle case, since premisses 5 and 6 are decidedly dubious (and 4 may involve equivocation). For it can be plausibly argued that Australia’s vital interests are not guaranteed by US techniques, which threaten to upset the whole applecart, and can be obtained by alternative more satisfactory means outside of such soft alliances as ANZUS. In any case, it is unclear that local contributions enhance global (nuclear) stability (see e.g. Mack and Davidson). But first, there is more pernicious regionalist version of the elitist position to be considered, what might be called the offshore elitist position. This position grants 2A*. Australia can defend itself against regional threats, and can look after itself regionally. But it does not (as indeed other qualified elitist positions may not) grant 1A. What the offshore position insists upon is 1AI*. Australia’s interests could be threatened in the near future. Since these interests - perhaps concerned with trade, Australian companies or Australians abroad, or whatever - may have little or nothing to do with internal Australian security, this premiss represents an extremely important shift (a shift not unrelated to the inverse bureaucratic shift from war to defence). It goes further than what has been called forward defence. In extended form the offshore position does call for some sort of global policeman or police force ready to intervene whenever a “free port” anywhere looks like closing its doors. Part of the difficulty in getting to grips with the elitist position is that it tends to slide through to the offshore position (by way of now evident immediate positions). The arguments against both the populist and elitist cases, and indeed against virtually all of themes 1 through 7 are sufficiently familiar to justify but a fairly brief outline of some of the main points involved. Of course just a couple of defections from themes 1 through 7 would serve logically defeat both cases, but there have been some interesting repair attempts, designed to float the arguments on diminished premisses. 3. The brief against the popular populist case; the need for new directions. Contra 1 and 1A. While Australia is not at present under notice of threat, veiled threat or harassment from abroad, a majority of its population appears to believe that it is. As the popular view is not the informed, administrative, or parliamentary view, it is worth inquiring 8 why the popular view persists, as the opinion polls reveal it has. The populace has been deliberately kept in the dark (or even misinformed), because this suits bipartisan government purposes. Although both main Australian political parties are well enough aware that the main assumptions underlying the populist case are false, the reasons for which they support the American alliance (e.g. those of the elitist case) are much more difficult to sell to the public. Accordingly the parties and Government have no political interest in undermining the unsound populist case. In particular they have gone out of their way not to cast doubt upon the connected assumption that US is a reliable guarantor against all threats. Thus long-standing Australian psychological insecurity about security has been allowed to stand, and has not been assuaged by any requisite informational and educational effort. In particular, older attitudes to Asia persist not far below the surface of popular Australia: fear, mistrust and xenophobia, patched over by a pragmatic attachment to trade and tourism. This misplaced insecurity is fuelled by popular misconceptions of Australia and its place in the world: metaphorically, that Australia is a luscious plum ripe for Eastern picking, instead of the Asians view that Australia, so far as they are aware of it at all, is a remote desiccated uncouth place perhaps good for some trade and investment. Or, to get towards more concrete assumptions, Australians apparently tend to their view country as affluent but underpopulated, resource rich but largely defenceless; yet not far to the north are Asian hordes who are impoverished, resource poor, and so on . Such a view is seriously out of touch with reality. Parts of Asia are now at least as affluent (on conventional economic indicators) as Australia. They do not see themselves as overpopulated, in a way that calls for mass exodus; and in those areas which are as overpopulated as Europe, such as Java, bribes and force are required to move people on transmigration programs to relatively unoccupied parts of the Indonesian empire. So far as they require them, they can purchase Australian resources - which are not unique - much more easily and cheaply (because they even carry significant local subsidies) than they could obtain • them by seizure. 1s For these sorts of reasons, and because Australia itself poses no threat, no other state has a genuine interest in attempting to invade Australia. As it is for interests, so it is for capabilities. No regional power has the capacity to launch a successful invasion of Australia, or is likely to have such a capacity in the near future. As the joint Parliamentary Committee concluded, Currently only the United States would have the physical capacity to launch a full scale invasion of Australia, and it clearly lacks any motive to do so (TAS, p.94). 9 As the report also stated, quoting Synnot (former Chief of Defence Staff), ... to raise the sort of force which would be required for a mass invasion of Australia could not possibly be done in under five years by other than the superpowers (TAS). But neither superpower is at all likely to expend effort or resources to such an end. An obvious naive question which at once arises is: Why bother then with much defence? (A later question to entertain is: why not be a free-rider on collectively provided global security, such as it is?) Why not proceed forthwith to unilateral disarmament? Mack for one, having reassembled the now-standard telling case that Australia is not threatened ‘now or for the foreseeable future’, and so having broken the populist argument, is confronted by the awkward option of unilateral disarmament for Australia. He stages a hasty retreat, points to the dependence of premisses 1 and 1A on premiss 2, and proceeds to claim that ‘the populist case for ANZUS is sustained’ even without premisses 1 and 1A. It is however a decidedly problematic retreat. While it is true that the arguments against 1 and 1A may sometimes take it for granted that Australia can look after itself to some extend, put up some resistance, it is far from clear that they depend essentially on assumptions approximating premiss 2. Consider the no­ interests argument, which appears decisive given the (estimated) very limited invasion capabilities of potential invaders. The main consideration adduced appears to depend in no essential way, indeed in no obvious way at all, on Australia’s dynamic fighting forces. Australian mineral resources, to repeat one of the more sensitive examples involved, can be obtained more readily and cheaply by trade methods than military ones. What all this seems to show is that a rather minimal streamlined force, if any, would presently meet Australia’s military requirements. It is not as if Australia is ‘entirely defenceless’ without a conventional military force, like a babe-in-arms. The whole apparatus of nonmilitary defence is available on a continent well suited to its use, though lacking a population trained in its techniques. But even without requisite popular training in defence methods, Australia would be a difficult place to govern, Australians a difficult lot to subjugate. It was such features of the Australian character that deterred the Japanese on a previous occasion “If the invasion is attempted, the Australians, in view of their national character, would resist to the end. Also, because the geographical conditions of Australia present numerous difficulties in a military sense, it is apparent that a military venture in that country would be a difficult one” (TAS, p.62). The points still hold good, and could be strengthened. There are several parts to any such 10 program of nonmilitary defence: making it happen, and putting it abroad (ideally with dinkum Australian exaggeration) that it has happened. To the issue of alternative defence we are bound to return. For now, when Australia is not threatened, is a good occasion to reconsider, and begin to adapt, defence arrangements. For example, it looks very much as if enormous sums, which could be valuably directed elsewhere, are being spent, largely to make many Australians feel secure.But a much more effective and inexpensive way to such results would be through requisite popular education and psychological therapy - with, if it were well done, much more satisfactory results, a more secure and better informed people. Contra 2. As a result of post-War developments in weapons systems and C3I capabilities, the military defence of Australia has become much easier. It comes down to enhancing, through new robust and reliable systems, the enormous strategic advantages Australia enjoys by virtue of geographical isolation. In principle, any maritime invading force can now be detected well in advance of arrival, through modern radar warning systems, and destroyed by precision guided munitions. And any invaders that did manage to gain a foothold on Australian soil would face severe logistic problems, and be subject to disproportionate responses from local defence. Standard discussions (as in Dibb, Mack) proceed to introduce a great deal of “Boys’ Own War Games” stuff concerning contemporary weapon and C3I systems; the essential point is that these could serve to turn Australia into a pretty unvulnerable armed fortress, and into an extremely difficult territory were the oceanic moat crossed and the fortress entered (see especially D. Martin). Under such armed neutrality and (differently) fortified Australia defence scenarios, even invasion from outside the region by an inimical world power could be resisted with reasonable prospect of success. There is no power at all likely to mount such an invasion; there is apparently (as noted above) only one power that could, that good ally the USA (reckoned however a likely invader by 6-7% of the Australian population!). Nonetheless the threat of a Soviet invasion is taken seriously not only by the larger populace but by committees of their elected representatives. But the Soviet military has never undertaken such a long-range massive force projection, is ill-equipped to do so, and lacks any plausible reason to try such a stunt (for details see, e.g., D. Martin; also SS, ST). The only credible Soviet threat to Australia is in the context of a superpower war, when American facilities in Australia and perhaps Australian cities, would be struck at by intercontinental missiles. While this would be bad enough, it is highly unlikely that it would be followed or accompanied by an invasion. Soviet forces are once again not sufficient, and not thought sufficient by the Soviets for that sort of diversion; they would be required elsewhere in a superpower war; and they would be devastated, unless USA is militarily even more incompetent than sometimes depicted. i. 11 Contra 3. What will be argued is not the negation of 3, that the Americans cannot be relied upon, but rather that 3 is dubious, and that it would be rash to place excess reliance on American protection. That being so, and other patrons being even less promising, Australia should look more to its own resources, as the American administration is kindly advising. Especially since the American “Vietnam debacle” and the fall of Saigon, things have changed in important ways which cast doubt on the reliability of American patronage. First, the relative economic and military strength of the USA has declined significantly. It no longer has such a large share of world product(ivity); as a connected matter of policy, US world warfighting aspirations have been reduced. Its ability to act as, and afford to be, global policeman has also markedly declined/ Secondly, the willingness of Americans to engage in remote foreign wars has correspondingly tumbled. Although the American administration includes more than enough hawks, to be sure, the people and Congress are not longer in a mood for gratuitous foreign adventures, especially when the fun may not appear to be in American interests. Since Vietnam, US opinion polls regularly show strong popular opposition to overseas military involvement. This “Vietnam syndrome” has served as a major constraint on US military policy and foreign involvement. An important manifestation of these changes is the Guam Doctrine, calling upon US regional allies to take primary responsibility for their own defence in regional conflicts. Another important outcome is Defense statements to the pointed effect that before US troops are committed abroad there must be reasonable assurance of Congressional and popular support (Weinberger, reported in PC p.14). As Mack comments, ‘such assurance is impossible to guarantee - especially for remote countries where no US vital national interests are at stake’. Certainly no more is assured under the ANZUS treaty which provides only that each signatory ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’ (article 4). All the treaty strictly requires is consultation; there is no undertaking or commitment. Isn’t the treaty backed up by informal verbal reassurances? None that are not undermined by others, in American administrative multiple-speak. Even the elite view is that Australia has to ‘work ... to maximize the prospect of US support’ and that the Americans cannot be counted upon. For ‘the threshold of direct US combat involvement could be quite high, and circumstances at the time could significantly limit US willingness or ability to help Australia in other ways?. ‘... we cannot rely upon US support in a defence emergency arising within our own neighbourhood’ (SB, pp.29-30). However a special case has been made for American reliability in Australia’s case - as 12 opposed to examples of American abandonment of earlier military undertakings (in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran) - on the basis of permanent friendship, common interests, and shared values and democratic traditions. There are two difficulties with this type of special pleading: first, as to the basis, and, second, as to the adequacy of such a basis in by-passing Congress, the American people, and slow constitutional processes. Historical evidence hardly sustains the adequacy of the basis in analogous cases. And here, as already indicated, the basis is shaky. For there is not a common culture shared by Australia and America: rather values diverge significantly on quite crucial issues. Even less are interests always common, as the matter of subsidised agricultural produce reveals, and as missile testing and nuclear ships issues in the South Pacific have recently confirmed. Interests diverged, for instance, when Australia toyed with opposing Indonesia’s claim to West Papua. So it is dubious at least that American interests would coincide with Australian in disputes or confrontation with Asian nations to the North, e.g. with Indonesia or Japan. Of course if the special case argument did hold water, Australia and America really were mates, then the treaty would be otiose. There was in fact no treaty in operation in 1942; but by then American interests in countering the Japanese were independently aroused. 4. Other-reliance and regional self-reliance A major problem with other-reliance for defence is then that it cannot be deemed entirely reliable, yet precisely here unreliability can hardly be tolerated. When the Indonesians are rolling into Brisbane it won’t do for Defense to call up with a message like that from local Services, "We can’t get there till tomorrow’’, or “until after Congress meets”, or “Sorry, Mate!”. More seriously, handing defence over to others means handing control of our lives over to others; and given nuclear defence, which too many Antipodean administrations have opted for, it quite likely means literally handing our lives over for many of us. Another problem of other-reliance is thus its adequacy. A further problem is its cost. In principle, if a State hires out its defence it would no doubt look, other things being equal, for the cheaper bidder - if, that is, defence is a commodity of a sort, like national shipping, meterological services, etc. The trouble with global defence is that the market is monopolistic, with currently only one supplier of the right complexion22, who accordingly can exact a very high price, and has - making the whole country a nuclear target and demanding substantial subservience. Similar points make part of the case, well-enough appreciated, for not trying to press defence, plainly a collective good, into a marketable commodity. When a country can supply its own defence, it therefore makes very good sense for it to do so, since it normally has a stronger interest in its own proper defence than most other parties. Should it also be cheaper in costs that matter, then self-reliance not just makes good sense but pays; other-reliance does not. But in that event, it surely does not need nuclear 13 patrons, or to farm out some of its defence. Such self-reliance undermines an important part of the older case based on other-reliance for alliances such as ANZUS. However newer bipartisan approaches to defence try to combine them (thus e.g. Australian minister Beazley as reported by Davidson) - approaches which thus begin to empty ANZUS of what little content it had, and remove much of the apparent point of such older alliances. Since the ANZUS arrangements contain no clear commitments beyond consultation but are merely vague articles of understanding, a simple course is of course to allow them to be emptied of content, so that the alliance, an expensive and outdated “insurance” policy, dies a natural death. It may however be death by seizure or convulsion should American defence facilities be closed or internationalised and passage of American nuclear equipped or powered transport be excluded from Australia. That would no doubt sacrifice the deterrence and other advantages the treaty supposedly affords , while making way for the greater advantages of friendly nonalignment, of no longer being a nuclear target, or so on. But self-reliance pure and simple is insufficient. The world does not consist of separable isolated pieces, as becomes increasingly evident. Most dramatically, Australia will not escape the effects of nuclear winter. The picture is much the same as for other dynamic subjects, such as plants which are not internally self-sufficient but depend crucially on their environment - and indeed as for States themselves. The question then is what form the additional holistic component of policy should take? Put this way, it is almost obvious that the appropriate move is not taking sides (as in a kids’ war game or tug-of-war game that is already set up) and doing one’s bit for confrontation. For that will not contribute to stability, to a proper holistic approach, but rather to sectionalism and fragmentation, and to bringing nuclear winter closer. Other-reliance and self-reliance typically present a false contrast, and certainly do with pure self-reliance - a false contrast like that of holism and partism (EE, p.223), and of dependence versus isolationism. In between lie a range of positions, one of which - favoured by a long line of peacefully-disposed philosophers from Rousseau and Kant onwards - might be called integrated reliance or federated reliance. The elitist case, insofar as it were to call for such reliance (e.g. in assumption 4), could hardly be faulted. But it doesn’t; and is satisfied with much less. Integration may reach only certain inadequate levels, the level of modern alliances and alignment, which are essentially coupled with opposition to an other side, e.g. the monolithic East (or West). It is into just this trap that elitist arguments fall. 14 5. The decline and fall of elitist arguments. Premisses 4 and 5 of the elitist argument turn around the crucial notion of stability, as related arguments revolve around that of security. But stability and security are value-laden terms, which are not cultural invariants. What stability comprehends in American administrative perception is very different from what highland villages take it to include. In each case a system is stable if it returns to a given stationary state under perturbations of sufficiently small magnitude. But both the relevant states and the stationary among them are relative to given frames of reference; for instance, what is stable at a macrolevel may well not be at a microlevel. As Trudeau has said of the superpowers, ‘they share a global perception according to which even remote events can threaten their interests or their associates’ (p.10) and disturb stability. But lesser states or regional people, not counting remote business or military interests as relevant, report no instability. Bureaucrats invariably view bombs as necessary to stability, and the nuclear fix as stability; by contrast, gentle people increasingly see bombs as tools of terrorism and as characteristically antithetical to peace. ad 4: Of course Australia has a vital interest in global stability and security: what sizeable nation does not? But the determinable motherhood interpretation (of italicised terms), while no doubt diplomatically convenient, conceals crucial differences, highly material to the argument. For one global stability means something different in USA from what it means in Costa Rica and likely what it intends in Australia. Certainly vital interests are different. America is interested in containing socialism (in Australia as elsewhere), and it tends, in more popular rhetoric at least, to equate containing socialism with containing communism and both with Soviet containment. A continental swing to socialism (or Non-Soviet communism) in Latin America, or in Africa, would upset global stability, on American perception, and would indeed have significant effects on US business or investment; but it would not on its own upset or affect most Australians or directly threaten Antipodean stability, and it certainly need not affect nuclear stability. Australians generally are not opposed in principle to socialism or notably interested in containing its spread (indeed perhaps the opposite). Australia is not interested in (and oughtn’t to be charmed by the idea of) defence of the (American) “free enterprise” system, or in the defence of uglier forms of capitalism wherever they are presently initiated or opposed (cf. Chomsky and Herman). Contra 5. It can be conceded, without granting the main thrust of the premiss, that the Soviets are expansionistic, at least in that they are interested in extending their influence where they can. So also are most empires, including American and Indonesian (so for that matter are many academics and most sales-people). But the Soviets have an ideological 15 message to spread, Marxism-Leninism, an ideology they used to anticipate being installed everywhere. But the Americans also have a message, a capitalist message, Free Enterprise Inc, which they are working to sell pretty much everywhere accessible to them. And they need to be expansionistic to have it adopted, whereas the Russians and Chinese need simply wait for history to take its allegedly determined course (though a little assistance - reflecting legitimate doubt about this determinism? - would surely spread their disconcertingly different forms of “progress” without interfering). But surely the Russian message is pernicious? All these messages are pernicious (for familiar reasons: see e.g. Erlich). The proper question is whether on its own Soviet international activity threatens, in some damaging way, global stability. Undoubtedly Soviet-American confrontation, as in the Cuban missile affair, does threaten global stability; though not in a way that has any bearing on Australian defence. In fact no Russian expansionary tendency, military or otherwise, has an untoward direct effect on Australia, little of significance reaches into the Antipodes (see Dibb SS). So what is the local excitement about? In large measure the excitement has been drummed up by the political right, East European expatriates, and pork-barrelling politicians. The effect of Soviet expansionism is much exaggerated and overexploited (Mack ST). Viewed from the Antipodes it is hardly a problem, unless the Soviets should get locked into military confrontation with USA - a real problem to be addressed. With that problem however, the Antipodes can better assist as part of a third nonaligned group which helps to referee and to prize apart the heavies, not by seconding and inciting the USA. But confrontation apart, Soviet internationalism, hardly a great success story, does not seriously disturb global stability, as seen from Australia. For a proper assessment of Soviet internationalism, types of expansion should be distinguished - military, potential military, influence with military access, and mere influence. In actual military expansion and involvement since W’orld War II, the Russian record is hardly striking by comparison with the USA or several other states. The one conspicuous case involving control of new territory, that of Afghanistan, has actually had little effect on global stability. The usual Western apprehension concerns not anything the Soviets have accomplished, but what they might attempt militarily, especially in Europe. But the idea of Soviet military adventure in Europe is a Western invention and bogey, lacking in plausibility. The Soviet military lacks the force ratio needed to be assured of military success in Europe, both by their own standards of what is required and by Western strategic standards. And the Soviets have no good reasons or interests in undertaking such an exercise which would draw them into nuclear war. They already face enough economic difficulties and troubles with East European client states which they cannot control satisfactorily. 16 The extension of Soviet influence has largely been in the Third world. But it has hardly been successful, with as many failures and losses to record as Soviet “gains” - gains which add to the imperial burden since they involve countries wracked with problems, such as Vietnam. The Third World exercises are marred by Soviet inaptitude and limited by the state of their own economy. They scarcely displace the global structure enough to test its stability; and they produce no shock waves or even significant ripples in the Antipodes. Contra 6. The main current threat to world stability appears to come not from one of the dancers in the East-West dance of death, but from the escalating confrontation, easily ignited, between the lead dancers. With this US policies and practices have at least as much to do as USSR ones. Recent US practices are more destabilizing than Soviet ones, and indeed highly destabilising, because of new weapons and weapons systems, because of rejection of arms control and Soviet proposals, and because of “star wars” preparation which both accelerates the arms race on earth and begins a new one in space. A vast increase in tension and suspicion accompanies the “arms race” which is in large measure due to US intransigence and US war-fighting doctrines, new weapons systems, with built-in incentives for pre-emption, and deliberate abandonment of arms control (see PR). Such considerations, duly assembled, demolish the received (but nonetheless crazy) theme that an alliance or alignment with USA helps increase stability. American practices are to be resisted as much as Soviet. 6. The East-West balance argument: American alignment versus friendly independence The need for Australian alignment with the USA is supposed to be shown by the East-West This politically-important balance argument, which shares key premisses nr with the related elitist argument, runs as follows : balance argument. 7. Global stability is the key to world peace. 8. Stability of the international order is a matter of maintaining a global balance. But 5. The global balance is constantly threatened by an expansionist USSR. 6A. The threat is [only] checked by the USA, which (6A.1) guarantees an open and pluralistic international order. 9. Australia’s primary security concern, indeed most vital interest, is this stability. Hence 10. Australia’s role is to help America maintain the balance. The rest of Australia’s intervolvement with American military arrangements is then taken to follow. But there are many reasons for halting the argument before it reaches this stage of practical (and allegedly moral) detail. The balance argument assumes much that has already been rebutted, for instance that the Soviet threat thesis is correct (i.e. 5) and that US 17 policy is stabilizing (part of 6A). It also takes for granted, what now is at least in serious doubt, that American policy is directed at balance and deterrence, rather than what the American administration appears to be aiming at, superiority. But in that event, Australia is not really engaged in some longer term balancing feat, so much as in helping USA prevail in nuclear race, contradicting the goal of world peace of premiss 7. Contra 10. and its derivation. The derivation is inadequate: it does not follow that Australia’s role is such a lackey’s one. If the balance of strength is leaning in America’s direction, as most less-biassed evidence indicates, then Australia should surely be throwing its slight weight in with the Eastern team (that is what such images as the balanced tug-of-war would suggest). Presumably premiss 6A.1 is designed to exclude this deplorable thought, of Australia teaming up with totalitarians. Nevertheless Australia should be putting its slight weight where it is effective, given its own broader objectives, interests, principles and supposedly pluralistic ideals. There are several different roles Australia could fulfil which would enable it to make a more satisfactory, less passive, contribution to world peace, among them de-escalation through active nonalignment, appropriate aid, and so forth. Thus 10 is hardly well-supported or evident. A more direct approach would be better than throwing Australian weight unreflectively on one side of the balance. As a little reflection attests, the balance image and argument point not in the direction intended, but towards nonalignment. Contra 6A (and 6). The theme that US maintains the balance, and hence preserves the peace, is of course false. For again, it takes two to tango. While it can be granted that the USA is interlocked with and checks the USSR in this munitions dance, the history of the dance reveals that the pace-escalation has flowed from the interaction of the one partner with the other. That is, but for the USA, the USA would not be required to check the USSR (the interaction is two-way as with Hegel’s famous master-slave relation). In any case, it looks as if, on a different historical trajectory, the main states of Western Europe could match the Soviet Union militarily (for they have comparable combined GNP, technological resources, etc.; cf. note 20) Thus it is doubtful that the current Soviet build-up, produced in interaction with the USA, could only be, or have been, checked by the US. ad 6A.1. As the premiss is only of marginal relevance to the argument, it is enough to observe that the international order the USA helps maintain leaves very much to be desired. In its intervention, militarily, economically and indirectly, USA has assisted substantially in reducing plurality and openness, is well as in establishing or propping up rotten regimes, etc. The negative side of American imperialism as well-enough documented, if not widely enough read or known by Americans themselves (cf. again Chomsky and Herman). Only under scandalously low redefinitions of ‘open’ and ‘pluralistic’ is the present “free” world order 18 either open or pluralistic. ad 8, and the damaging equivocation on ‘the balance’. While balance is one way of maintaining stability in the world arrangements that have presently come to pass, the balance structure can only carry so much loading. Add too much weight (of arms tension, and so forth) to both sides and the precarious structure will fail, probably catastrophically. increasing probability of catastrophic breakdown, for a variety of reasons The (accident, miscalculation, computer error, human interference, etc.), has been argued elsewhere (e.g. WPI). While a certain neither overloaded nor overstressed balance may serve for stability, the present increasingly stressed balance will probably not. The balance argument, however, neglects this dynamical situation, illegitimately switching from a (certain post) balance in premiss 8 to the (on-going) balance in subsequent premisses. The balance argument itself breaks down through equivocation. What the dynamic picture also indicates is the importance of removing some weight from the balance, most obviously by arms limitation and tension reduction. It points too to a different role for Australasia, to a less aligned position genuinely directed at stability. It is to the emerging case for a different role for Australia, and to action for achieving this different role, that the positive argument will now begin to swing. The inadequate East-West balance argument is typically combined with attacks upon proposals for a different role for Australia than American alliance and. service. effect of these additions is to generate extra confusion and dust. The main For the additions are inessential to the argument, and do not serve to repair it or reinforce it. For example, against nonalignment or neutralism is set the alleged pervasiveness of nuclear winter. We might as well be aligned (it’s good for trade and other economic perquisites), so it is sometimes argued from up top, because if the central balance fails we are all dead. This is a conspicuous nonsequitur^, worse than ex nihilo quodlibet (because it also suggests that balance is a prerequisite for stability). But, in the main, the attack is irrelevant, because the point of nonalignment is to help remove overload and to break down confrontation and its escalation to war; it is a thing to do now, be fore winter descends, to delay or halt its descent, and most important, to reduce its extent and severity. Australia’s weight may be slight, another irrelevant addition goes, but psychologically it is important for the West. Any further spread of the “Kiwi disease” (from New Zealand) would show the weakening of Western resolve, and give the green light for Soviet expansionism. Bell, a leading exponent of the balance argument, virtually gives the impression that if Australia dropped out of American alignment, the Russians would be on the road down through the isles to Australia tomorrow/ Much of this sort of rhetoric is reminiscent of the baseless fear-mongering of an earlier pre-Vietnam time. The Russians have no such military interests, or present capabilities. And if they were to gear up and set out, they would be met by substantial resistance along most of the route, resistance obtaining Western assistance. For America, for one, has major interests, different from Australia’s, in both Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as elsewhere in East Asia. The addition, so far from strengthening the argument, depends, in its “green light for expansion” comparison, on the previously faulted premiss 5 of Soviet expansionism. In fact most of the further case for American alignment of one sort or another - when it is argued-, often nonalignment and neutrality are simply denounced in good old-fashioned authoritarian style - turns upon already-faulted assumptions. Catley, for example, another exponent of “central balance”, presents the following ‘consideration’: ... whatever the Swedes or Swiss may think about the matter, Australia is locked by considerations of culture, economics, and political philosophy into the defence of the Western world. It has both an obligation and a duty to contribute its share to that defence if necessary by hosting facilities which cannot easily be located elsewhere (p.15). The premiss is false for reasons essentially indicated: and the premiss in no way sustains the conclusion, the argument involving among other things, the prescriptive (is-ought) fallacy. Consider the premiss. Australia is not, unless Catley has information withheld from most of the rest of us, locked into Western nuclear defence, but in principle independent and free to reconsider and rethink its options. (American use of the “facilities” is not irrevocable, and shortly comes up, in principle at least, for reconsideration.) How do culture, economics and political philosophy provide locks and chains for Australia but not for nonaligned Western European states? They do not: Australia is not a part of USA or altogether a client state; and the cultures, interests, economic frameworks and political philosophies of the two nations are significantly different (for details, see CPD). But even if the ideological frameworks were much more similar than they are, that would not entail similar defence practices (as, e.g., ANZUS in all its weakness shows), nor any such defence obligations. Most of the arguments against nonalignment are of Catley calibre - or worse. Fortunately, then, such arguments are examined in detail elsewhere, notably by D. Martin in his examination of counter-arguments to Australian armed neutrality, the legally-recognised non-belligerent form of nonalignment he favours. Virtually none of Martin’s counter-case depends for its success on features of neutrality, which is not advocated here. Virtually all of Martin’s argument is moreover couched in negative form; his positive brief is very brief. It 20 reduces to this: alignment or alliance with the USA 'cannot make us secure against such dangers as we may one day have to meet, while it needlessless exposes to other dangers, including nuclear war (p.l, italics added). While the message is correct enough, and in need of wide propagation, it does little on its own to support neutrality, and it by no means exhausts the positive case for weakening alignment. In particular, there are more positive arguments of much theoretical interest, to be drawn from systems theory and from the burgeoning theory of collective goods and action. 7. Contributions towards stability: free-riding, enlarging group size, and increasing variety. The strategic world situation we now confront can be viewed as a game with more than 100 players, counting in nation-states and leaving out (for convenience) major organisations such as the largest 100 transnational companies. These organisational players align themselves around two large poles, East and West, as indicated: NON-ALIGNED N N WEST EAST India NATO States Japan, Israel Sweden* Switzerland* NZUS: Australi I Ireland1* ^Most Latin ' American States I Tanzania Costa Rica** State capitalist Key: N: *: **: State communist Nuclear weapons states Neutral states Nonmilitary states There are various - a great many - games these state players are playing, some of which are practically important for peace and for stability. Some of these games, such as World Empire and Chicken (already played under one representation), are played essentially between the East-West superplayers. There are several problems about East-West games: for instance, what representation they have, the repeatability of the games (clearly some nuclear games 21 may, like Russian roulette, end after one round, as they will with the Big One), and the negative sum characters of some games. And the monolithic East/monolithic West dichotomy is misleading, and, as will appear, discards crucial detail (in the way simplifications may). So game-theoretical modelling will be approached differently and more obliquely. World Security, like regional and local security, is a collective good (technically, an item, quality unspecified, in joint supply and precluding exclusion). That is not of course to say that there are not conditions under which security may leave much to be desired, for instance where security is guaranteed by a narrow and intolerant despotism; but then, so it can be argued, the trouble lies with the provisioning, not the particular product. collective good G for the collection of N nation-states. It is a It is, furthermore, a collective good which permits the possibility of free-riding by nation-states. Looked at from this perspective the recent American complaint about its allies, Japan for example, and their insufficient expenditure on defence, is a complaint about their free-riding. Within the balance of power framework the conditions for free-riding are satisfied, for instance by unaligned and unilaterally disarming states. For 1. G is available to all N members of the collective if it is available to any, and the achievement (or maintenance) of G by any will make every member better off. 2. G is achieved iff some number m (no larger than that of group K) contribute towards its provision, where under the balance of power assumption Il C K C N and II = {USA, USSR}. 3. The expected value of contributing to G or its maintenance is less than the expected value of not doing so, i.e. likely costs of contribution exceed likely benefits - except perhaps for members of II given that G is largely provided by II. There is what can be called a pegged (or asymmetric) free-rider problem, pegged by members of II for whom the free-rider option is not open - within the confines of the balance of power assumption - and for whom condition 3 is only satisfied under certain ways of looking at the matter (e.g. there will be a war 10 years down the road so the expected costs each year exceed the expected benefits). For most members of N, by contrast, the benefits of G are available even should they reduce their contributions. There is a straightforward case (in narrow game-theoretical terms) for recommending Australian, and regional, free-riding on the balance of power provision of G. Some arguments, beyond or adding to those already in effect presented, are these:- Either stability breaks down catastrophically and there is a large-scale war or it does not. If it does then the region is 22 better off than it would be if (strongly) aligned because it is unlikely to be (so heavily) targetted. (Here the dreadful new argument that nuclear winter means that the Antipodes might as well be involved gets challenged and rejected: as to how see e.g. MF and B. Martin). If, alternatively, stability doesn’t break down then the region has the benefits in any case, without the costs. For there is no clear evidence that our alignment and cooperation with the USA enhances global stability, etc.; indeed, as remarked and will be further argued, the evidence points to the contrary. As regards Australasian regional weight in the Western block, do we seriously believe it is significant? That the Australian voice, though useful for propaganda purposes, makes much real difference in the halls of Northern power? We shouldn’t: and if we do we’re living in a delusional framework. Australia has been left out of the picture in virtually all major strategic planning exercises, most difference-making peace initiatives, etc.,etc. Now Eastern block countries would hardly object to Antipodean free-riding, rather than no offering support (however trifling), comfort and incitement to their opposition/ Furthermore free-riding is how the Americans, on their theoretical principles, would expect Australia to act, the rational self-interested procedure (see CPD). It is how lesser nations should act. For it is economically rational; contributing is not. But won’t the US make things economically dear for Australia? In threats and theory, yes; but in practice, no more than it has already done with subsidized wheat deals to the Soviets, no more than it threatened to do already in the case of New Zealand over the nuclear-ships issue. For except for short term aberrations, America will never give up trade or business arrangements: one gets the impressions that America would trade with the Devil Himself, if doing so would open some new markets in Hell. Despite its political stigma, free-riding need be no problem, or in any way immoral or irregular. Perhaps the buses are free; perhaps there is a voluntary payment system, to which only some need contribute, etc. With the nuclear fix, free-riding is indeed the moral course; contributing is not.29 Free-riding, though often protrayed as a problem, is only a problem in certain cases of collective provisioning, where the good involved is sufficiently desirable and will not be provided because of too many free- riders. This is not the situation with global security, which will be provided, in the curious and precarious way that it is, whether or not Australia stays on the escalating treadmill or gets off and rides free. Australia's free-riding may be a problem for America; it is not for Australia. Interests diverge again. What is more, judicious free-riding can increase stability. In pictorial terms, the stability of a structure is typically increased up to a certain point by securing it more 23 adequately; for example, if it is a wind tower or similar building, by increasing its rigid ties or supports to the ground. Then a tripod (or better still a quadrapod) tower is much less likely to topple than a bipedal one, and requires less guying to stay up. Increasing the diversity, or variety, of supports increases stability. The theme that diversity correlates with stability has been sharpened and confirmed in ecology, for instance in the theory of “spreading the risks” (see EW). The related theme, that a certain variety increases stability, has been elaborated in cybernetics. The core eco-systemic idea to be developed is that Australia’s free-riding in defence, and consequent nonalignment, could help to enhance diversity and variety, and accordingly to increase stability (especially if done in concert with other client and suppliant states). Two interlocked supports in tension, East and West, well dug in but hardly well guyed, are inadequate for the long-term stability of the precarious structure of world peace. What makes engineering sense is not however adding weight to the structure, or even strengthening the supports that are there, helping the East when the balance is disturbed by the more powerful West’s surging ahead and likely overburdening the structure. What makes more sense is increasing the variety of supports, enlarging and diversifying group size, as significant independent grouping could do. The monolithic East/monolithic West picture is much more than a convenient simplification, for instance for strategic thinking. It may force damaging mistakes in conceptualisation, mzsconceptualisation perhaps convenient for some larger players. One main reason for mistakes concerns group size. Whereas 11+ = {West, East} is a small group, the number N of nation-states is not, but is considerably larger. But the collective behaviour of large groups differs in theory from that of small groups; group size is a highly significant factor (though its precise import remains contentious). The group N of nation-states is a large group, of essentially self-interested parties, indeed of substantially economic actors. collective action applies: So we may expect that the American theory of that the groups will behave in a counterintuitive way. Though expected to act in the common interest, to obtain security in particular, the collection will not. On this account (that elaborated by Olson), the common interest can only be guaranteed by outside influence or imposition (coercion in Olson’s rapid thinking). But with the collective of nations, there is, as experience has shown, no outside mediator or influence of sufficient authority to ensure attainment of the collective good. The prognosis looks very gloomy: this most important (though far from unique) collective good will not be provided. Fortunately the reasoning, like much of the “logic” of collective action, has been too 21 swift. The group, though large, is highly privileged, in containing several actors for whom costs of war exceed benefits (note the shift in perspective from the earlier free-riding condition 3). Indeed an important economic effect of the knowledge of an ominous nuclear winter is that virtually all actors involved should now be in that position; for (subjectively) expected costs of nuclear war have become very high. To go back to basics, Olson's grand theory is based on the accountants’ tautology (defining ‘net’) net agent benefit = gross agent benefits - gross agent costs, i.e. in symbols, for each agent or o actor i (in collective N), A- = V-Cj. A group is privileged if Aj is positive for some i in N. It needs little argument to show that for vulnerable European nation-states the net benefits of global security are decidedly positive (e.g. with a nuclear war their respective future GDPs would expectedly fall to near zero). The fact that the group of nation-states is privileged does not however imply that the collective good involved, security, will be supplied, particularly in the longer term. The simple logic is not dynamic; it takes no account of mistake, error, or the like, or of stability achieved through superiority or intermediate instability. An improved modelling - which can take some account of group size and of the dynamics, through iterated games - is gained by returning to game-theoretic grounds. A free rider “problem” is tantamount to a dilemma of some sort; according to the conventional wisdom, it is a prisoners’ dilemma (cf. Pettit, but contrast Taylor and Ward). The argument can go this way:- a free rider problem or issue is defined in terms of the provisioning of a collective good; but the theory of collective goods is equivalent to that of a .QI, generalised prisoners’ dilemma. Certainly the global nuclear situation appears to present a dilemma; as much is a commonplace claim. Elsewhere (e.g. WPI) it is argued in detail that it does indeed present a moral dilemma. Here the argument - which can proceed through the theoretical route just sketched above or in the more piecemeal way to be indicated - is that it is also a prudential dilemma (for many members of N).°2 Consider first, since these have obtained some investigation (e.g. Hardin), the range of apparent two party games being played by the US and Soviet Union administration (labelled US and SU respectively) in 1985 as regards the moves of further nuclear armament, A, or nuclear disarmament, N. (It is supposed, naturally, that the game is set in some background context, e.g. nuclear disarmament is not considered in isolation from on-going French and Chinese nuclear armament). It is important here, as other places, to distinguish the administration - which for the most part calls the shots - from the society and the people. It is administrations or governments that generally take people into war; etc. The American people seem rather more inclined towards nuclear de-escalation than their administration; the German people were clearly opposed to the new nuclear missiles their administration proceeded to install. The strategy games involved are then administration games, which we 25 can suppose to be played over successive time intervals, e.g. years; so there is interaction and feedback as the games go on - until the Big Ones explode. Within this simplistic setting, the apparent games being played by US and SU are those diagrammed next: New Initial game Prisoners’ Dilemma Game SU SU D US A Revised Game D 2,2 A 4,1 1,4 3,3 D US A SU D 3,2 A 4,1 1,4 2,3 D US A D 3,3 A 4,1 1,4 2,2 According to Hardin, ‘giving evidence of [his] deformation professionelle’, the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) ‘represents the preference ordering of virtually all the articulate policy analysts in the United States and presumably also in the Soviet Union’ (p.248). While PD may have represented US policy, there is considerable evidence (as already indicated) that it no longer does, that the US administration has shifted to a more aggressive, war-fighting, phase. That is, the US has interchanged its rankings of (D,D) and (A,A), presumably some time between 1978 and 1984 games. The Soviets, who have been much more consistent (and no doubt better censored) in their policy pronouncements, appear not to have changed their game, but have stuck with their form of deterrence and no-first-strike. However they are bound to try to keep up with the Americans, and so are presumably pushed towards the Revised Game shown, which pleasantly restores symmetry. Stable or equilibrium outcomes for each game are circled. An outcome is said to be stable if neither player has incentive to switch strategies unilaterally on the strength of the game, i.e. to alter the outcome except by influencing the other player also to alter strategies. All these games provide dilemmas, in a broad sense, that equilibrium is achieved in an undesirable and dangerous outcome. In all the apparent games, arming is the dominant strategy for each player; yet in the PD game that is even Pareto-suboptimal, whence the economic fascination. But as the other games deliver results which are socially suboptimal (and below a satisfying threshold), all these games are dilemmas. And the same applies to suggested alternative games that might plausibly be taken to represent the superpower situation, and such as Chicken. A recognisably suboptimal outcome is guaranteed by the independent ‘‘stable” strategies. What is worse, iteration of games does not help (as it may in other political circumstances). For there are substantial political and military incentives for the superpower players not to adjust their preferences substantially in socially superior directions after repeated games, but to do what the US at least appears to have done, to make the situation worse. 26 It is important then to attempt to modify or curtail these self-interested superpower games. There are various connected ways of going about this. One is for other parties to combine to limit or discourage these games. Another alternative is for them to try to alter the games. Thus much socially preferable would be a switch to a coordination game of some sort; for instance, to the game which neutrals tend to play (and which Lackey, in contrast to other more bellicose utilitarians, sees utilitarian superpowers playing; hence Hardin’s provocative label for this game, ‘Lackey’s game’). In the coordination game diagrammed, WN represents a western-inclined neutral and EN an Eastern inclined neutral (e.g. Yugoslavia): EN WN D D 1,1 A 3,2 A 2,3 4,4 [Other coordination games, with (D,D) assigned (1,1)] Now the dilemmatic and coordination games are not played in isolation; they come together in international settings such as United Nations’ committees (and elsewhere, since coordination games are frequently peoples’ games as well). Superimposing the games, with coordination games of the first sort applied to previously given US and SU games, leads to the following augmented East (E) and West (W) games: New Game, Augmented Prisoners’ Dilemma Augmented E E A D Revised Game, Augmented A 4,1 2,2 : *4,1' \ : 3^2 ’ D 1 : W ......... 1,4: A 2/3: 2/3; D ; 1 w ........ : 1,4 3,3 ; a 4 ; E D 2/3 • • — •- : 3-3’**: D ; 1 W I 2,3 ; . • 2.3 A D 2/3 2,2 a 4 ■ 4,1* ! . ; : 2/3 J 4 Key: rh represents a sequence of ms, i.e. m, m, m ... for each coordination player; 2/3 a sequence of 2s and 3s in some order. As augmenting games reveals, to play with a superpower is to help reinforce a stable deadlock. But playing an independent coordination game increases variety and can help in breaking the deadlock, in fact in several ways. For one, enough significant players playing a coordination game can alter the overall dominant strategy towards disarmament. For another, much more pressure can be brought to bear on the superpowers. For example, with less support, unilateral action by the US administration on Star-Wars and arms build-up can be exposed. Superpower militarism and power excursions would stand naked and 27 unsupported. Australia’s impact, in particular, would be rather greater as a nonaligned free-rider pressing seriously for disarmament and regional nuclear-freedom (instead of, as at present, white-wash polemics and token ambassadors, undermined by a none-too-tacit policy of US support). The strategy suggested by game-theoretic modelling converges then with that suggested by other approaches, notably regional and ecological approaches. The strategy is that of limitation, of disengagement from escalating US/USSR war games, and progressive alteration of their likely outcomes by defusing coordination moves. In more practical terms, the approaches mean trying to limit and modify superpower games by restricting their games and supporting regional or local coordination of players, in forms of organisations both of nations and of people. Such organisations would work, as many have already been doing, to contract the regions and spheres of influence and access of US and USSR military administrations, and to diminish support for their war-fighting objectives. For example, Antipodean groups could, and should, coordinate to ease the American military out of the South Pacific region, meanwhile resisting any intrusion of Russian military. Then, while the Europeans are doing their coordinated de-escalating, denuclearising things right across Europe, the Russian and American war games are progressively excluded from the entire Southern Hemisphere. An eventual aim geographically is, to send their weapons of war back home, to restrict their (and French and other) global military enterprises to their “own” backyards, where they would not always be so enthusiastically received. Fortunately such an ambitious and optimistic project, so unlikely to come to pass given present nation-state arrangments, can be accomplished piecemeal, from small and significant beginnings, already to be seen. As a result of recent movements in the region, a South Pacific nuclear-free region is now a politically-achievable option. A first token step has already been taken. But next steps, towards genuine nuclear-freedom, require above all cooperation of a less aligned Australia, joining other disengaging “free-riders” in the region. That in turn requires, as a practical component, closure of American bases in Australia as their leases terminate, cessation of American nuclear ship visits and aircraft staging, and an end to uranium mining and sales. As Australia is the only country in the region supplying uranium, and the main location of US bases, such steps would be most significant. Even so, the Pacific regional effect would remain unduly limited, so long as France and the US are based within the region, and transit of nuclear ships is internationally sanctioned everywhere on the shrinking high seas. Plainly there are further more difficult steps on the way to southern Pacific nuclear-freedom and independence, i.e. even for one of the easier oceanic regions. But there is no good reason to 28 expect that removing the nuclear scourge, any more than eliminating other major politico­ social evils, will be easy. Permanent removal and a less dubious “peace” than we presently enjoy is not something that will be achieved by more of what we have witnessed, or even through clever diplomacy and smart technological tricks, such as new defensive weapons; it will take difficult structural and radical design change. 8. On the need for, possibility of, and prospect of appropriate structural change. There is little doubt that certain sorts of structural political change would be highly conducive to peace (e.g. democratic reorganisation of the superpowers), and that certain fundamental changes may even be sufficient for permanent peace. With that in view they have long been advocated - at least from Rousseau and Kant onwards. But it has also been supposed that some such changes are necessary for lasting peace; ‘it is also necessary to transform the structures that lead to war’ (B. Martin, p.12). To render this theme immune to obvious criticisms - for example, that straightforward authoritarian extension of certain established structures could bring an end to war - further desiderata, typically presupposed, are invoked, for instance that certain freedoms, modest material standards of life, and so on, are duly guaranteed, and also the type of necessity involved is wound back to some lower technical level (not excluded however by present practicalities). These adjustments make the necessity theme more difficult to assess, but also more difficult to sustain. There are two parts to its assessment and defence, a negative and critical part, demolishing a range of arguments from determinism, human nature, and the like, to the effect that arrangements have to be more or less the way they are, and a positive part, comprising direct arguments for the theme. The large negative part of this enterprise will simply be illustrated.34 According to deterministic and mechanistic approaches, such as that of (marxist) technological determinism, nuclear weapons, like megamachines generally, are no aberration. They are an integral part of the business of industrial and ecological conquest, a further stage in human intervention which has already involved substantial disruption through pesticides, wastes, etc. The argument tends to the fatalistic. The megamachines of conquest are made, and once made they will be used. No change in political arrangement, which would make any difference, is possible. Sometimes technological enthusiasts push their position and luck, even further, that a weapon or device once invented by humans will be used: there is no stopping progress. But in doing so they overextend themselves. While there is, sadly a fair induction from the manufacture of weapons (of any given type, for many batches are never deployed) to their use, inductions from invention of machines or the like to their manufacture are c 29 unreliable and subject to many counterexamples (and many machines that do eventually get made have been reinvented or independently rediscovered). But even the good inductions do not show that weapons of various sorts must be used, that a change in background political organisation would not frustrate the inductions. The broader deterministic position is of course that such background changes are not possible either; political arrangements too, like the rest of social life, are technologically or economically determined. But (nonanalytical) determinism, technological and other, is false, so it is argued elsewhere (JB, CPD). Different political arrangements, which alleviate problems, are technically possible, and arrangements would be different in differently evolved worlds. Things did not and do not have to be the way they are, or the social and political sort of way they are. Many routes, none of deductive strength, lead to the conclusion that the dominant political structures of our time, fashioned (with much input from schemes of past philosophers) from feudal institutions, require extensive structural alteration. In particular, they need to be superseded by alternative structures less intricately tied to war, which do not promote or lead so readily to war. Such a theme has been argued directly from the nuclear fix itself (as e.g. WP1, p.47ff.). But suppose, improbable as it may seem, that nuclear weapons all vanished, thereby removing the current nuclear fix; for instance, they turned out to be quietly self-destructing, or a disarmament actually took place. massive thermodynamic miracle occurred, or nuclear The problem of war would not be thereby removed, and even that of nuclear war would only be given some respite. For the structural arrangements for war would remain intact.04 Conventional weapons would remain, along with weapons perhaps as dangerous as nuclear weapons, such as chemical and biological ones. Nuclear weapons, insofar as they were removed (for small caches are easily hidden away), could soon be replaced, especially if nuclear power plants remained intact; and nothing would prevent the development of (Star-Wars) weapons more diabolical than nuclear ones. War cannot be eliminated while leaving the rest of society as it is - by freezing the status quo. ... The structural conditions for war need to be removed - not reinforced as appeals to elites may do - and superseded by alternative structures which do not lead to war (B. Martin, p.12: Martin goes on to indicate the types of structures, and how to reach them). Structural adjustments can provide conditions for lasting satisfactory peace. An initial, somewhat simplistic, Kantian argument for the proposition that peace is possible (presented by Latta, introducing Permanent Peace), runs as follows:- Peace, perpetual peace, is an ideal, not merely of a speculative kind but a practical idea, a moral principle. Hence this ideal ought to be realised, i.e. there ought (morally) to be peace. But ought entails can; therefore peace is possible. 30 From Heracleit.us through Hegel there buzzes an impressive swarm of philosophers"*6 who have rejected the second premiss. Some are even captivated by such extravagant counter-claims as that with peace everything would stop, that competition, with war as one limit, is essential to motion and progress! would now be With the recent shift in philosophical fashions, the second premiss more widely conceded, though often not on Kantian grounds, but consequentialist. Such grounds to support the theme that peace is desirable and ought to be realised, but are more discriminating in that they help indicate what sort of peace. Unfortunately, however it is done, the second premiss does not sustain the conclusion, ought does not entail can, as many moral dilemmas reveal (see MD, WP1). So fortunately, there is a more satisfactory and revealing route to the conclusion that peace is possible, and indeed is feasible. That is the more elaborate method of (semantical) modelling: present in detail scenarios of societies where peace persists (for the sceptical it may be necessary to recall n-human models, with n small). This sort of thing is of course already done, in more pleasing fashion than logicians could hope to emulate, if rather less precisely, by OQ novelists and science-fiction writers, and by activists like the different Martins. What all these scenarios point to, however, are societies considerably different from our own - though not in the people involved, who have their weaknesses, their power drives, and so forth, but because of significant structural alterations in the societies depicted. By way of such modellings we can not merely argue to the feasibility of lasting peace, but push ahead with the argument, that societies of these restructured sorts are desirable alternatives to contemporary military- industrial arrangements. For those of us then who want to move towards such pacific alternatives, the practical inference, from feasibility and desirability is clear: we should begin on the real work of structural change. Peace is possible and desirable, but the prospects are poor (as Heilbroner has said of the human prospect). Present arrangements, though contingent and fashioned in large measure from the schemes of past intellectuals, are thoroughly entrenched, and enforced, both ideologically and by much physical power, often as if along with natural law they were God­ given, though they are no longer appropriate. Even small nonstructural changes look difficult to achieve in present political climates. Through climates have not changed that much, major social improvements have been gained, not instantanously, but in longer-term struggles with government. Such short-term difficulties did not deter social theorists such as Kant, who like Rousseau before him and many after him, were concerned with obtaining lasting peace. The world has changed enormously since the time of Kant’s proposals for peace (of 1795), and even since the time of Veblen’s more cynical additions (in 1917). Hard science and 31 destructive power have grown enormously; and even theoretical knowledge of collective behaviour, especially that admitting of game-theoretic treatment, though still slight, has advanced. But political arrangements and what can be accomplished politically have, in important respects, changed very little, since Rousseau complained (around 1761) that governments were probably too short-sighted to appreciate the merits of his project for perpetual peace. Governments have long been, and been seen as, main obstacles to peace. Thus Veblen rightly maintained that ‘... if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about irrespective of governmental management, - in spite of the State rather than by its good offices’ (p.7).^^ So it has been with most major social changes; for they have involved structural political change disturbing to governmental conservatism. In his search for the indispensible conditions for lasting peace, Kant claimed, as others have claimed since, that peace is not possible under present structural arrangements of an unregulated competing nation-state kind. As times have changed, so, to a limited extent, have state structural arrangements, since Kant compiled his conditions. In particular, there is now, in the shape of the United Nations, a very weak reflection of what Kant looks for, a world (or European!) federation of nations. But crucial ingredients in Kant’s resolution are still lacking:- namely, at the upper level, what is required for a standard resolution of Prisoners Dilemma type situations - some surrender of national sovereignty, especially as regards war, and, at the lower level, “republican” states. Major blockages to adequate arrangements for peace remain at two critical levels of organisation, that concentrated upon of the organisation of collectives of states and, in part by devolution, that of the internal organisation of individual states themselves. Much evidence has now accumulated that more far-reaching changes than Kant, Rousseau and Veblen envisaged are required at both international and nation-state levels if genuine peace is to be secured. Indeed significant changes are wanted even in republician states for peace movements to get their mixed message through already fixed channels to state control systems. For this sort of reason, movements on a single front, such as peace, are unlikely to succeed on their own, but should be linked into a broader plurality of movements, which seek to widen informational and democratic channels, and to alter the character and membership of state systems, and thereby render them much more controllable and accountable.40 Many longer-haul structural changes depend upon diverting nuclear war in the meantime. Thus arguing for more far-reaching changes, for an altered nonaligned Australia, 32 for a nuclear-free South Pacific, for regional structural changes, certainly does not exclude arguing and working for obvious measures for reducing risks of nuclear war. These include: a serious commitment to arms control by the superpowers (whose practices threaten our futures, though most of us lack representation in either); a move away from war-fighting strategies and associated destabilising weapons-systems; moderation of confrontational rhetoric and other tensions-inducing practices by superpower administrations, and improved efforts at mutual understanding (as well some appreciation of the elements of political pluralism); and then, remote though it may appear, significant steps towards nuclear disarmament. Richard Sylvan 41 Bungendore NSW 33 NOTES 1. Queensland premier, with destructive deep-South policies. 2. The point, which has become controversial, is argued in effect in Gilbert. 3. See especially Dibb, as reported in the ANU Reporter, and for a more guarded elaboration, his IAD (e.g. p.163 ‘At present, planning for the defence of Australia lack coherence because there is no clear definition, in priority order, of what needs defending’); see also Sharp, p.l48ff and differently Langtry and Ball, p.575ff., p.6O5ff. The much-heralded Dibb Review of mid-1986 would, if (as already seems unlikely) it were adopted, remove some of the lesser incoherence in Australian policy, that involving details of regional defensive defence (as would also Langtry and Ball, if followed through). While Dibb appears to have demolished what he refers to scathingly as the ‘largely mythical “core force” concept’, a new controversy has sprung up over whether Australia’s more self-reliant defence should be purely defensive defence, Dibb’s ill-named ‘strategy of denial’, or whether it should include an offensive component. Dibb himself has rather rapidly shifted ground on this important issue. In late 1983 he was contending that ‘Australia should have in the force-in-being significant deterrent capabilities, based on present air and naval strike assets, which can mount defensive and offensive operations against attacking forces, their staging bases and lines of resupply’ (IAP, p.166). But in the otherwise conservative Review of 1986 such offensive defence is abandoned; no such forces and equipment for offensive off-shore operations are recommended. Instead ‘the review proposes a layered strategy of defence within our area of direct military interest. Our most important defence planning concern is to ensure that an enemy would have substantial difficulty in crossing the sea and air gap’. The new offensive/defensive defence controversy puts the Review’s adoption in increasing doubt - in which event the local incoherence in strategic planning processes and militational difficulties Dibb alludes to early in his statement will presumably persist. The Review not merely fails to address significant regional issues, as to defence priorities, and as to multiple purpose roles for Australian armed forces given that they will be involved in virtually no military activity other than maintenance and a certain “preparedness” (for on Dibb’s overstatement of the prevailing view of Australia’s very favourable regional security prospects, ‘there is no conceivable prospect of any power contemplating invasion of our continent and subjugation of our population’). But further, the Review is itself vague to incoherent, concerning wider defence issues, vague as to the post-ANZUS situation, and incoherent about Australia’s role in US global “defence” activity. According the Dibb (CT, p.16), ‘there is no requirement for Australia to become involved in United States contingency planning for global war. The presence of the joint facilities, together with the access that we provide to visits by United States warships and the staging through of Australia of B-52 bombers, are a sufficient tangible contribution to the Alliance.’ These contributions are not involvement? That is not how the USSR views the matter: they are the reported sole 34 basis of USSR nuclear targetting of Australia (see Dibb. SS p.13). global stance is left essentially to the USA. And Australia's Amazingly, in the Strategic Basis Papers (SB), Australia criticizes New Zealand because ‘it has still developed no policy for national defence and tends to look to ... the US as its primary source of defence guidance’ (p.29). Note that C3I abbreviates the mouthful, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. 4. See Sharp, p.l46ff. An Australian policy should moreover fit with the genuine needs and shared aspirations of local people - to the extent, presumably, that these are commendable; again the presupposed value framework is critical. 5. Thus e.g. Gray (p.17) on the Reagan Administration’s ‘foolhardy brief willingness to talk publicly about nuclear strategy’, and his distain for public involvement or input. There is some concern, especially among neo-conservatives, about US defence strategies being ‘undermined by well-meaning persons who believe they are helping the cause of peace’ (Bell p.10; similarly Gray). Even those not so far right support partial information releases which maintain public confidence; e.g. Dibb on ‘the release of a generalised statement about ;the] functions of the US bases in Australia ... to give Australians more confidence about their crucial contribution to the Allied cause’ (ISA, p.166). ‘Our defence policy-making process is probably more “closed” than that of any other advanced Western democracy’ according to Langtry and Ball (p.608), who contend that ‘the public needs to be involved much more in our defence planning and operations'. For a justified critique of public exclusion and leave-it-to-the-experts approaches, see B. Martin; also Sharp. 6. The paper was drafted in mid-1985. 7. For those amassing evidence that Australia falls into the inexact class of client states, the following Australian contribution is noteworthy: ‘The US prefers to act as a member of a group, and a contribution by Australia can also assist in demonstrating to Congressional and public opinion that the objectives sought are significant enough to attract allied support’ (SB, p.28) 8. As to DI and arms control, see, e.g. Mack PR and Gray. As to D2, ‘USA has now an announced first-strike nuclear targeting policy’ technologically reinforced, Hayes, p.4; and see also Mack AC, p.111. The goal of the Reagan administration is superiority (a conveniently ambiguous term). Thus e.g. Gray (p.32): ‘it is of course essential that the United States modernize its offensive forces so as to render the Soviet Union genuinely offensive-counterforce incompetent.’ 9. On the major changes in American policy, see e.g. Gray p.118 ff. Though America is now said to have a ‘new national security concept of which SDI is the centerpiece’ it may still lack an ‘arms control policy’ (Gray, p.25,pll). Not only arms control, but American commitment to the security of allies, remain at least decidedly cloudy matters. Thus it is of little avail to contend that Australia does have a coherent secondorder global policy, namely the (discreditable) one of following prevailing American policy. For the US lacks a first-order policy which is sufficiently clear in relevant respects. The American direction of Australian policy had better be away from too much public exposure because Australians, no more than New Zealanders, mostly do not like being pushed around, even by Americans. 35 10. Thus we can avoid the important debate as to whether, and to what extent, deterrence remains part of US global “defence” policy (though it certainly remains part of the policy sold to the American public). As to the philosophical significance of the debate, see Gay, p.l29ff. and Benn. 11. The common-interest theme is often traced to (partly self-interested) American action in the Pacific in World War II. Curiously Australia’s interests are are now said also to converge with those of Japan, but to be diametrically opposed to those of the USSR (despite increasing trade). 12. Nor, though this is a longer story, does Australian culture by any means coincide with American: see CPD. Thus a uniform treatment is entirely inappropriate. Similarly, a single overarching treatment for a monolithic West is thoroughly inadequate: see further below in the text. 13. Australian planning should be looking at strategic models (game-theoretic and other) which include Australia. For, as argued below, abandoning the uniformity assumption of the monolithic West, of the West as one parish, makes significant differences to the results yielded. 14. As Cock goes on: ‘These basic issues increasingly become lost in the array of consumer choices’. 15. ‘The serf societies - more or less willingly - accept the status of “allies”, i.e. protection with rights and duties as in feudal societies. They become client countries’ (Galtung, p.169). 16. So-called by Mack PC. But the formulation presented follows G. Davidson’s more satisfactory account in Canberra Times, Wednesday, May 8, 1985, p.2. Mack considers that what amounts to the elitist case is the ‘altogether more sophisticated argument [which] holds sway ... in government’ (p.l, italics added)! 17. The “Asian hordes” derive from one of the less spoken about successors to the Yellow Peril, from the immediate past days of the Asian communist threat, the Domino theory, and White Australia. 18. As Stephenson argued, less fortunately, 20 years ago. Even when around World War II Japan, did have interest in access to strategic raw materials, the Japanese High Command decided against invading Australia because of the difficulty of dealing with the people - a point of much importance. 19. Of course, such military expenditure is also encouraged by economic forces, e.g. like much Third World hard currency expenditure it helps the American economy along a bit. 20. Heilbroner has traced some of the economic components and consequences of what, with excess exaggeration and insufficient irony, he calls ‘the rise and subsequent fall of the American imperium’ (p.52): it hasn’t fallen that far yet. ‘Empires have always been expensive and the American empire was no exception. ... The sheer military cost ... for the United States alone ... is roughly ten percent of ... GNP for the last 25 years ($2 x 10) in 1972 dollars)’. American imperial spending supplemented by other capitalist countries fueled inflation, enhanced poverty, etc., and was complements by, what it was represented as required by, counterexpenditure and efforts by the USSR. 36 ‘The establishment of an American hegemony [consisted and: resulted not just in very large military expenditures, but in the rapid build-up of American capital investments abroad. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of American-owned plant and equipment abroad leaped from $12 billion to $78 billion’ (p.54). A result of the expenditure abroad was a serious balance of payments problem (negative “capital flows” and balances), and a growing accumulation of IOUs. On this sort of basis, Heilbroner speculates that ‘the mere operations of the American imperium by itself - deemed of such critical importance to preserve the peace and security of the capitalist world - was in all likelihood a sufficient condition for the globalisation of the inflationary phenomena’ (p.57 with insert from p.56). According to Heilbroner, ‘Long before the Vietnam debacle, it was clear that American arms could not prevent the rise of revolutionary governments in the under-developed world’ (p.57). But really very little evidence of collapse is presented by Heilbroner; and seemingly there is little. What there is more substantial evidence for is the marked decline of the American imperium in the period (1973-8) concerned. One piece of evidence is the sharp decline in America’s share of World GDP, shown in the following table of select leading national economies: SHARE OF WORLD GDP (%) POPULATION SHARE COUNTRY RANK 1968 1975 1984 (1984 est) USA 1 35.0 24.3 25.0 5.2 USSR 2 11.1 11.0 13.8 6.2 JAPAN 3 5.2 8.0 9.5 2.7 GERMANY FDR 4 5.1 6.7 5.7 1.5 FRANCE 5 4.6 5.4 CHINA 6 2.9 4.8 4.3 22.6 UK 8 2.8 2.8 2.3 1.3 4.4 1.3 INDIA 12 1.3 1.5 1.1 15.1 AUSTRALIA 15 1.1 1.4 1.0 0.3 37 The table should also make it clear that if the USA cannot sustain a grand empire, nor can the USSR. A totalitarian Pax Sovietica is even less likely than a capitalistic Pax American was. 21. Although, so the documents continue, ‘neighbourhood contingencies .... are at present assessed as impossible’! The theme that the USA affords no sure guarantee of Australian defence is reiterated in Langtry and Bell, e.g. p.608. They go on there to outline the major points that reliance upon the US has distorted Australian arrangements (with forces better equipped to fight alongside the Americans in Asia than on their own in defending Australia) and has led to neglect of the regional priorities, ‘to defence planning which at least would recently paid little attention to the direct defence of our continent and the protection of our remote communities’ (p.608). 22. The French, who operate a global network second only to the Americans and more extensive than the Russians, with many forces in the Pacific region, have never been seriously considered. Yet in certain significant respects French social and cultural arrangements are closer to Antipodean ones than American arrangements are. In these days of technological warfare, the post-Waterloo loss record of the French should not be given too much weight; we don’t after all look very hard at the American record of defeats and incompetence. Etc. 23. If Australia is not likely to be threatened there is no real deterrence advantage because nothing to deter. Other advantages of the ANZUS alliance such as access to high-level intelligence are not only dubious (see PC, D. Martin), but not always guaranteed by the alliance as the blackout of New Zealand shows. 24. Soviet activity is undoubtedly perceived rather differently by American administrations than Antipodean ones. ‘An agressive, treacherous, ruthlessly self-interested, expansionist increasingly powerful, and hence increasingly threatening state - that is the image of the Soviet Union in America. It is the image which has legitimised the strategic modernation and Star Wars programs’ (to adopt Mack ST, pl). To see that this is indeed the intellectually shoddy route by which these grand and dangerous programs are justified, it is enough to work through fundamentalist sources, such as Gray. It is almost as if Americans had projected some of their own occasionally-manifested worst features into the giant enemy. 25. After some considerable reconstruction, that is. For the argument, curiously referred as that of “central balance” in newspaper-level publications of academics (e.g. Catley, Bell), is never presented in requisite detail - which is one reason why it has proved hard to criticise and refute. 26. As well both the premiss and its usual substitutes are false (see MF). The type of argument exhibited is a good example of prevalent Australian consequentialist thinking. A parallel argument, enjoying unwarranted popularity, runs: We might as well sell uranium (e.g. to France), because if we don’t someone else will - as if motives counted morally for nothing. 27. See also the discussion of Bell’s claims in D. Martin and in Mack PC. 28. Since the New Zealand restrictions on nuclear ships, ‘the Soviet media has been full of gloating references to the prospect of the collapse of the ANZUS treaty’ according to Dibb (SS, p.14). Given the unimportance of the Antipodes to Soviet interests (as Dibb 38 himself explains), Dibb is surely exaggerating, at least, when he later claims that ‘the prospect of the breakup of the AN ZUS treaty would be of enormous benefit to the USSR’s world-wide interests’ (SS p.31). Soviet support for Antipodean independence and for ‘a real nuclear weapon-free zones' in the South Pacific has its disconcerting elements (‘with friends like that ...’); but luckily the quality of ideas does not depend essentially on their sources and supporters. 29. As WPI serves to show. In a different context, Bell objects to Australian free-loading ‘on other people’s risks and burdens. That has certainly not been our tradition, and I hope it will not become so, since it is morally quite indefensible’ (p.7). Not so: bludging, for instance, is a well-established, if disapproved of, part of the tradition; and in some cases it is morally in order. However, free-riding is not being proposed merely for self interested reasons, e.g. to remove the present risks of nuclear targetting; it is being proposed with a view to altering the two great alliance structures that at present dominate international politics. Bell’s objection to such a course is that it ‘would on the one hand tend to increase the tendency of the superpowers to unilateralism, and on the other hand tend to induce many of the minor powers in question (including Australia) to consider acquiring nuclear capacity’ (p.7). The second alternative neglects the non­ proliferation treaty, to which Australia is a signatory; the first appears to assume erroneously that friendly relations with America are foregone; both are pretty minor considerations (and both can be dealt with in other negotiated ways) compared with the major problem of nuclear war. 30. The less than perspicuous symbolism is that used in Hardin (CA, p.20, p.39), but with agents’ costs or contributions, C, duly agent relativized. Hardin misleadingly treats C as a fixed parameter, thus strictly falsifying the tautology. 31. Thus Hardin who (in CA) claims to ‘demonstrate the equivalence of the logic of collective action and the Prisoners’ Dilemma’ (p.4) The demonstration is given on p.25ff. 32. But of course the two types of dilemma interconnect. 33. Even so, significant change in USA looks unlikely. Present arrangements suit not only the American corporate-administrative power elite, which can direct public opinion through its control of the main communications media, but many other fat-cat Americans, rather well. The polarisation of the world into two camps increases US control of the larger and far wealthier camp, yet scarcely reduces US trade or markets. While it does limit the global coverage of US business and multinationals, and somewhat restricts the transfer of other regions’ surplus value to the USA, it ensures the much greater advantage of being able to maintain the US domestic political economy on a military basis. The US and the USSR not only dance together; they were made for each other. Abroad US hegemony is maintained through a series of alliances and economic control strategies. Particularly ominous for the South Pacific are the Trilateral and Pacific Rim arrangements (which, with much local assistance, are helping to send Australia on its present economic trajectory). When advice or persuasion directed at allies and client states fail, economic measures can be resorted to (capital outflows, for instance, being a highly effective mechanism, “aid” a lesser device). For the most part, the imperial war machine can remain in the background. At home updated and improved imperial measures also work well. The mass consumerist society affords a rich and diverting selection of bread (much of it again imported) for a majority of Americans; television 39 and its entertainment variants offer a constant diet of circuses. For passive middle mainstream America, the vast police and security network remains a largely background and even unnoticed phenomenon; what is seen is even welcomed as a necessary shield from that other, dangerous, minority America. American social, educational and media management of opinion is obviously successful. Of present relevance, most Americans have been convinced that unilateral disarmament would be unAmerican. Thus the American administration, being hedged in by opinion they have helped to generate, cannot move in any such directions. For, given popular opinion, it would of course be politically disastrous, as well as undemojl’cratic! In the USSR, where political control is exercised to a much greater extent through overt power, present change of substance appears even less likely. 34. More of the negative enterprise is attempted elsewhere, e.g. a critique of the supposed strait-jacket of human nature is begun in CPD. From Plato through Hegel and into contemporary times it has been erroneously supposed that war, like aggression, is part of human nature, that war is a permanent (and perhaps even desirable) condition of human and social existence. For a refutation, see e.g. Trainer and Waite. 35. As observed by B. Martin, who uses this important form of argument for institutional change to get this thick book started (pp.12-13). 36. The swarm includes some anomalies, such as that somewhat tarnished hero of deep ecology, Spinoza: see e.g. Northedge. 37. Perhaps Kant had some such scenario in view in his theme that peace is empirically possible, which he coupled with his striking claim that peace is morally and rationally imperative. The latter claim, running in direct opposition to the long line of bellicose philosophers, really relies on the correct, but controversial, assumption that states are subject to the same moral relations as individual persons. Both then have an obligation to seek peace derived from forms of the categorial morality, notably from rational autonomy, the universality of maxims, and the ultimate value of persons (or, yet more chauvinistically, of humanity). 38. Veblen argued against the State on the basis that ‘governmental establishments and ... powers ... are derived from feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which in turn, are of a predatory origin and of an irresponsible character’ (p.9), however the Christianfeudal origin of the State provided only one - and a coersive - evolutionary pattern of organisation (pp. 12-13), a pattern much influenced moreover by schemes of intellectuals. Other patterns remain feasible. 39. There are now theoretical arguments for Kant’s claim, as well as practical arguments of an inductive sort. 40. Such is also the new message from America: for the peace movement to get through to the administration, American democracy must be overhauled and revitalised, capitalist democracy superseded by true democracy or “republicanism” (see especially Cohen and Rogers, and earlier Chomsky). But the message, like the US peace movements’ very limited demands for peace, leaves the State, as the bringer of wars, and main source of violence essentially intact; the structural changes suggested, which will be slow to achieve, are much too narrowly conceived. 41. My thanks for information to Andrew Mack and David Bennett, and for comments to Grover Foley and Russell Hardin. REFERENCES G. H. Andrewartha and L.C. Birch, The Ecological Web, University of Chicago Press, 1984. W.R. Ashby, Design for a Brain, Second edition, Wiley, New York, 1960. S.Beer, Designing Freedom, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto, 1974. C. Bell, ‘The case against neutrality’, Current Affairs Bulletin 61(4) (1984) 4-10. S.I. Benn, ‘Deterrence or appeasement? or, On trying to be rational about nuclear war’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 1(1984) 5-19. F. Capra and C. Spretnak, Green Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1984. R. Catley, ‘Along with the Bomb ...’ (Review of D. Martin), The Weekend Australian Magazine, 7-8 April, 1984. N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1979. P. Cock, Alternative Australia, Quartet Books, Melbourne, 1979. J. Cohen and J. Rogers, On Democracy, Penguin, New York, 1984. P. Dibb (as reported) ‘Defence Planning “lacks coherence” - researcher’, ANU Reporter, 1983. P. Dibb, ‘Issues in Australian defence’, Australian Outlook 37 (1983) 160-166; referred to as IAD. P. Dibb, ‘Soviet strategy towards Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’ paper prepared for Soviet Strategy Against Asia converence, Tokyo, November 1984; referred to as SS. P. Dibb, Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities, Report to the Minister of Defence, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986; edited text also published in The Canberra Times, 4 June 1986, pp.16-18; referred to as the Dibb Review. P. and A. Erlich, Population, Resources, Environment, Second edition, Freeman, San Francisco, 1976. H. Feith,‘Richard Falk, World order radical’, Peace Studies 24 (1985) 24-5. J. Galtung, There are Alternatives, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1984. W.C. Gay, ‘Myths about nuclear war: misconceptions in public beliefs and governmental plans’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 9(1982) 117-144. A. Gilbert, ‘The state and nature in Australia’, Australian Cultural History 1981 (ed. S. Goldberg and F.B. Smith), Canberra, 1982, pp.9-28. 42 C.S. Gray, ‘The Reagan administration and arms control’, paper presented at The Future of Arms Control Conference, Canberra. August 1985. R. Hardin, Collective Action, Resources for the Future, Washington, 1982; referred to as CA. R. Hardin, ‘Unilateral versus mutual disarmament’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12(1983) 236-254. M.D. Hayes, ‘Defending the sunburnt country’, Chain Reaction 33(August-September 1983) 11-17. R.L. Heilbroner, Beyond Boom and Bust, Norton, New York, 1978. I. Kant, Perpetual Peace (trans, and introd. M. Campbell Smith), Swan Sonnerschein, London, 1903 (first published 1795). J. O. Langtry and D Ball (eds), A Vunerable Country, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1986. A. Mack, ‘Farewell to Arms Controls’, Peace Research 9(1984) 9ff.; referred to as PR. A. Mack, ‘The pros and cons of ANZUS’, Fabian ANZUS Conference, Lome, 4-5 May 1985; referred to as PC. A. Mack, ‘Arms control, disarmament and the concept of defensive defence’, Disarmament 8(3)(1984) 109-119; referred to as AC. A. Mack, ‘The Soviet threat thesis: perceptions, capabilities and interests’ typescript, Canberra, May 1985; referred to as ST. B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984. B. Martin, Armed Neutrality for Australia, Drummond Books, Melbourne, 1984. F.S. Northedge, ‘Peace, war and philosophy’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed P. Edwards), Volume 6, Macmillan, New York, 1967, 63-67. M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965. P. Pettit, ‘Free riding and foul dealing’, Journal of Philosophy, to appear, J.J. Rousseau, A Project for Perpetual Peace (trans. E.M. Nuttal), London, 1927 (first Published 1761). R. Routley, ‘On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political fall out’, Discussion papers in Environmental philosophy #5, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984. R. Routley, ‘Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 3/4(1984) 19-34; referred to as MF. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1984; referred to as MD. 43 R. Sharp (ed.), Apocalypse No. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1984. P.R. Stephenson, The Foundations of Culture, W.J. Miles, Sydney, 1936. R. Sylvan, ‘Culture and the roots of political divergence’, typescript, Canberra, 1985; referred to as CPD. M. Taylor and H. Ward, "Chickens, whales, and bumpy goods: alternative models of public­ goods provision’, Political Studies 30(1982) 350-370. T. Trainer and H. Waite, ‘Culture and the production of aggression’, in Sharp, ep.cit, 205-226. The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy, leaked extracts published in the National Times, March 30-April 5, 1984, 23-30; referred to as SB. Threats to Australian Security, Parliamentary Joint Committee for Foreign Affairs and Defence, Australian Government Printer, Canberra; referred to as TAS. T. Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, Viking Press, New York, 1945 (first published 1917).  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 680: Draft of Australia's defence philosophy: further investigation of the nonexistent Subject The topic of the resource Computer printout. Handwritten annotation on page 1: War & Peace III. Description An account of the resource Note, one of four papers digitised from item 680. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 680 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. 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Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:23d96cf">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:23d96cf</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Como - Cupboard - Pile 3 Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/751b703fda71fa9f2929cc0337db77cb.pdf 1419dad761d2e92700a8b87ce6cff449 PDF Text Text ff/(E~,r/f# . - c" : { ~7 / ~~c;.- l1fC~ / · 00682 1 �-- - t - ,...,, ..,, ? ., .. ..,,, ~ rr r,~ "4• -~11,1fL ~ • r~~ .u"1 .5 . ,...,,-,.,~ r;•_ eJry- 1V'lit .. rI .--, -.Hl,_ °",' .::_-.,"tt/,,,,- r-.:'1 ~llA~ f'r°' Iy,-~ - ~ ~•,'f _,., Y-"'" - ';,--~~J - w,f - /4- ~ r~ r --"""""""le - - ~vn,)'l - ',1 . - -,,y ""r,tiVJ~ra-n() -r- ·i 1tr'-lll#-J -- ,r ---,vv,7n - I -'- ---- -- ----~ ~- "',J,"0 --""11- - . , f ~ f' __ ,_ ,.,.,,,..,an, -; . . .-, -,,,,..,..,,,,~JKT- r,,..if,~A'F-:. - ..,·....,or--7 - = u<-1..,)"'<'1 . -r --f -- - ~ - - - ··- ~ - =-- ,...__,_...,,, "1 --- ~ CJ - r.• - C...0,7 0""1?' 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"'~ .,, ·u -- ~ » 7, ✓t:C,//,d , y ... ?..,., 1 7, r •- 'f/,, J'(_) �Brentano could hardly have reMaLned LndLscrLMi,nate apptaudLng u~ LlLtarLanLsM (such as of pte.3sures BenthaM's); Lntellectually or "posi,tLve" coMfortabLe E>nJc, Hon wLth of stLl,I, 1,ess coutd /4e ever ctLMb down to a MaterLal,LstLc eMpLrLcLsM whLch reMoved entLreLy the LdeaLLsM of CathoLLcLsM. though a strong eMpLrLcLst pas Lt Lon one. of C~ ~~ i..c eMp_i..: i..c LsM i,s .3n uns t.3b Le one_ Bren t.3no ach i,eved so Me teMporary stabi..LLty by spLrLtual So drLve Ls at work Ln Brentano, whLch Ls ManLfested especLaLLy Ln hLs exLstentLaL reductLon prograM, Lt Ls a heavLLy qualLfLed The the reaLM, where a two God world dLstLnctLon, between theoretLcaL or was the greatest good, and a practLcaL or secular reaLM, where utLLLtarLanLsM prevaLLed. 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M0 t~V7...:.7L1-.L..: . ~< VG~1/~~~ ;//;;_~ ~ ' Jf/C-?.-.Y- o/.J tiof is 1e of e- e S- e is of is 's 's 's s, re d at to re to et of is er of re id n d e in If r. / The correctness of loving and hating, like that of truly, or correctly, then the hypothetical judgment bejudging, is objective in that it' is impossible for anyone to comes: "He apodictically rejects judgers who are both correctly what anyone else hat.es correctly or to love love disjuncThe correct A-acceptors and correct B-rejectors." what anyone else hates incorrectly. incorrectly there or A's are there either that judges "He tive judgment Ethics must make use of the comparative concept bet• are B's" could then become "He apodictically . rejects ~ ;11r\ ter than, for which there is no analogue in the theory of judgers who are both correct A-rejectors and correct B1 . ~ ) knowledge. "A is better than B," according to Brentano, rej:.!ctors." h..1 ,- • means that it is correct to prefer A, as an end, to B. The philosophical consequences of this nonpropositionEvidence and truth. Brentano's views on evidence and ~___,.al theory of judgment are far-reaching. One consequence is · truth may be found in the posthumously published ~ an interpretation of Kant's dictum that "existence" is not a Wahrheit und Evidenz (Oskar Kraus, ed., Leipzig, W30). ( predicate. According to Brentano, when we say that A The distinction between judging on the basis of evidence 'exist: of attribute an exists, "it is not the conjunction of and judging "blindly" is not to be described in terms of ence' with 'A,' but 'A' itself which we affirm." The word instinct, feelings, degree of convictio.n, or impulse to be"exists" is a synsemantic tern1 that is used to express the lieve. We arrive at the general concept of being evident, act of judgment. according to Brentano, in the same way we arrive at the All of the doctrines set forth above fall within the provconcept of a correct emotion: by contemplating actual Unpsychology. ince of what Brentano called descriptive instances of the concept, in this case actual instances of and genetic ng psychology-includi experimental like evident judgments and of blind judgments. physiological psychology-descrip tive psychology, accordEvery evident judgment is either directly or indirectly ing to Brentano, is an exact science, capable of arriving at if a judgment is indirectly evident, tts evidence is evident; laws that hold true universally and not merely . "for the ultimately, by judgments that are directly eviconferred, even is and philosophy all for basis most part." It is the dent. Directly evident judgments are of two kinds. First, capable of providing a characteristica universalis of the there are the judgments of "inner perception," such as the sort that Leibniz had conceived. J)escriptive psychology is that I am now judging in a certain way, that I judgments closely related to what Husser! was to call phenomenolsuch-and-such, that I think I remember so-andsee to seem from Vienna in ogy. Husser! had studied with Brentano so. Second, there are judgments of reason or insights (Ei111884 to 1886, when Brentano used the expression besichten), such as the judgments that two things are more schreibende Phiinomenologie ("descriptive phenomenolthan one thing; that that which is red is, as such, other than ogy") as an alternative name for descriptive psychology. that ·which is green; that there cannot be a triangle with of doctrine Brentano's (Husser! later wrote that without four sides; or that a whole cannot exist if its parts do not intentionality, "phenomenology could not have come into exist. being at all.") Brentano's conception of psychology has led Every judgment that is evident is true, but not every some of his critics to accuse him of what Frege and Husthat is true is evident. Most judgments of "outer judgment does serl called psychologism. However, this accusation (of the external world), Brentano believed, are perception" his and evidence of theory Brentano's account not take into true, but all of them are "blind"; they are not evident. He moral philosophy, both of which he took to be branches of argued, howeve r, that the hypoth esis of a three-dimendescriptive psychology. sional external world , with its familiar details concerning Moral philosophy. Brentano's ethical views are set forth physical bodies, has an "infinitely greater probability" ed., 3d 1889; (Leipzig, Erkenntnis in Ursprung sittlicher than any of its alternative s. Judgments based on memory, Oskar Kraus, ed., 1934), translated by Cecil Hague as The too, are "blind"; but many of them confirm each other, and Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London, they are worthy of our confide nce. 1902), and in Grundlegung und Aujbau der Ethik ("The In WahrheU und Evidenz Brentano characterized truth ed., Mayer-Hillebrand, . Basis and Structure of Ethics," F reference to evidence: "Truth pertains to the judgment by assumpthe upon ethics his based Bern, 1952). Brentano of the person who judges correctly ... hence it pertains tion that the members o( the third class of mental pheto the judgment of one who asserts what the person who nomena, loving and hating, may be said to be correct or judges with evid e nce would as sert" (p. 130). In addition, incorrect, just as judgments may be said to be correct or into say that A exists is to say that anyone who judged about correct. To say that something,_!\, is good is to say that it ') lrl' with evidence would accept A, and to say that A does not A ~~I , apodictiis it is, that is impossible to love A incorrectly; exist is to say that anyone who judged about A with evi / ~ .> cally to reject incorrect lovers of A Analogously, to say that dence would reject A The "measure of all things," then, is rect haters of A A is bad is apodictically to ga· the man who judges with evidence. The only way to grasp the concept of correct emotion, However, these statements, relating truth to evidence, emoof cases actual according to Brentano, is to contrast not give us the whole of Brentano's theory of truth . do emotions of cases with correct" as "qualified are tions that "Evident" is said to be predicate in the strict sense of the that are not. This is analogous to the way in which we term, but "true" and "exists" are not, being only synseunderstand, for example, what it is to be red and what it is mantic. This brings us to Brentano's theory of categories. · to be colored. Thus we learn that knowledge is good, joy Theory of categories. The basic theses of Brentano's enrichment every bad), is what in is good (unless it is joy theory of categories may be stated as (I) there is nothing within the realm of ideas is good, love of the ood is ood, IJJI other than concrete particular things, and (2) every judglove of the a is bad and the ri ht end in life is to choose prr I ..1 l __,,,..._...._4 ..-........ _...._.... .•.Jl &.t. ! .._... t...l ...... ---- _____ .i~ :hP f'C lliO.t..!l.nCP n. thP u>iP •tinn of. c;_on1P �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Photocopy of title page and two pages from McAlister L L (ed) (1976) The philosophy of Brentano, Duckwort, 36-37. 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M0 t~V7...:.7L1-.L..: . ~< VG~1/~~~ ;//;;_~ ~ ' Jf/C-?.-.Y- o/.J tiof is 1e of e- e S- e is of is 's 's 's s, re d at to re to et of is er of re id n d e in If r. / The correctness of loving and hating, like that of truly, or correctly, then the hypothetical judgment bejudging, is objective in that it' is impossible for anyone to comes: "He apodictically rejects judgers who are both correctly what anyone else hat.es correctly or to love love disjuncThe correct A-acceptors and correct B-rejectors." what anyone else hates incorrectly. incorrectly there or A's are there either that judges "He tive judgment Ethics must make use of the comparative concept bet• are B's" could then become "He apodictically . rejects ~ ;11r\ ter than, for which there is no analogue in the theory of judgers who are both correct A-rejectors and correct B1 . ~ ) knowledge. "A is better than B," according to Brentano, rej:.!ctors." h..1 ,- • means that it is correct to prefer A, as an end, to B. The philosophical consequences of this nonpropositionEvidence and truth. Brentano's views on evidence and ~___,.al theory of judgment are far-reaching. One consequence is · truth may be found in the posthumously published ~ an interpretation of Kant's dictum that "existence" is not a Wahrheit und Evidenz (Oskar Kraus, ed., Leipzig, W30). ( predicate. According to Brentano, when we say that A The distinction between judging on the basis of evidence 'exist: of attribute an exists, "it is not the conjunction of and judging "blindly" is not to be described in terms of ence' with 'A,' but 'A' itself which we affirm." The word instinct, feelings, degree of convictio.n, or impulse to be"exists" is a synsemantic tern1 that is used to express the lieve. We arrive at the general concept of being evident, act of judgment. according to Brentano, in the same way we arrive at the All of the doctrines set forth above fall within the provconcept of a correct emotion: by contemplating actual Unpsychology. ince of what Brentano called descriptive instances of the concept, in this case actual instances of and genetic ng psychology-includi experimental like evident judgments and of blind judgments. physiological psychology-descrip tive psychology, accordEvery evident judgment is either directly or indirectly ing to Brentano, is an exact science, capable of arriving at if a judgment is indirectly evident, tts evidence is evident; laws that hold true universally and not merely . "for the ultimately, by judgments that are directly eviconferred, even is and philosophy all for basis most part." It is the dent. Directly evident judgments are of two kinds. First, capable of providing a characteristica universalis of the there are the judgments of "inner perception," such as the sort that Leibniz had conceived. J)escriptive psychology is that I am now judging in a certain way, that I judgments closely related to what Husser! was to call phenomenolsuch-and-such, that I think I remember so-andsee to seem from Vienna in ogy. Husser! had studied with Brentano so. Second, there are judgments of reason or insights (Ei111884 to 1886, when Brentano used the expression besichten), such as the judgments that two things are more schreibende Phiinomenologie ("descriptive phenomenolthan one thing; that that which is red is, as such, other than ogy") as an alternative name for descriptive psychology. that ·which is green; that there cannot be a triangle with of doctrine Brentano's (Husser! later wrote that without four sides; or that a whole cannot exist if its parts do not intentionality, "phenomenology could not have come into exist. being at all.") Brentano's conception of psychology has led Every judgment that is evident is true, but not every some of his critics to accuse him of what Frege and Husthat is true is evident. Most judgments of "outer judgment does serl called psychologism. However, this accusation (of the external world), Brentano believed, are perception" his and evidence of theory Brentano's account not take into true, but all of them are "blind"; they are not evident. He moral philosophy, both of which he took to be branches of argued, howeve r, that the hypoth esis of a three-dimendescriptive psychology. sional external world , with its familiar details concerning Moral philosophy. Brentano's ethical views are set forth physical bodies, has an "infinitely greater probability" ed., 3d 1889; (Leipzig, Erkenntnis in Ursprung sittlicher than any of its alternative s. Judgments based on memory, Oskar Kraus, ed., 1934), translated by Cecil Hague as The too, are "blind"; but many of them confirm each other, and Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London, they are worthy of our confide nce. 1902), and in Grundlegung und Aujbau der Ethik ("The In WahrheU und Evidenz Brentano characterized truth ed., Mayer-Hillebrand, . Basis and Structure of Ethics," F reference to evidence: "Truth pertains to the judgment by assumpthe upon ethics his based Bern, 1952). Brentano of the person who judges correctly ... hence it pertains tion that the members o( the third class of mental pheto the judgment of one who asserts what the person who nomena, loving and hating, may be said to be correct or judges with evid e nce would as sert" (p. 130). In addition, incorrect, just as judgments may be said to be correct or into say that A exists is to say that anyone who judged about correct. To say that something,_!\, is good is to say that it ') lrl' with evidence would accept A, and to say that A does not A ~~I , apodictiis it is, that is impossible to love A incorrectly; exist is to say that anyone who judged about A with evi / ~ .> cally to reject incorrect lovers of A Analogously, to say that dence would reject A The "measure of all things," then, is rect haters of A A is bad is apodictically to ga· the man who judges with evidence. The only way to grasp the concept of correct emotion, However, these statements, relating truth to evidence, emoof cases actual according to Brentano, is to contrast not give us the whole of Brentano's theory of truth . do emotions of cases with correct" as "qualified are tions that "Evident" is said to be predicate in the strict sense of the that are not. This is analogous to the way in which we term, but "true" and "exists" are not, being only synseunderstand, for example, what it is to be red and what it is mantic. This brings us to Brentano's theory of categories. · to be colored. Thus we learn that knowledge is good, joy Theory of categories. The basic theses of Brentano's enrichment every bad), is what in is good (unless it is joy theory of categories may be stated as (I) there is nothing within the realm of ideas is good, love of the ood is ood, IJJI other than concrete particular things, and (2) every judglove of the a is bad and the ri ht end in life is to choose prr I ..1 l __,,,..._...._4 ..-........ _...._.... .•.Jl &.t. ! .._... t...l ...... ---- _____ .i~ :hP f'C lliO.t..!l.nCP n. thP u>iP •tinn of. c;_on1P The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Photocopy of title page and two pages from McAlister L L (ed) (1976) The philosophy of Brentano, Duckwort, 36-37. (2 leaves) .P .f'? t__ ·-1c /'~'i.- -- 1 Z, /-,,v / Ca-e... t it(_,; ; ~ • // ce~ ,-.- fc/YYC. /; ~~ /«., /~ ~- / ~ / d ,of ✓ ~ 1 J {,:, ~ -:: ;}7 ~ - ~ 7?"/ c //p / ,,,--,-- c £.;,7 .,, u;,-< ✓c. ~ "&~ / r /2 ~ ~ / l 7~ t"~~ ,' •• •• ;Jo ;ft<J1 o -;::: 1/4 ~/~ _:; ~.✓- ~ ~2:. __., -, ft ~~; ~ ~ ~ ~ "',,,: :~ / C ~ .-/ ~ ,G;_:__ ~ ~ ~ ?~--..__ ~4/ I ?~/ -~_ _'_~  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 682: Notes and cuttings on Franz Brentano Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten and typescript notes. Includes copies of published works by other authors Description An account of the resource Published works redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Title in collection finding aid: Manilla Folder - Brentano - Better, = Correct Pref. RS: many v. misc ms notes on Brentano (but also other topics: including Broad on Sidgwick). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 682 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [37] leaves. 14.09 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:00cae17">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:00cae17</a> Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/b53260d8b71b1e884c7cd83c19548c36.pdf 05c51d75c317aed7f6e3c1eb1eb7d7d6 PDF Text Text UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION: Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more Kantian imperatival form: Act only in such a way that you action would serve to maximize net expected utility. or explained j The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of { pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or happiness - of members of some other base class. But the further detail s are not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are in fact corrnnon to often confused utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism, with utilitarianism. To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required . Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve. Certainly its application can still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to racism or nuclear escalation: so however can most rival ethical positions. But its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends, and not merely with ~aJ e: directions. its serious adoption forces adherents in these Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural environ- ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism. So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position: it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION: Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more Kantian imperatival form: Act only in such a way that you action would serve to maximize net expected utility. or explained j The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of { pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or happiness - of members of some other base class. But the further detail s are not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are in fact corrnnon to often confused utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism, with utilitarianism. To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required . Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve. Certainly its application can still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to racism or nuclear escalation: so however can most rival ethical positions. But its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends, and not merely with ~aJ e: directions. its serious adoption forces adherents in these Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural environ- ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism. So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position: it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 683: Draft of Utilitarianism as supererogatory: maximizing versus satisizing in value theory Subject The topic of the resource Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations. Description An account of the resource Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [1] leaf. 503.45 KB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:da9203b">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:da9203b</a> Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/9a0eaf07f4febb1ac32bde2cd9f153e1.pdf 05c51d75c317aed7f6e3c1eb1eb7d7d6 PDF Text Text UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION: Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more Kantian imperatival form: Act only in such a way that you action would serve to maximize net expected utility. or explained j The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of { pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or happiness - of members of some other base class. But the further detail s are not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are in fact corrnnon to often confused utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism, with utilitarianism. To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required . Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve. Certainly its application can still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to racism or nuclear escalation: so however can most rival ethical positions. But its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends, and not merely with ~aJ e: directions. its serious adoption forces adherents in these Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural environ- ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism. So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position: it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION: Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more Kantian imperatival form: Act only in such a way that you action would serve to maximize net expected utility. or explained j The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of { pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or happiness - of members of some other base class. But the further detail s are not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are in fact corrnnon to often confused utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism, with utilitarianism. To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required . Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve. Certainly its application can still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to racism or nuclear escalation: so however can most rival ethical positions. But its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends, and not merely with ~aJ e: directions. its serious adoption forces adherents in these Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural environ- ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism. So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position: it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 683: Draft appendix, notes and cutting on utilitarianism Subject The topic of the resource Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations. Includes photocopy of pages from publication by Hutcheson, with a note from Charles to Richard. Hutcheson F (1755) System of moral philosophy. A System of Moral Philosophy, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139583688.019 Description An account of the resource Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683. Title in collection finding aid: Appendix: ts + ms draft - attached to xc from Hutcheson 'Adventitious Rights'. Published work redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [8] leaves. 1.93 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7aded01">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7aded01</a> Box 59: Nuclear https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/382a1128067b3cf4c3bcc193ab4cac7d.pdf b45dc2ea94eb2ca3936e966fc7a70ea7 PDF Text Text ETHICS PROJECTS AND ISSUES 1 l That of putting together and justifying as largely evaded Aristotelean, outside one of two . whole a svstem of ethics. ~t ask is ~ One traditions. which sets out with a 74. R where it is tackled is the conception of Man's end or uJ timate good, and ),J( / .' )(~ then endeavours to show that the virtuous life - which is what ethics concerns - wilJ 1 ff/f'O fulfil this or realise it. By contrast, Cicero begins with a fairly full-fledp-ed colJ ection of duties and makes some attempt at showing personal advantage will not clash with those. for Duty's together: sake requires a .iustification. And collections ,-e_ 9. ~ ,; ~ru.:t: there is a ~grneu-+: of coherence on ethical svstems . 21 Why want fallacies, such as those fallacies? be. J abel1ec'l have naturaJ ism and to But nuty be pulled prescriptive, RR Because if they weren't fallacies too much that is not determined would Briefly, one would not expect that is ohligatory or good to fol low from the scientific facts, because that would determine which value system to adhere to . But there is not a fina1 unique system delivered from the facts. 31 Def ea ting objections achieved by to consequentionalist objections reliance on principles ( act - ) utilitarianism is that to deontics . sometjmes a One of the frequent better outcome or like act consequentialism , that ob,jection no longer carries any weight . can be Under satisizing It is· enough , at most , that application of the principle yields a sufficiently good outcome . T � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ETHICS PROJECTS AND ISSUES 1 l That of putting together and justifying as largely evaded Aristotelean, outside one of two . whole a svstem of ethics. ~t ask is ~ One traditions. which sets out with a 74. R where it is tackled is the conception of Man's end or uJ timate good, and ),J( / .' )(~ then endeavours to show that the virtuous life - which is what ethics concerns - wilJ 1 ff/f'O fulfil this or realise it. By contrast, Cicero begins with a fairly full-fledp-ed colJ ection of duties and makes some attempt at showing personal advantage will not clash with those. for Duty's together: sake requires a .iustification. And collections ,-e_ 9. ~ ,; ~ru.:t: there is a ~grneu-+: of coherence on ethical svstems . 21 Why want fallacies, such as those fallacies? be. J abel1ec'l have naturaJ ism and to But nuty be pulled prescriptive, RR Because if they weren't fallacies too much that is not determined would Briefly, one would not expect that is ohligatory or good to fol low from the scientific facts, because that would determine which value system to adhere to . But there is not a fina1 unique system delivered from the facts. 31 Def ea ting objections achieved by to consequentionalist objections reliance on principles ( act - ) utilitarianism is that to deontics . sometjmes a One of the frequent better outcome or like act consequentialism , that ob,jection no longer carries any weight . can be Under satisizing It is· enough , at most , that application of the principle yields a sufficiently good outcome . T  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 683: Draft of Ethics projects and issues Subject The topic of the resource Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations. Description An account of the resource Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [1] leaf. 794.1 KB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fa52764">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fa52764</a> Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3