Vol. 17.2 picks up where the previous issue left off in the philosophy of nonviolence and pushes directly into the hardest terrain: the cases where intuition most powerfully resists pacifist conclusions. Both articles argue from within the Western philosophical tradition — Tolstoy and Kant respectively — that nonviolence is philosophically defensible even when the stakes are highest, and the issue closes with two memorial tributes to Gene Sharp, who died on January 28, 2018, two days before the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. Taken together, the issue stages a sustained argument that the philosophical foundations of nonviolence are more secure, and more demanding, than either its opponents or its pragmatic defenders tend to acknowledge.
Charles Fink’s “Nonviolence and the Hard Question” takes Tolstoy’s canonical challenge seriously rather than dismissing it — the case of an innocent child threatened by a violent criminal, where killing the attacker seems to be the only option. Fink does not argue that pacifism is obligatory in this case, but that it is at least permissible — and that this more modest conclusion is less trivial than it sounds, since pacifists are routinely accused of cowardice or selfishness precisely for refusing to kill in defense of others. His argument proceeds on three fronts. First, the consequentialist case for defensive killing is shakier than it appears: we cannot know with certainty what the consequences of either action will be, and Tolstoy’s point that killing the criminal is certain while the child’s death is not has more force than our intuitions typically allow. Second, attempts to define violence narrowly enough to permit defensive killing — as retaliation only, or as harm wished for its own sake — fail, because killing someone as a means to an end still treats that person as a mere thing, violating their dignity as surely as any act of malice. Third, and most positively, if it is at least permissible to cultivate agapeic love — the boundless, impartial love that cannot simultaneously wish harm on anyone — then it is at least permissible to commit oneself to nonviolence in every circumstance. Fink draws on the Buddha’s Metta Sutta, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Sermon on the Mount to show that the ideal of agapeic love is not the exclusive property of any tradition, and that those who would compel us to commit violence in defense of the innocent are implicitly insisting that unconditional love is a moral failing — a conclusion he finds plainly absurd. Matthew Rukgaber’s “Guns as Lies” approaches the question from a different angle, mounting a Kantian argument that guns, like lies, are evil in themselves regardless of the costs and benefits they produce. Kant’s controversial claim is that lying is reprehensible even when it harms no one, because it corrupts practical reason itself — it makes truth a mere means to be used rather than a constraint to be obeyed, erodes character, and ultimately destroys the foundation on which all rights and contracts rest. Rukgaber argues that bearing lethal arms does the same kind of moral damage: guns are not merely dangerous objects but machines with their own normative and material teleology, one that requires the bearer to arrogate to themselves the power of violent enforcement — a power that in a civil society properly belongs only to the collective. Just as lying places individual judgment above the “common authority as the proper enforcer of rights,” so gun ownership constitutes a standing declaration that one wills to live in a community where violent self-help is the operative standard. This structural moral objection, Rukgaber argues, operates independently of any empirical assessment of risk and places a significant burden on any advocate of gun rights to show that the benefits outweigh not only the physical harms guns produce but the moral distortions they require.
Three book reviews carry the issue’s global reach outward in three directions. Bill Gay reviews Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity Press, 2015), finding it a commendable and accessible introductory text whose core contribution is a taxonomy of four nonviolent strategies: Gandhi’s satyagraha, which seeks to persuade and then to dramatize injustice through willingness to suffer; the “moral jiu-jitsu” of Richard Gregg; the “political jiu-jitsu” of Gene Sharp’s tradition, which exploits the dependence of governments on popular compliance; and the decentralized occupation-based experiments of Occupy and Critical Mass. May roots all four in the values of dignity and equality, drawing largely on Kant for the former and Jacques Rancière for the latter. May’s final chapter on neoliberalism as structural violence — arguing that the appropriate nonviolent response is to undermine rather than overthrow the neoliberal order — is, Gay suggests, one of the book’s most distinctive and timely contributions. Gay notes some gaps, including May’s failure to engage The Acorn and Concerned Philosophers for Peace literature, and his occasional conflation of pacifism with passivism. Sanjay Lal reviews the two-volume anthology Nonviolence as a Way of Life (Motilal Banarsidass, 2017), edited by Predrag Cicovacki and Kendy Hess, which brings together fifty-four contributors from twelve countries and five continents under the rubric of the Jain concept of ahimsa. Lal identifies the collection’s greatest strength as its breadth — chapters range from Jain studies proper (Donaldson on environmental rites, Fisher on the 1947 Partition) to everyday applications in prisons, parenting, medicine, and environmental ethics — while also noting its unevenness, singling out Apressyan’s “The Limits of Nonviolence in Reactive Action” for failing to engage the Gandhian means-ends literature and thus arriving too quickly at a conclusion that violent responses are sometimes justified. He offers sustained praise for contributions by Barry Gan, Robert Holmes, and Johan Galtung, whose pieces collectively make the philosophical case that violence is not basic to human nature and that nonviolence is a continuum rather than a binary. Court Lewis reviews Chaiwat Satha-Anand’s Nonviolence and Islamic Imperatives (Irene Publishing, 2017), a collection of essays written over thirty years that argues Islam’s core values require nonviolence and that the association of Islam with terrorism represents a profound misreading of Islamic history. Satha-Anand’s anchoring move is to reframe September 11 — not as 2001 but as 1906, when Muslim leader Sheth Haji Habib supported Gandhi and helped bring his South African satyagraha movement into existence — and to derive from the Qur’an and Prophetic Traditions five pillars of nonviolent peacemaking: willingness to disobey unjust laws, courage before evil, discipline, community, and constructive action. Lewis recommends the book to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Islamic history and practice, noting that its insights are valuable to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The issue closes with two memorials for Gene Sharp. Barry Gan, former editor of The Acorn, recalls Sharp as a figure who shifted the field of nonviolence decisively toward its pragmatic and political dimensions, deliberately separating strategic nonviolence from the metaphysical and ethical framework in which Gandhi had embedded it. Gan traces Sharp’s intellectual development from early Gandhi scholarship through the magnum opus The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) and the later From Dictatorship to Democracy, translated into thirty-one languages and used by activists across the Arab Spring and the former Soviet republics. Gan offers personal memories of Sharp speaking at the Rochester Zen Center in the late 1980s and at an Oxford conference in 2007 — “almost shy, certainly affable” in small settings, “comfortable and expansive” at the podium. Gan’s one note of puzzlement is Sharp’s determination to emphasize the political and ignore the ethical in Gandhi, a separation that Gan, as a philosopher of pacifism, never quite accepted. Jack DuVall, co-author of A Force More Powerful and longtime collaborator with Sharp’s tradition, offers a complementary portrait, calling Sharp “a general of ideas” who built the roads before commerce could travel them. DuVall suggests that the absence of overt moral framing in many Sharp-influenced movements may be less significant than it appears: Vaclav Havel’s insistence that nonviolent resistance means “living within the truth” points to an implicit moral dimension that operated even where explicit ethical commitment was absent. Together the two tributes frame Sharp’s legacy as genuinely open — the colloquy between principled and pragmatic nonviolence that his life’s work provoked is, DuVall writes, “open-ended,” and the rights and freedom of all of us may yet depend on how it continues.
The Acorn Journal 