After three consecutive issues shaped by concentrated guest-editor projects — the Butler symposium of Vol. 23 and the Le Guin/Butler pairing of Vol. 24.1 — Vol. 24.2 returns to the broader, more eclectic register that has always characterized The Acorn at its most expansive. The issue carries no single organizing theme in the guest-editor sense, but it is far from miscellaneous: Moses’s editorial introduction, written in Austin in March 2025, identifies a governing question that binds the disparate contributions together — the distinction between dogmatic pacifism (which applies rigid habits of indifference to self-reflection and circumstance) and philosophical pacifism (which is constitutively committed to inquiry, debate, and the application of ideals to a non-ideal world). The issue went to press in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, and that political atmosphere — its anxieties, its disillusions, and what they demand of anyone committed to nonviolence — hovers explicitly over several of the contributions.
The issue opens with Sanjay Lal’s feature essay, “Gandhian Insights as a Possible Cure for the Post-Election Blues,” which is the most directly topical piece The Acorn has published in recent memory. Writing in the wake of November 5, 2024, Lal turns not to Gandhi the political tactician but to Gandhi the philosophical counselor, drawing out four aspects of his thought that bear directly on the emotional and moral condition of activists in defeat. The first is Gandhi’s insistence that political power resides in the people — not in parliaments or election outcomes — and that civil disobedience is “the storehouse of power”: a resource that no electoral result can deplete. The second is Gandhi’s priority of moral standing over electoral success and his argument that means and ends are inseparable — that no political victory achieved by moral disregard can count as a victory in any meaningful sense. The third is Gandhi’s concept of swaraj or self-rule: that genuine community liberation is impossible without prior moral self-governance in the individual, making inner work the precondition rather than the alternative to political engagement. The fourth is Gandhi’s counsel of nonattachment to consequences — his Bhagavad Gita-inflected insistence that right action is always within the individual’s control, while outcomes never are. Lal closes by defending Gandhi’s remarkably positive view of human nature, arguing that the love-force Gandhi describes as the basis of social life is visible in everyday familial and neighborly relations even among voters whose political choices appear to contradict it.
Andrew Fiala’s “Whose Pacifism? Which Nonviolence? Key Questions that Guide the Inquiry of Philosophical Pacifism” invokes Alasdair MacIntyre’s questions about rationality and justice as a methodological prompt. Fiala proposes five clarifying questions that he argues are implicit in all serious pacifist literature but rarely made explicit: Who has the obligation to be peaceful? To whom is pacifism addressed? When, or under what circumstances, is nonviolence required? What kinds of nonviolence should be employed? And in what manner and to what degree should the commitment to nonviolence be manifest? By working through each in turn, Fiala demonstrates that philosophical pacifism is not the simplistic, dogmatic position that critics such as Sam Harris and Derrick Jensen caricature, but an open-ended inquiry that engages the full complexity of ideal and non-ideal theory. Philosophical pacifism, Fiala argues, is ultimately broader and more useful as a critical social theory than traditional just war theory, and a promising convergence between the two traditions is now emerging around the study of jus post bellum. The paper draws a sustained analogy with feminist theory: just as feminism moved from dogmatic assertion to complex, situated inquiry, so too has philosophical pacifism developed into a rich scholarly tradition that resists reduction to any bumper-sticker formula. Carlo Filice’s “Did Jesus Teach Absolute Pacifism?” brings the issue’s inquiry about dogmatism and principle into an unexpected but fitting historical register. Taking a fresh look at Gospel texts, Filice weighs the evidence from both the teachings and the actions of Jesus, and concludes that it weighs clearly in favor of a pacifist leader founding a pacifist movement — one who not only anticipates Kantian standards of principled action but extends the imperative further by grounding it in the fulfillment of love. Modern peace churches, Filice argues, are the most faithful heirs to this heritage. Yet Filice also notes, consonant with Fiala’s findings, that ruling out any engagement with just war theory may be more than the Gospel record strictly warrants — a concern that was not lost on the influential church fathers who followed.
The reviews section features a substantial joint engagement with Mechthild Nagel’s Ludic Ubuntu Ethics: Decolonizing Justice (SUNY Press), under the title “Justice Among Neighbors.” Nagel’s book proposes a dialectical progression of stages through which justice can be transformed: from vengeance, upward through shaming and insurrection, toward restorative justice, and finally to a plateau of transformation where love and laughter thrive. Her analysis engages colonial vestiges embedded in ostensibly peacetime institutions — policing, imprisonment, child welfare agencies — as well as African experiments with formal Truth and Reconciliation processes, the Hawai’ian virtue of balance (Ho’oponopono), and the Lakota Circle of Courage, culminating in a call for abolition democracy. J. Chidozie Chukwuokolo’s review, “Narrative of a Committed Intercultural Philosopher,” offers a careful account of Nagel’s ambitions and her engagement with African T&R processes; Andrew Fitz-Gibbon’s “Transforming Broken Justice” brings decades of personal experience as a foster parent of more than one hundred children to bear on the difficulty of finding solutions for evils that are, as he puts it, too well known; and Nagel responds to both in her “Author’s Reply: Ludic Ubuntu Ethics for Our Times.” Sanjay Lal closes the review section with “The Many Gifts of Intercultural Dialogue,” a review of the Festschrift for Edward Demenchonok, Dialogue and the New Cosmopolitanism: Conversations with Edward Demenchonok, edited by Fred Dallmayr. The volume argues for a cosmopolitanism that is not hegemonic but dialogical — democratic, lateral, among equal partners — grounded in Dallmayr’s conviction that peace is not the product of unilateral will-power but a gift arising from ethical attention to others cultivated through genuine dialogue. Moses notes in his introduction that Demenchonok is also credited within this very issue as the editor of a 2009 special issue on global violence and peace for The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, making Vol. 24.2 a modest but fitting site for celebrating a philosophical life dedicated to intercultural exchange.
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