Socratic Pacifism

Sometime in the period between 2006 and 2013, I did a small paper for the Ancient Philosophy Circle at the U of Minnesota trying to put together Socrates' prohibition of harm (in the Republic) and his very odd and permissive view of harm (in the Apology). I thought the  resulting position was a reasonable starting point for new  discussions about torture and the limits of a just war.

The Odd Pacifism of Socrates

Peter Shea

Some people were disappointed that the convicted would-be terrorist Moussaoui was not sentenced to death. In commenting on his sentence, someone remarked that the prison he was being sent to was very debilitating, and that he would go insane soon after he arrived there. He is to be kept in total solitary confinement for the rest of his life; Moussaoui was in his late thirties when convicted.

Those who held this view proposed to plunge a relatively young man who is obviously mentally unbalanced into a state from which no further human progress, including repentance and remorse, could possibly be made. No other rationale seemed to fit the conditions of imprisonment. I was reminded of Hamlet refusing to kill his uncle when he found him at prayer, for fear his uncle might be repenting his sins. He wanted to catch him in some foul deed and send him straight to hell.

What sets the limit on what one can do to one’s enemies?

In the Republic, Socrates is pursuing definitions of justice (actually, of a broader notion that might be translated as morality, decency, right conduct with reference to other people – I’ll continue to use “justice,” here.) Someone suggests that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. Socrates objects that harm means making someone worse, that making someone worse means making that person less just, and that it is very strange for someone to claim that justice makes a person unjust. This argument convinces the assembled company, and they proceed to the next definition.

Socrates points out that one cannot consistently hold a conception of justice that permits one to do absolutely anything to one’s enemy, because some of what one can do to people injures them with respect to their capacity for justice itself, and so shows a disregard for the justice in the name of which one is proceeding against them. If I value justice or decency of soul, that means that I am committed to maintaining and supporting that capacity in other people.

One might think that this line of thought brings both Socrates (as portrayed in Republic) and moral common sense into line with Jesus: “Love your enemy, do good to those who hate you. Pray for those who persecute you. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well.” That goes way too far. The motive for Jesus’ position seems to me different, a concern to maintain the possibility of relationship, in a context in which the Jews were compelled to live among militarily superior enemies. There are many forms of pacifism more demanding than the view Socrates presents here. But is it true that having a commitment to rightness, morality, decency implies that one strives to bring those about in all other human beings, and so refrains from any action that would do true harm to anyone? Is a limited pacifist commitment implicit in having any moral commitment at all?

If so, this pacifism is an odd sort of pacifism, as the definition of harm is an odd definition of harm. One might try to explain “harm” by giving standard examples: killing, causing pain, depriving of property. But Socrates explicitly excludes those as examples of harm, most eloquently in the Apology, where he says: my accusers can kill me, but they cannot do me harm. It does not necessarily make a person worse, to kill him or her, on Socrates’ view. His own long military service seems not to count against his professed commitment not to harm people.

In this discussion, I want to first explore this idea of harm as “making a person worse” and then to consider the limits on violent action that might be implied by this standard.

Don’t we normally take harm to involve doing things to people that they don’t want done to them? Isn’t Socrates’ definition of harm just wildly implausible?

Here’s an argument that it is not implausible. We know that we are sometimes wrong about the effects of events in our lives. Sometimes, an illness or accident works to one’s ultimate advantage. Sometimes, inheriting money or getting a good job is the beginning of a person’s downfall. For the person who cares only about happiness, the decision about whether some event was truly harmful or only apparently harmful will depend on whether the event contributed or detracted from ultimate happiness. For the person who cares most about the virtue of justice in the soul, the decision about whether some event was harmful or only apparently harmful will depend on whether it made the one to whom it happened more or less just.

But does the idea of moral harm make any sense? One might want to maintain that the idea of harm has its home with respect to common sense ideas about happiness and comfort. One can make sense of making someone worse in those respects, but one can make no good sense out of the idea of making someone worse with respect to justice in the soul. People do become worse, or better, but they are not made worse or better. A pacifism that commits to refraining from moral harm is empty.

My response to this is: how could anyone know the answer to this question? We see admirable character correlated with certain advantages: good mentors, support and encouragement, appropriate challenges at various life stages, etc. We see despicable character correlated with certain disadvantages: people being faced with great pressures and temptations early in life, lacking any plausible role models, being raised with very low expectations about human decency. And, we know that people have turned out very badly, despite every imaginable advantage and have turned out very well, despite every imaginable disadvantage. Empirically, this seems just an open question, and I cannot see any way of answering it in principle, that is, from some deeper than average understanding of virtue and vice. We assume that choice is involved in the formation of virtues and vices, that they are different from diseases and disabilities. But it is not clear from the cases how responsible one person can be for bringing about bad choices in another. So, it would seem reasonable that the person who is committed to some conception of justice would refrain from doing those things to another person that might make him or her worse, without prejudging the extremely difficult question: can one person make another person worse?

But what counts as possible moral harm, the sort of thing that a committed moral person should avoid doing to another person? This will depend on how one understands moral virtues, and how one thinks people become worse with respect to such virtues. With respect to the ideals presented in Plato’s dialogues, the dialogues give some suggestions about what harm would look like. 

In Apology, Socrates does an inventory of complacency: there are three groups of people in whom he sought wisdom, all of whom disappointed him: the politicians, who, knowing nothing, thought they knew everything already and didn’t need to make progress; the artisans, who knew some things but assumed that their knowledge in one area empowered them to pronounce on all matters; and the poets, who refused to interpret and analyze the fine words they uttered under poetic inspiration. One might say: here we have, in an indirect way, an account of harm. Anyone who brings about complacency in a person, of any of these sorts, is harming that person with respect to the virtue of wisdom. So sophists harm the politicians, by teaching them how to defend whatever claim they might choose to put forth. Those who admire and praise the artisans and the poets for their admitted excellences without challenging them to go beyond those limited accomplishments do them moral harm, as well.

So here is one clear way that the dialogues suggest one can make a person worse: by encouraging self-satisfaction, discouraging exploration beyond the range of his or her primary expertise or knowledge. One harms someone by cultivating and maintaining illusions and prejudices.

Another, different idea about harm is presented in the Republic at 538c. Plato pictures a young man who has grown up respecting certain guidelines of action, without having thought about them very hard. This young man has all sorts of immoderate desires, which he restrains out of respect for the principles he has learned. Then someone questions him about his beliefs and “reduces him to the belief that this thing is no more beautiful than it is ugly, and the same with what is just and good and the things he honored most.” This person will then give way to his desires, since he no longer respects the guidelines that have held them in check, and will descend thereby into what Plato elsewhere describes as a kind of madness. Only carefully selected people who have been through rigorous training can, at the age of thirty, be trained in dialectic and trusted to use it to find the truth. In particular, at that age they can be trusted to keep at the search for the requisite five years, and not wander off skylarking after they finish day one of the “chastity” unit: “arguments against.”

So, Plato suggests here, in a passage that comes very close to endorsing the indictment of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, one can cause harm by introducing critical reflection at a developmentally inappropriate point. To put it more generally, one harms someone if one brings that person’s soul into a state in which reason is subordinated to other psychological forces, such as desire or fear.

In the examples discussed, philosophic criticism of belief is the tool by which people may be made better or worse. One harms people by withholding such criticism from those that need it and by applying such criticism to the beliefs of those who are not ready for such criticism. In each way, people are made worse.

One might generalize the point, however, to allow for other means of harm: moral harm occurs whenever complacency and illusion are nurtured, whenever the person is encouraged to relinquish rational control of impulses and appetites. There might be other dimensions of moral harm worth discussing, but these give some foundation to the notion, as Plato might have fleshed it out.

Other ethical stances might conceive harm in different ways. For example, those moral views that take compassion and empathy to be the root of morally valuable response might take moral harm to consist in diminishing someone’s capacity to imagine the feelings or circumstance of another human being, or in diminishing his or her willingness to imaginatively reconstruct that person’s point of view.

It seems possible that people with very different conceptions of admirable states of the soul might be in substantial agreement about what constitutes harm: surely complacency and mental dissolution block compassion and empathy as they impede rational investigation.

I want to explore the relevance of this principle with respect to the employment of violence – the standard cases about which pacifism has something to say.

It seems as if Socratic pacifism is not concerned with guns and bombs and waterboards but with the use and misuse of arguments and questions, praise and blame – the really dangerous weapons. The armies can play what games they want; souls are not at issue. 

One could argue that some killing is very unlikely to make the victim worse. Socrates is established in philosophic practice when he is killed, and it is clear that he would, left alive, have continued arguing until death claimed him. There is no reason to think that his train of thought would have been completed, had he died a natural death. Only the prospect of immortality would give him that sort of hope.  Socrates might say, of soldiers killed in battle, “They likely went to battle inspired by visions of glory, in death or in victory. They were not likely to be improved by any questioning or led farther out of their personal caves than they had come already. They had reached their full growth.”

But what is to be said about killing those who could or would otherwise develop, intellectually and morally – children, young philosophers, old philosophers who are still deeply puzzled? Is it making someone worse to put an end to an ongoing process of development that would lead, in the normal course of things, to virtue? One might also ask, in a parallel way, whether it harms someone to refrain from killing him or her, if he or she is about to enter into dissolution and depravity – for example, the disorder of the soul, akin to madness, pictured by Plato is his account of the tyrant. Had Hitler been assassinated late in the war, would he have been in any way morally harmed?  (I wonder whether the student senate would authorize funding for a Socratic assassins club. There are plenty of professors who have reached their full growth; others show slippage into very distressing states.)

This speculation is normally frivolous. We so seldom have good information about the developmental place of any individual, their current stopping point on the journey out of, or deeper into, the cave. The concern about harm, like many other weighty moral concerns, will forbid killing as a hobby or sport.

How does this principle apply to war, and other examples of the state’s use of violence (assassination, for example, and torture)?

From the standpoint of one’s moral self, death is not always an evil. There’s truth in the old line that nothing so wonderfully clears the mind as the knowledge that one is to be shot at sunrise. The confrontation with death, undertaken in full consciousness, may lead to growth in virtue, as Socrates and lots of others understand such growth – the dissolution of illusions and pretensions, the serious investigation of questions too long neglected. It’s final exam week, writ large.

But there are clearly good deaths and bad deaths. One can die in terror and fear and confusion, without the chance to prepare, to take account of one’s own death. Socrates’ principle would reject means of warfare that made bad deaths the norm. Socratic pacifism is also going to criticize psychological operations that have as their object generating cowardice and irrational fear and dissension among the enemy. Any such operation is pretty straightforwardly an attempt to encourage people to be ruled by something other than reason.

Perhaps the dictates of a Socratic policy in war would be simply to put a very high value on maintaining the consciousness, the thought, the integrity of all concerned, and to block or diminish those means of war that produce insanity, mental numbness, the flight into lies and illusions. Such a policy could authorize killing, but not torture, not systematic terrorism, not strategies designed to produce widespread panic, or to demoralize the population.

One might object that war involves trade-offs, whichever values one holds. A country at war sacrifices civilians to save civilians, sacrifices children to save children, bombs cities to save cities. Presumably the person who will not be party to bringing about some particular horror will have to sit out modern warfare. Every terrible thing comes up, in the category of “collateral damage.” Yet ethics has a place here, if people still feel responsible to think through and articulate their trade-offs, trying to maintain some proportionality between the means used and the goods preserved. In that calculation, it matters whether moral harm is identified as an evil to be avoided. Perhaps it must sometimes be part of what one lives with, in the overall strategy of fighting, but it matters whether people take it as an important argument against a plan that that plan will tend to make human beings worse. I doubt that that consideration has at present any place in military thinking. One  may strive to preserve life, while not caring at all about souls. If souls were in the equation, the presumptions against torture and against terror would be stronger. Caricature, racism, and hatred would be seen as dangerous, whatever their doubtful value in inspiring a fighting spirit.

In closing, some remarks about this kind of pacifist response:

1. It is a simpler foundation for human rights than that derived from Kantian arguments.
2. The principle, “preserve the ‘space’ for moral response and for moral development in all human beings” is not a complete and independent prescription; it calls for an account of moral response and a psychology of moral development, and its full consequences will only be clear in the context of those views. It sketches a research project. Its implications extend potentially into human relations, education, public policy, theories of punishment – as well as setting limits to violent response to harm.
3. Any pacifism has to take account of the terrible cases in which the value it protects is endangered in a way that seems to require some limited sacrifice of that value: we must inflict pain on these people to preserve this larger group from worse pain. We must morally degrade these people to save those people from a worse sort of moral degradation. But, without working out the details, it seems to me that this kind of case is less often plausible, with respect to the limit that Socratic pacifism sets. To the extent that one side in any dispute takes its cause to be just, there is generally some case to be made that preserving the capacity for moral growth and response in the adversary will lead to a better outcome than diminishing that capacity. (This is true as a matter of logic and consistency. It is also substantiated by evidence about torture suggesting both that humane approaches elicit better information than violent means and that torture of members of an opposing force (the IRA in Britain, for example) strengthens their resolve and prolongs hostilities.)
4. Anscombe reminds us that advocating pacifism is a morally weighty act, in that public rejection or refutation of an absolute pacifist stance may open the way for unrestricted use of violence. She makes the case for public advocacy of  more nuanced positions. I find the view she supports, derived from just war theory, to have serious problems, but the issue she raises: that public positions proposing limitations on violence need to be carefully calculated as rhetorical moves in a very complex and dangerous game, is one that no one who cares about actually containing violence can afford to ignore. In that connection, I think a proposal to limit moral damage might have potential for achieving a consensus that stronger versions of pacifism could not achieve.