Is pacifism a defensible moral position

Abstract or Introduction

There are plenty of ideas in international ethics which indicate how states and
individuals should behave and interact. The belief that the use of violence in contact
with others is wrong, represents one of those. Pacifists, fascinated by a world without
war or violence, formed different moral positions according to that vision. To have a
moral position means that a person or a state must have general kinds of reasons "for
supposing a certain type of act to be his [or its] duty, in a moral sense" (Wasserstrom
R., p. 66). Pacifism describes a duty that might range from non-resistance to any sort of
physical attack, up to the attitude to use force only in case of self-defence. In the first
part of this essay the debate will therefore focus on the individual and whether or not
pacifism can be made a plausible moral principle for our private lives. Passive and
active non-resistance and self-defence will be the main viewpoints discussed in this
section. It will be followed by debatable moral standpoints for a nation as a whole in the
second chapter. We will determine, if it is imaginable and desirable for a state to adopt
perspectives like 'no force at all', 'no war' or 'wars only in the case of self-defence', as its
righteous. To provide evidence for the moral verification of pacifist views, we firstly have
to prove whether or not they can possibly be moral positions and secondly if they are
defensible. However, it will be shown, that moral positions are defensible, if one has
plausible reasons to believe that this specific vision is likely to be realised. [...]