Max wrote:
>Finally, there is the idea that the use of violence "never solves
anything,"
>to quote MP verbatim. More generally, the presumption that using violence
>is a losing game because you create more enemies than you kill. I would
>call
>that a pacifist argument too.
which can't be right. The argument "war is a bad idea because you create more enemies than you kill" is not even a moral argument against war; it more or less explicitly admits that it is not an argument against situations in which you can be confident that you won't create more enemies than you kill.
Furthermore, even if it is a pacifist argument, then it's one which greatly reduces any force in the charge of "selective pacifism", as it is an argument which can quite clearly be made selectively, and indeed ought to be. For example, one could quite consistently argue that a war against a small, unpopular country with few external allies, like Vietnam, was permissible on these grounds, while a war against a more politically loaded enemy, like Al-Quaeda was not.
The argument is only pacifist in a ludicrously strong, universally qualified version which literally nobody would ever bother with.
dd
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