WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST
(1940)
The question is whether to serve in the wars at the command of the civil society to which we belong is a wicked action, or an action morally indifferent or an action morally obligatory.
In asking how to decide this question, we are raising a much more general question: how do we decide what is good or evil?
The usual answer is that we decide by conscience.
But probably no one thinks now of conscience as a separate faculty, like one of the senses. Indeed, it cannot be so thought of.
For an autonomous faculty like a sense cannot be argued with; you cannot argue a man into seeing green if he sees blue.
But the conscience can be altered by argument; and if you did not think so, you would not have asked me to come and argue with you about the morality of obeying the civil law when it tells us to serve in the wars.
Conscience, then, means the whole man engaged in a particular subject matter.
But even in this sense conscience still has two meanings.
It can mean (a) the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right; (b) his judgement as to what the content of right and wrong are.
In sense (a) conscience is always to be followed.
It is the sovereign of the universe, which ‘if it had power as it has right, would absolutely Rule The World’.
It is not to be argued with, but obeyed, and even to question it is to incur guilt.
But in sense (b) it is a very different matter.
People may be mistaken about wrong and right; most people in some degree are mistaken.
By what means are mistakes in this field to be corrected?
The most useful analogy here is that of Reason – by which I do not mean some separate faculty but, once more, The Whole Man judging, only judging this time not about Good and Evil, but about Truth and Falsehood.
Now any concrete train of reasoning involves three elements :
Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about.
These facts are received either from Our Own Senses, or from The Report of Other Minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material.
But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred Facts upon which to Reason, ninety-nine depend on Authority.
Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving Self-Evident Truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other.
This act I call Intuition.
Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering.
Thus in a geometrical proof each step is Seen by Intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but An Idiot.
The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable ‘steps’.
Failure to do this does not mean Idiocy, but only lack of Ingenuity or Invention.
Failure to follow it need not mean Idiocy, but either Inattention or Defect of Memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together.
Now all Correction of Errors in Reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element.
The Second, the Intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is Wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking.
You can give The Man New Facts.
You can Invent a Simpler Proof, that is, a simple concatenation of intuitable Truths.
But when you come to an Absolute Inability to See any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing.
No doubt this Absolute Inability is much rarer than we suppose.
Every Teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they ‘can’t see’ some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a Refusal to See, resulting either from some passion which wants not to See The Truth in Question or else from Sloth which Does Not Want to Think at All.
But when the inability is real, argument is at an end.
You cannot produce rational intuition by argument, because argument depends upon rational intuition.
Proof rests upon The Unprovable which has to be just ‘Seen’.
Hence faulty intuition is incorrigible.
It does not follow that it cannot be trained by practice in attention and in the mortification of disturbing passions, or corrupted by the opposite habits.
But it is not amenable to correction by argument. Before leaving the subject of Reason, I must point out that authority not only combines with experience to produce the raw material, the ‘facts’, but also has to be frequently used instead of reasoning itself as a method of getting conclusions.
For example, few of us have followed the reasoning on which even 10 per cent of the truths we believe are based.
We accept them on authority from the experts and are wise to do so, for though we are thereby sometimes deceived, yet we should have to live like savages if we did not.
Now all three elements are found also in conscience.
The facts as before, come from experience and authority. I do not mean ‘moral facts’ but those facts about actions without holding which we could not raise moral questions at all – for we should not even be discussing Pacifism if we did not know what war and killing meant, nor Chastity, if we had not yet learned what schoolmasters used to call ‘the facts of life’.
Secondly, there are the pure intuitions of utterly simple good and evil as such.
Third, there is the process of argument by which you arrange the intuitions so as to convince a man that a particular act is wrong or right.
And finally, there is authority as a substitute for argument, telling a man of some wrong or right which he would not otherwise have discovered, and rightly accepted if the man has good reason to believe the authority wiser and better than himself.
The main difference between Reason and Conscience is an alarming one.
It is thus: that while the unarguable intuitions on which all depend are liable to be corrupted by passion when we are considering truth and falsehood, they are much more liable, they are almost certain to be corrupted when we are considering good and evil.
For then we are concerned with some action to be here and now done or left undone by ourselves.
And we should not be considering that action at all unless we had some wish either to do or not to do it, so that in this sphere we are bribed from the very beginning.
Hence the value of Authority in checking, or even superseding, our own activity is much greater in this sphere than in that of Reason.
Hence, too, human beings must be trained in obedience to the moral intuitions almost before they have them, and years before they are rational enough to discuss them, or they will be corrupted before the time for discussion arrives.
