Plato’s Republic and Crito

Non-religious consequentialist considerations can also support pacifism and/or conscientious objection more broadly. Socrates, for example, argues in Plato’s Republic and Crito that doing violence or harm to another leads to an unacceptable form of literal self- destruction. Harming others is argued to work contrary to the central ability of reason to discern the good, and the ability (virtue) of judgment (phronēsis) to determine how to enact the good appropriate to specific contexts and circumstances. To work contrary to these functions of reason and judgment in turn runs the risk of degrading – perhaps ultimately paralyzing or destroying – these central abilities. And, if we degrade or destroy our ability to discern the good and judge what it means, we will thereby lose our ability to make the judgments needed to pursue a genuinely good life of contentment (eudaimonia) and harmony. Failure to achieve these, finally, makes our lives no longer worth living. Hence, the just or good person will never harm another, no matter what sorts of other gains such harm might bring, because to do so risks making life no longer worth living.2 However we understand the pacifism of Jesus and the early Christian communities, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., built on these Socratic and Christian roots (and, for Gandhi, the Buddhist virtue of ahimsa – nonviolence) to argue and practice nonviolent protest against unjust laws. Such nonviolence was intended not only to prevent harm to the selves or souls of its practitioners (one consequence) but also to awaken the conscience of the larger community (a second consequence), in hopes that the larger community would come to see the injustice of its behaviors, laws, etc. (consequence 3) and then replace these with more just ones