Secular Texts, Humanist Pacifism

Abstract

If natural law links different religions, Eastern and Western, so it also underpins the non-deistic model of peace. Natural law is the body of unwritten moral rules that can be discovered by the use of reason, and is claimed to justify all human, positive laws. Any law that is not fundamentally just and in accordance with natural law is not a law at all. Those who maintain faith that there is a creator will see the world as rational because it has been made that way, whereas those who do not believe in a creator still accept that continued existence of anything in nature can proceed only if there are evolutionary laws designed to preserve life, and that they can be discovered by human reason, are reasonable themselves, internally coherent, and amount to moral sanctions, such as forbidding the violent ending of life in an act of murder. Just as mathematics and physics are valid whether or not there is a God, so are justice and morality. Hugo Grotius laid the basis for thinking about natural law in these purely secular terms in the seventeenth century. As a consequence, the argument for pacifism need not rely on theological concepts of personal responsibility, conscience, self-sacrifice and charity. It can also be derived from the simple observation that for every living creature, life goes on, unless violated, until death comes through natural causes. In natural law, what is, also should be.1 That life should go on until its natural termination is a moral statement derived from the factual statement that it does.KeywordsEnglish LiteratureCivil DisobedienceRational PacifismConscientious ObjectorNuclear DisarmamentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.