Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and U.S. Policy

By Eli Sasaran McCarthy and William O'Neill

Why do many U.S. residents, Catholics and Catholic leaders among them, too often fall short of adequately challenging the use of violence in U.S. policy? The opportunities and developments in approaches to peacemaking have been growing at a significant rate. However, violent methods continue to hold significant sway in U.S. policy and society as the commonly assumed way to "peace." Even when community organizers, policymakers, members of Catholic leadership, and academics sincerely search for alternatives to violence, they too often think about nonviolence as primarily a rule or a strategy. Catholic Social Teaching has been moving toward transcending the limits of these approaches, but it still has significant room for growth. In order to contribute to this growth and to impact U.S. policy, McCarthy draws on Jesus, Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan, and King to offer a virtue-based approach to nonviolent peacemaking with a corresponding set of core practices. This approach is also set in conversation with aspects of human rights discourse to increase its possible impact on U.S. policy. As a whole, Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers offers an important challenge to contemporary accounts of peacemaking in the U.S.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621898542

Eli Sasaran McCarthy

Eli Sasaran McCarthy is Adjunct Professor of Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. He has published an essay in Peace Movements Worldwide, along with articles in the Peace Studies Journal and the Journal of Political Theology.

Book preview

Foreword

Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers

William O’Neill, SJ

So many in these days have taken violent steps to gain the things of this world—war to achieve peace; coercion to achieve freedom; striving to gain what slips through the fingers. We might as well give up our great desires, at least our hopes of doing great things toward achieving them, right at the beginning. In a way it is like the paradox of the Gospel, of giving up one’s life in order to save it.

¹

So wrote Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, in September, 1957. Surely at the heart of Christian faith lies the God of peace, shalom (Rom 15:33)—the God desiring peace for all people far and near (Ps 85:8; Is 57:19). Yet in a world of terror and casual slaughters, walking in the way of peace (Lk 1: 79) remains a hard grace.

The great 16th Century British physician, Thomas Linacre, it is said, first opened the New Testament only late in life. Chancing upon the hard sayings of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, e.g., turning the other cheek (Mt 5:39), he was horrified: Either this is not the Gospel, he exclaimed, or we are not Christians. Linacre, his biographer tells us, flung the book from him, and resumed his medical studies.² Even if apocryphal, the story bears a grain of truth. For then, as now, how readily the things that make for peace (Lk 19:42) slip through the fingers!

Eli Sasaran McCarthy’s splendid new book takes up Day’s challenge of living the Gospel of Peace (Acts 10:36; Eph 6:15) today. Wise and passionately argued, Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers offers a novel assessment of nonviolent peacemaking from the emerging perspective of virtue ethics. McCarthy’s virtue-based approach is itself irenic, incorporating not only the wisdom of Ghandi and Abdul Gaffar Khan, but the mediating discourse of human rights in public policy.

The significance of such an interpretation becomes apparent against the backdrop of our regnant political rhetoric of war and violence—the belief, in Michael Walzer’s words that war remains a rule-governed activity, a world of permissions and prohibitions–a moral world, even in the midst of hell.³ Pacifism, by the same token, is assimilated to what McCarthy describes as rule-based or strategy-based alternatives, so that our thinking about nonviolent peacemaking turns on the regulative logic of just war.

And yet, as McCarthy persuasively shows, the logic itself is deceptive. For even disciples espousing the justum bellum can never forsake the primacy of shalom, incarnated in the Gospel of Peace. Thus for Augustine, war was a tragic necessity, the consequence–and remedy–of fallen nature. Indeed, the love of enemies admits of no exceptions, yet the kindly harshness of charity does not exclude wars of mercy waged by the good. Inspired by the severity which compassion itself dictates, such wars of mercy presumed that those inflicting punishment had first overcome hate in their hearts. Neither Ambrose nor Augustine permitted violent self-defense; for only defense of the innocent neighbor could satisfy the stringent claims of charity.⁴ Thomas Aquinas, too, recognized the normative primacy accorded caritas in-forming justice, posing the quaestio in the Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 40 "whether it is always sinful to wage war? Harking back to their Thomistic heritage, the Renaissance Spanish schoolmen Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez fashioned the just-war tradition in the law of nations or international law–law ordained, in Vitoria’s words, to the common good of all," including that of one’s enemies.

Still further variations emerge in the seventeenth century, with the doctrine’s progressive disenchantment. In the Prolegomena of his magisterial De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), Grotius writes that the manifest and clear precepts of natural law retain their validity "etiamsi daremus non esse Deum (even were God not to exist).⁵ For Grotius, the impious premise cannot be conceded; yet for his successors, the speculative hypothesis soon became a thesis. For Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel the self-evidence of natural law increasingly left God a supernumerary in Creation.⁶ Under the spell of modernity’s disenchantment, Grotius’ heirs thus treat the validity of the just-war rules as logically independent of the religious tradition that bore them. And with the corresponding eclipse of the Thomistic ideal of the common good (the medieval’s virtue-based bonum commune), the sovereign self’s natural rights reign supreme.

In Hobbes’s militant rhetoric, for instance, the state of nature—no longer naturally pacific–is aptly called war, as is of every man against every man. And in that inglorious tract of time we call history, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known, we have but one right, that of self-defense—the very right Ambrose and Augustine denied."⁷ For stripped of Grotius’ natural sociability, it is only the foresight of their own preservation, that leads men who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others to submit to that restraint upon themselves, (in which we see them live in commonwealths).⁸ Violent self-preservation, no longer a stain upon our love for neighbor in Ambrose’s words, is our natural right, writ large upon the artificial person of the state. Neither does Leviathan sacrifice this right, even if it is tempered by the rule of international law. For Hobbesian realism legislates for self-preservation in the form of laws of nature, the force of which depends upon general compliance. In a state of partial compliance, governed by weak international law, reason will abide by the laws of nature, e.g., of the justum bellum, if, and to the degree, they promote national security. There are, in this sense, theoretical limits to Hobbesian realism, underwritten by realism itself.⁹ And so, the violent bear it away (Mt 11:12)—less by abjuring the rules of just war per se, than by incorporating them within the realist narrative.

A great divide thus appears between the rules of just war and pacifism, itself viewed as a rule-governed activity. Indeed, we seem to face a Hobson’s choice between peace, whether rule-based or strategy-based, and justice as legitimate self-defense. Inspired by Lisa Cahill’s critique, McCarthy’s recovery of a virtue-based assessment of pacifism belies such a simple dichotomy, for the demands of biblical shalom are never less than just. In the Psalmists words, justice and peace shall kiss (Ps 85:10).

The turn to virtue, moreover, permits McCarthy to incorporate human rights claims under the rubrics of the global common good as elaborated in modern Catholic Social Teaching. For basic human rights generate structural imperatives that seek to redress the systemic causes of violence. Finally, McCarthy’s rapprochement of virtue and rights underscores the family resemblance of religiously inspired nonviolence peacemaking, e.g., the rich affinities of Christian pacifism, Ghandi’s ahimsa, and Abdul Gaffar Khan’s theory of nonviolence.

In the midst of polemics more indebted to Machiavelli and Hobbes, than Augustine and Thomas, McCarthy gives us reason for hope—our hope of doing great things as together we live the Gospel of peace. In the words of Dorothy Day, whom Machiavelli would deride as unarmed prophet: Yes we go on talking about love. St. Paul writes about it, and there are Father Zossima’s unforgettable words in the Brothers Karamazov, ‘Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams’. What does the modern world know of love, with its light touching of the surface of love? It has never reached down into the depths, to the misery and pain and glory of love which endures to death and beyond it. We have not yet begun to learn about love. Now is the time to begin, to start afresh, to use this divine weapon.

¹⁰

1. Dorothy Day, The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Knopf, 1988) 280.

2. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (Maryland: Westminster, 1949) 84.

3. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 36.

4. Cf. Augustine, Epist. 189, and 209, 2; De Civitate Dei, XIX, 12-13, XXII, 6; Quest. Heat. VI, 10, SEL., XXVIII, 2, p. 428, IV, 44, CSEL, XXVIII, 2, p. 353; De Libero Arbitrio, V, 12, Migne, PL, XXXXII, 1227; Contra Faustum, XXIII, 76 and 79; Epist., 138, ii, 14. Cited in Bainton, War and Peace, 91ff.

5. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Prolegomena, trans. F. W. Kelsey (The Classics of International Law, Publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 3, 1925) par. 11.

6. A. P. D’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, 2nd. ed. (Hutchinson: London, 1970) 55.

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968) 185–86.

8. Ibid., chap. 17, 52.

9. Cf. Walzer’s citation of Hume: "The rage and violence of public war: what is it but a suspension of justice among the warring parties, who perceive that this virtue is now no longer of nay use or advantage to them? Nor is it possible, according to Hume, that this suspension itself be just or unjust; it is entirely a matter of necessity, as in the (Hobbist) state of nature where individuals consult the dictates of self-preservation alone." Just and Unjust Wars, 76, n.

10. Dorothy Day, Love Is the Measure, The Catholic Worker, June 1946, p. 2.

Acknowledgments

I thank those who have inspired and guided me through this book, particularly the graciousness, patience, wisdom, and devotion of my doctoral advisor and friend William O’Neill, S.J. I also thank scholars Michael Nagler, Jim Donahue, Sr. Marianne Farina, and Jim Keenan S.J. for their commitment and expertise during my studies. A special thanks to the passion of my professor Kevin Burke, S.J. for lighting my theological flame at Weston Jesuit School of Theology. I deeply thank Mike Campos PhD, Mark Miller PhD, and Alan Goulty, who was the former British Ambassador to Sudan, for taking the time to read over my work and offer constructive feedback. I thank Holy Trinity parishioners Charlotte Mahoney and Jean Johnson for their continued inspiration and support as they live out the practices of nonviolent peacemaking in parish life. I have had many mentors in nonviolent peacemaking along the way. I particularly thank Bob Cooke, Mary J Park, David Hartsough, and Fr. Emmanual McCarthy. I also give thanks for some of the more famous nonviolent peacemakers for weaving this thread through history and inspiring my personal journey—Jesus, St. Francis, Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Kahn, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hahn, Cesar Chavez, and Oscar Romero.

However, I must also thank the many poor and marginalized persons, who I have encountered and have oriented my vision. These include the orphans lying on dirty cement floors in Haiti, the homeless persons I worked with in Boston, such as Rick, Joe, and Chuck, and the elderly who opened their arms in friendship, such as Shelia, Adrienne, Dorothy, and Ed. To those doing the exhausting work of teaching me how to grow in love, so that I am less of a resounding gong or clanging cymbal (1 Cor 13:1), I thank you for your everlasting patience and love: Joy and Lazarus. And ultimately, I thank the God who created us out of love, walks with us in love, and draws us toward love.

Introduction

Some think nonviolence is simply a rule against violence, or a rule against violence but under some conditions violence is justified based on national security or ‘just’ war criteria. Others think, Ok, we will try nonviolence if it will work. If not we will use the tool of violence. My journey indicates a 3rd way of orienting nonviolence and peacemaking.

My present social context is Washington DC, although I grew up in a small rural town in western Pennsylvania, later lived in Boston, Massachusetts for five years, and then in Berkeley, California for five years working on my doctoral degree. I have experienced conflict during different stages of my life, out of which my passion for peacemaking in part arose. My experiences with the people and the poverty in Haiti, of my first teaching opportunity being shaped by 9/11, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq function as core moments in my movement toward the offering in this book. My five months in Haiti during the spring of 1999 particularly transformed my life as I finally began to ask some of the questions of social justice. How were some people so happy in Haiti with so little things? Why were resources so inequitably distributed? What is my role as a U.S. citizen and the role of the country I live in? Where is God in all this? I have experienced the structural and cultural privileges of being a middle class white male in the U.S., which is upper class relative to the global scene. I also practice Catholicism, with a love for Jesus that has continued to orient my life since my undergraduate days.

In the midst of this journey, this book explores two interrelated questions that grow out of the common ways of thinking about nonviolence mentioned above. First, what is a more adequate way to assess nonviolent peacemaking compared to the more common rule-based or strategy-based assessments? Second, what is a more fruitful way to mediate or persuade others in public discourse to implement nonviolent peacemaking practices not only in our daily life but also particularly in public policy?

My thesis is that a virtue-based assessment of nonviolent peacemaking enhanced by aspects of human rights discourse largely resolves key limits of rule-based and strategy-based assessments of nonviolent peacemaking for public discourse and policy.

For clarification of terms, my virtue-based approach does not exclude the use of rules and strategy in nonviolent peacemaking, but it does uplift and shift the emphasis to virtue. Further, by nonviolent peacemaking I mean in general a family of practices, but I elaborate on this later. For this project, I use peacemaking in a broad way to include the practices often distinguished in the terms peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. By public discourse I mean the discourse of persons intended to influence public deliberation about public policy, and to arrive at consensus on such policy in the midst of different conceptions of the good or basic political differences.

¹

The broader context and significance of this book consists in the following elements. The Catholic context of this project plays an important role. The people of the Catholic Church live in the midst of significant transformations, and at times contestations elicited by Vatican II in the 1960’s. Vatican II explicitly acknowledged the call to holiness for lay and religious, rather than merely the religious, i.e. clergy, religious brothers and sisters. In this spirit, the Church also opened up more deeply to the broader world as a partner for dialogue and a source for wisdom. Vatican II encouraged ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. Catholic Social Teaching framed the notion of the common good less in terms of human flourishing and more in terms of human dignity and basic human rights, which more easily resonates with public discourse. At the same time, recognition grew of the Bible as a key source for moral theology. Along with the call to holiness, this re-turn to the Bible sparked increasing attention to virtue in Catholic circles. The relationship between human rights and virtue has slowly been unfolding in official Catholic Social Teaching. This book aims to contribute to this unfolding, specifically around issues of acute conflict.

This particular contribution to Catholic Social Teaching is significant for the following reasons. First, Catholic Social Teaching intends to not only guide Catholics, but also to persuade the thinking of all people of good will in public discourse and policy. Second, the use of Catholic Social Teaching on issues of war and peace, especially by most U.S. Catholic leadership in my opinion has not adequately challenged U.S. political and military leadership on a) the preparation for war, i.e. being by far the largest spender on and seller of arms in the world, and on b) the use of war, i.e. the atomic bomb in WWII, and wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, etc.² Third, the documents of Catholic Social Teaching have been strengthening the presumption against war and recognizing the increasing importance of nonviolence for public policy. Fourth, religious communities usually entail cultivating a way of life or set of practices, which in turn function significantly to impact religious and even non-religious persons’ responses to conflict.

The U.S. context of this book includes the election of President Barack Obama. He premised his campaign on change. However, this change entailed both moments of stirring great hope and moments of simply repeating past patterns. A deep economic crisis remains with us, although the U.S. still remains the dominant economic power on the globe. Our relations with many other countries have been strained over the past decade, but Obama has been working somewhat to restore these relations. The continuing presence and exercise of our military dominance and our explicit national security strategies aiming for global strategic dominance represents one of the key reasons for this strain. These get expressed in our global dominance in military spending and arms sales, in our unmatched nuclear arsenal, in the enormous presence of our military bases spread around the world, in our wars within Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, in Guantanamo Bay and the use of torture, and for some, the extent of our military aid to Israel. Obama planned to broaden our methods of responding to conflict and not to rely primarily on military power. The gradual, yet still slow, development of the Civilian Response Corps within the new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations in the U.S. State Department represents one positive sign. But the entrenched military power in our culture, public discourse and policy has and will continue to make this initiative quite difficult, as we saw with the increase of troops in Afghanistan, the continued drone bombing in Pakistan, the military efforts in Libya, and the disproportionate levels of our military spending.

In the U.S., the political theories of realism, which emphasizes military power, and liberalism, which emphasizes economic power, dominate public discourse and policy. However, undergirding both of these dominant political theories is a kind of western, philosophically liberal moral framework. In this framework of moral reasoning, the moral options primarily shift between obligation-based approaches, with categories such as principles, rules, duties, law, and human rights, or consequences-based approaches, particularly utilitarian versions that focus on strategy and interest/preference satisfaction. This framework of moral reasoning has played a significant role in cultivating our present U.S. context, particularly regarding our responses to acute conflict, such as terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Libya. Further, this framework of moral reasoning has led to the prevailing assessments of nonviolence being primarily understood as a rule against violence, or primarily a strategy or technique to use under certain conditions. These rule-based or strategy-based assessments show up in Catholic Social Teaching, the public discourse about policy, the academic discourse in ethics, political science, and peace studies, and even more in popular discourse.

The broader U.S. society also indicates alarming patterns of violence that exist in the midst of these policies, prevailing moral frameworks, and assessments of nonviolence. For instance, violence shows up often in children’s toys, especially those given to boys, in cartoons, television shows, and movies. Many of our major cities and their public schools continue to struggle with gun violence. Domestic violence and rape continue at alarming rates even though these often go unreported. The U.S. suffers the largest incarceration rate in the world and remains one of the few economically advanced countries to use the death penalty. Our political rhetoric too often draws on violent imagery.

I recognize violence in the broad types of direct, structural (systemic), and cultural as Johan Galtung describes. By cultural he means the symbolic sphere of existence, such as religion, ideology, language, art, etc. that can be used to legitimate direct and structural violence. He more specifically defines violence as avoidable insults to basic human needs, which include survival, well-being, identity, and freedom needs.³ Michael Nagler deepens this by highlighting the dehumanization, or discord with human dignity aspect of violent activity for all parties involved.

In light of these patterns of violence, this book analyzes the prevailing moral frameworks in the U.S., particularly through the common assessments of nonviolence. The significance for the particular discipline of ethics consists in a critical elaboration of virtue ethics and human rights discourse with respect to nonviolent peacemaking. I also discuss how to understand the relationship between religion and public discourse with respect to nonviolent peacemaking. This research offers political significance regarding the approach to policy formulation and the content of our policies, particularly regarding our responses to acute conflict. Yet, I do not make a systematic analysis of just war approaches, nor do I thoroughly engage the question about the relationship between nonviolent peacemaking and just war approaches. However, this research does have important and at points more obvious implications for this question.

I begin the engagement with theses key questions through an exposition and critical evaluation of the rule-based and strategy-based assessments of nonviolent peacemaking. In this evaluation, I identify key limits of each approach. I use major components of official Catholic Social Teaching and moral philosopher James Childress to illustrate rules-based assessments. I use Gene Sharp and Peter Ackerman to illustrate strategy-based assessments.

Toward addressing these limits, I initially unfold a virtue-based assessment from a Christian perspective and argue that nonviolent peacemaking represents a distinct and central virtue. This virtue uplifts and qualifies other key virtues, including their core practices. I offer examples of three contemporary Christian theorists’ virtue-based assessments of nonviolent peacemaking, namely Bernard Häring, Stanley Hauerwas, and Lisa Sowle Cahill. I explain how a virtue-based approach specifically addresses the key limits of the rules and strategy-based assessments identified earlier. I end by raising some questions about the limits of such a virtue assessment of nonviolent peacemaking from a Christian perspective. For instance, do these arguments translate within other religious frameworks? Even if they do, how persuasive is a virtue-based approach in U.S. public discourse and policy?

I address these virtue-based limits from a Christian perspective by using analogy to show how these practices of nonviolent peacemaking extend to and get enhanced by those beyond the Christian community. First, I explore Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence and corresponding practices, as a representative figure of Hinduism. Second, I explore Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s theory of nonviolence and corresponding practices, as a representative figure of Islam. Both representative figures also illustrate how a virtue-based approach engages and impacts public discourse and policy. However, I do not assess the whole religious traditions of Hinduism and Islam in this project.

Moving toward questions about U.S. public discourse and policy, I offer an analysis of the prevailing moral frameworks that undergird public discourse in the U.S. Without intending any disrespect to the U.S. military or individual soldiers, I use the U.S. military to exemplify both a key player in forming the culture from which arises our public discourse and policy, and in illustrating the effects and limits of U.S. public discourse and policy. Finally, I use the example of Dr. Martin Luther King to offer some initial contributions which a virtue-based assessment brings to U.S. public discourse and policy regarding issues of acute conflict. However, I also acknowledge three key limits of a virtue-based assessment for U.S. public discourse and policy.

I address these limits by analyzing the contributions that certain aspects of human rights discourse offer a virtue-based assessment for U.S. public discourse and policy. I begin by describing some general characteristics and types of human rights theory, as well as some key limits of human rights discourse. I analyze the contributions by drawing primarily on Martha Nussbaum, William O’Neill, John Dear, and Catholic Social Teaching.

I analyze the fruits of merging a virtue-based assessment of nonviolent peacemaking supplemented by these aspects of human rights discourse. I use Catholic Social Teaching to illustrate a trajectory of thinking that integrates virtue and rights. However, I offer key contributions to developing this integration in Catholic Social Teaching regarding nonviolent peacemaking both in terms of a) shifting to a virtue-based assessment, and b) a set of seven core practices, which also have implications for U.S. public discourse and policy.

Finally, I initiate a conversation about how these core practices could potentially be applied in a situation of genocide or mass atrocity, such as Sudan.

The application of these practices to this case is significant because Sudan typifies a situation that often yields a broader consensus for armed intervention, such as the use of peacekeepers. I primarily raise questions and suggest a repertoire of possible responses, which would also potentially hold for other similar situations, rather than making a detailed proposal for the particular situation in Sudan. Further research and closer on the ground contact would be required to make a detailed proposal for this ongoing conflict.

I hope the reader enjoys and is challenged by this book about becoming nonviolent peacemakers. I look forward to the ongoing dialogue about these ideas and opportunities. I hope this book inspires and offers a way for all of us to move significantly further into the life of peacemaking and justice-making as well as to King’s Beloved Community. Together, let us engage and rejoice in the adventure!

1. Especially in light of feminist critiques, I do not understand public as signifying a public/private dichotomy. I particularly do not subscribe to the reduction of religious belief to some private realm. For more insightful discussion on the public/private framing see Butler, Precarious Life.

2. Notably, the historical origin of the U.S. Conference of Bishops resides in the National Catholic War Councils of WWI.

3. Galtung, Cultural Violence, 291–92.

part one

Common Assessments of Nonviolent Peacemaking

1

Representative Types of Rule-Based and Strategy-Based Assessments

Introduction

What are some common assessments of nonviolence? For many people nonviolence is primarily about avoiding all violence as a rule, duty, or obligation. Thus, some will simply protest against war, the military or police that use guns and brutality. Using the same assessment, others will say such a rule can simply be trumped by other rules or duties. Another assessment entails saying that nonviolence is primarily a strategy to use if we suspect it to work. Thus, nonviolence is a tool alongside the tool of violence. Some think nonviolence will work more often than others do, but the point is only to use nonviolence if the immediate objectives seem to call for it.

In this chapter I am asking the question: what limits exist in common assessments of nonviolent peacemaking? I identify two primary common assessments, which entail important limits: first, the rule-based assessment, usually expressed as primarily a rule against using violence, and second, the strategy-based assessment, usually expressed as primarily a strategy or technique. I first give an exposition of type one and then assess its limits. Next, I follow the same approach to the second type. This sets the stage for my argument that a virtue-based appeal is more adequate to assess nonviolent peacemaking practices.

In Christian terminology, the spectrum of responses to violence generally entails nonresistance, nonviolent peacemaking, limited war theories, and the crusade.¹ My focus is on assessments of nonviolent peacemaking, or what is often merely called nonviolent resistance.

Primarily a Rule: Deontology

The first

Reviews for Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

McCarthy's book is a clearly-written, if academic and dry, discussion of the ways we frame nonviolent peacemaking. He proposes that we adopt a virtue-based framework in favor of the more "pragmatic" frameworks now in place. As a sometime practitioner of nonviolent peacemaking, McCarthy's proposal fits well with my lived experience; it also offers a way to consider two important questions for individuals, communities and nations: Who are we becoming? and Who ought we to become?