Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory

Shaun O'Dwyer takes an unfortunately still relevant look at how to avoid war.

With the return of geopolitics, and with the international institutions built after 1945 to prevent or contain war now being perilously weak, the world again faces growing risks of conflict between industrialized nations such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There have been polarized responses to this conflict. One response has been to denounce Western military support for Ukraine as 'militarism'. Often such denunciations cloak a hypocrisy which faults Western imperialism while giving a free pass to the imperialism of non-Western powers, such as Russia or China. Yet both hypocritical anti-imperialists and more impartial pacifists frequently conflate militarism - the policy of building armed forces and using them aggressively to advance national interests against other states - with deterrence and just war theories created to counter militarism. There are important philosophical issues at stake in these debates, over for instance the validity of absolutist norms against military violence, or the ethical dilemmas in trade-offs between defending nations' self-determination and averting escalation to world war. When such debates fall into well-worn ruts, it can be useful to look to alternative perspectives, which can help disentangle familiar conceptual knots. One such novel perspective comes from outside of the Western philosophical canon, and indeed is even from the margins of today's Eastern philosophical canon.

The Mohists were a community of Chinese thinkers and engineers associated with a philosopher called Mozi. They were prominent in the fifth to third centuries BCE. They developed powerful arguments against militarism. Yet rather than repudiate any military response to militarism as being another instance of it, they also promoted an early version of Just War Theory. With allowance for its very different, ancient, cultural origins, their thoughts might also be relevant for our new era.

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