Question Series: Violence Maybe Justified

Questions Series

The purpose of these is to truly question what I don’t understand. There is no stance, or even any real facts. It is an openness to thoughts and more importantly questions.

Question 3: Violence Maybe Justified

Violence maybe justified. There are situations where the law has deemed violence necessary and situations that individuals feel are ethically sound. But is violence, especially violence perpetrated toward another individual ever justifiable?

If we’re discussing violence against another, specifically life threatening violence, can any one person have the judgement sound enough to determine if one person’s life is worthier than another’s? If acting in self defense, does the victim’s life now mean more than the original aggressor? What if the aggressor was stealing from you, but not causing you physical harm, then does your property supercede the thief’s safety? Where does one person’s right to life begin and another’s end? How do we trust ourselves to make the right call?

Part of the implementation of government is that we do not trust individuals to make these decisions solely on their own. So we create a shared set of laws and a way by which to hold ourselves accountable to them. We trust our government to make the majority of these decisions for us, but what happens when that trust is damaged or eroded away entirely? Viva la revolution.

At what point do the people need to remember the fifth of November? How do we as individuals make the decision that our systems have ceased serving the citizens? When only a minority of the population is being harmed, should we wait until more people are affected? How do we determine the line? And can we justify judging others who haven’t reached that line yet?

This may be where open communication, peaceful protesting, and reforms can come to play. In this way we can make important incremental change and showcase our concerns to more of the population so that we reach that line together rather than segregated. There is a fine line between unity and individuality. A balance seems important, but both are easy to exploit and weaponize. And they’re both corrupted the same way: fear.

Fear is natural and good. It keeps us safe so that we value self preservation to propagate our species. But what happens to society when we are ruled and manipulated by fear? Violence. Either by the government on its people or the people on its government. There is damage to property and livelihoods and loss of life. Whole buildings and cultures can be destroyed. Families are affected, individuals suffer, from the low level soldier to the innocent child to the government paper pusher, to the factory worker. Are these losses worth it? Are these losses ethical? Should we not have tried to find other means to rebalance the world? Where there other means to begin with?

Once again, the public opinion recorded in our history seems to determine ethics. The American Revolution, justified. The War of Northern Aggression, unjustified. Concentration camps, unjustified. The atomic bomb, justified. Certainly not everyone agrees with those determinations, but by and large, they seem to hold true enough that we include them in our student’s history books as such.

People can get just as carried away as their governments in their revolution for change. Can we look past the costs incurred in these fights? After all, are we not the reason our government failed us in the first place? We created the monster and now must vanquish it. How do we trust ourselves not to keep building monsters and the need for violence? Violence maybe justified, but maybe it doesn’t have to be.