In the last couple of decades some philosophers have begun to describe themselves as ‘contingent pacifists’. Contrary to his earlier stance by ‘political’ he means that he aims to achieve his pacifism through political campaigning rather than a personal fight such as the one he supported during the First World War. By ‘relative’ he means that his pacifism is relative to a particular war: Russell like many prominent intellectual figures such as Einstein and Leonard Woolf were ardently anti First World War whilst being reluctantly for the Second, and always claimed that he believed some wars to be justified.
In order to avoid these potential confusions Russell defines his position in his 1943 paper ‘ The Future of Pacifism’ more precisely as ‘relative political pacifism’. ‘Peacemaking’ gives the impression that there is a sense in which pacifism is more directed at a commitment to the activity of making peace, and indeed, analogously to Teichmans second argument this seems to quite comfortably describe a great deal of the people that we would like to consider pacifists, we rarely think of such a thing as armchair pacifists more commonly they hold an active political position.
Given that the word pacifism was used so widely in the First World War, just a decade after the coining of the term, we can expand Teichmans argument out even further: the term pacifism is derived from the term ‘pacific’, which literally means ‘peace making’ (Latin, paci– (from pax) meaning peace and - ficus meaning making). It is only together with her second argument, reflecting on apparent usage, that the etymological argument makes a strong case for the view that pacifism is more appropriately seen as directed against large scale armed conflict than violence per se. Rather than proving the meaning of a word etymology should be seen as one way amongst many to give us clues as to the legitimate usage of a term. It is generally thought in philosophy that it is wrong to define what something has become by looking at its origins, this is often termed a ‘genetic fallacy’ and is particularly rife in supposed clarifications on the meaning of words. Teichman also notes that most self-proclaimed pacifists are not committed against all forms of violence (very few people are against the idea of using violence to defend yourself, and even Quakers believe that the state has the right to use force against individuals). She tells us how the earliest recorded use of the term is of a Frenchman attending a peace conference in 1902 defining the term as ‘anti-war-ism’. Teichman’s main aim is to dispel the idea that pacifism is a rejection of all violence. One of the few philosophers to present a closer examination of the term is Jenny Teichman in her book Pacifism and the Just War. Pacifism is taken to be an intuitive notion, yet intuitions on the meaning of the term tend to diverge: many philosophers seem to assume that Pacifism is the position that all violence is wrong or at least all war is wrong, but it’s not clear that most pacifists would describe their position in such a way. In much of the philosophical literature critical examination of the position that pacifists actually hold has been surprisingly neglected.
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