Gary Lawrence Murphy has a thoughtful and funny response to my piece (comments here) on why I’m not a pacifist any more. An excerpt:

…Dr. Who, on detonating a bomb in an evil tyrant’s lair, was asked by his companions why he’d left his pacifism in this case. He replied, “Sometimes you just have to blow them up” — Krishna too tells Arajuna that some battles are justified, because yes, sometimes there is a complexity that goes beyond the way we wish the world was going.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that human beings respond primarily to connectionist values, that is, their behaviour is determined more by the history of reinforced patterns stored in the associative computing device in their biology than by those tricks of logic and sense we’ve painfully taught that biology to do. It is a testament to our ability as a creature that we have evolved any ethics or culture at all, so we can hardly expect perfection.

We should instead cheer if we see even the slightest moral reserve…

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