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Is it justifiable to use violence to support a political cause?

need for and against arguments for an essay.....
Reply 1
Avatar for Bagration
Bagration
18
Don't kid yourself. What do you think happens when you refuse to pay taxes? The only system in which the use of violence to accomplish any political goal is anarchism, but anarchism requires the use of violence to overthrow the state... violence in politics is absolutely endemic. Politics is the art of persuading one party to use force against another. I don't know of any art quite so violent as politics or of any occupation quite so violent as that of a politician.
Reply 2
Avatar for jjarvis
jjarvis
14
Bagration
Don't kid yourself. What do you think happens when you refuse to pay taxes? The only system in which the use of violence to accomplish any political goal is anarchism, but anarchism requires the use of violence to overthrow the state... violence in politics is absolutely endemic. Politics is the art of persuading one party to use force against another. I don't know of any art quite so violent as politics or of any occupation quite so violent as that of a politician.


The question is whether the use of violence is justifiable. This is a moral, normative question, not an empirical one. The OP is looking for arguments for and against the justifiability of using violence to support a political cause. While I agree that politics and the state in general are characterised by implicit violence, which becomes explicit when their power is challenged, that is not the OP's question. A monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a given territorial area is, of course, Weber's definition of the state. The only relation to your (largely empirical) point and the OP's (normative) question is the word legitimate, which implies that violence used by a body apart from the state is illegitimate. And the question seems to tend towards a discussion of violence used to support a particular political cause, not the violence endemic in modern society. Again, I agree with you that modern society is violent, but that is a broader point only tangentially related to the moral question the OP is dealing with.

OP, you might start by considering why there is a general prohibition on the use of violence. What might override the reasons for disallowing violence in the public sphere? Does government oppression justify using force of arms to overthrow that unjust government? Do the ends justify the means? Or is there something more fundamental at stake when a party or political cause decides to use violence to achieve its goals? What makes it, apparently, legitimate for a state to exercise coercive force, but not for political causes within or external to that state? And what might be the implications of permitting the use of violence to support a political cause?

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