ABSTRACT To defend the view that people sometimes ought to commit violence, some philosophers present cases in which a person is, or witnesses others, under threat such that there is an apparent need to commit violence. The cases are presented as though the person has no alternative options morally comparable to or better than violence. In this paper, I argue there are such alternatives, which I call pacifist alternatives . Pacifist alternatives are better than violence for three reasons: they are acts of a type against which there is not a moral presumption that must be overcome to justify committing them; they do not legitimise the violent perpetrator's role in dictating the terms of the scenario; and they weaponise civility to de‐escalate threat in a way that violence cannot. Ultimately, I reveal a weakness in the case against pacifism and in the methodology used in the ethics of violence more broadly.
Guy Crain (2026) studied this question.