1 The Question

Snuggled up with my 4-year-old one evening, having just finished up our nighttime routine, we were ready to read a bedtime story. He picked out a book we had just gotten from the library about medieval castles. We read about castle design, knights and jousting tournaments, and life in a castle. But about halfway through the book, there is trouble. The castle lord is away, and a hostile army is approaching. It’s war. I treaded my way carefully through the narrative, trying to avoid words like ‘war,’ ‘enemies,’ or ‘killing.’ But children are very perceptive, especially when they suspect something is being hidden from them. Pointing at the invading army, he asked, “Who are those people?” Then, examining the archers loosing their arrows from the battlements, “What are they doing?”

As a philosopher, I could have told him about just war theory, which holds that wars are permissible as long as certain moral principles are respected. As a pacifist, I could have told him why I think war cannot be justified. But as a parent to a preschooler, I was at a loss. I could not think of the right thing to say. And so what followed were just more euphemisms and obfuscations.

As a society, we think a lot about when and how we should talk to our children about sex. Perhaps this is because we believe sex is an important part of life, and we want children to have the time and space to figure it out well. Or perhaps it’s because we fear that if we do not, they will learn the wrong lessons about it from our (sexist) society and from watching pornography. Whatever the reason, it seems we generally agree that parents and care-givers should start the conversation early, by talking about topics that are age-appropriate. And so, for example, children in preschool might learn about the boundaries of their own bodies, and of others’ bodies, and about the importance of consent when interacting with others’ bodies.

Could it be that similar reasoning should apply when it comes to talking to our children about violence and war? We do not seem to show the same deliberation and care. Yet war, like sex, is a significant part of life that children begin to learn about from a very young age, which suggests that we should be intervening to shape their understanding of it. This raises for us the hard question: How should we talk to children about war?

2 The Basic Story

When we think about justified violence, in its most basic form, the story looks something like this: There’s a good guy, and there’s a bad guy. The bad guy attacks the good guy, and the only way to stop him is to kill him. The good guy kills him. (I will refer to this as the “basic story.”)

An excellent version of this basic story is the movie Die Hard, released in 1988, which lives on as a cultural reference. In it, our protagonist, Detective John McClane, strikes up a friendship with Sergeant Al Powell. Powell admits to McClane that, although he carries around a gun, he has not been able to use it since accidentally shooting and killing a child several years ago. Fast forward to the end of the movie – an unarmed McClane is confronted by a bad guy with a gun, when Powell pulls out his gun and kills the bad guy. Powell and McClane exchange a meaningful look, and we get the feeling that they will become life-long friends. Audiences can enjoy, with satisfaction, Powell’s transformation. Before killing the bad guy, Powell was a diminished person because he was unable to use his gun to fulfill his role as protector. Having killed the bad guy, Powell becomes once more a complete human being. As the audience, we cheer and welcome him back into the moral fold.

We learn this lesson about the morally transformative power of defensive killing in children’s movies, as well. The story of Land Before Time (also released in 1988) revolves around our dinosaur hero, Littlefoot, and his ragtag group of dinosaur friends. Littlefoot has been recently orphaned, because a T. Rex killed his mother. And now the T. Rex – who is evil and unknowable, possessing no history, no language, no sense of morality – is out to kill our hero and his friends. Since the T. Rex cannot be reasoned with, the only hope for our little friends is to kill him. They make a plan, which involves a lot of teamwork and some risk of death, and ultimately they succeed.

We can find countless variations on the basic story, in children’s movies, books, and videogames. Taken together, these stories constitute a form of moral training for children that has two particularly important features. The first is that these stories teach children how to focus their attention. If, in learning about violent conflict, their attention is focused on the protagonist’s heroic defensive killing, what is their attention being turned away from? Take, for example, The Legend of Luke, which is part of the New York Times bestselling children’s series Redwall (Jacques 2012). In the story, Luke, the mouse hero, embarks with a group of loyal warriors on a quest to kill the stoat that has attacked their peaceful community and killed, among others, the hero’s wife. We follow Luke’s many adventures, but what is kept out of view is the life of the community left behind – how they must have struggled to survive, how they must have worried about whether Luke and his crew would return, how Luke’s son must have suffered, growing up not only without a mother, but without a father as well.

In the narrative of heroic killing, children learn to train their attention on the spectacular, the violent, the momentary, rather than on the patient, the peaceful, the quotidian. And indeed, this is how our attention is trained with respect to war. Writing about her experiences as a field nurse during World War I, Ellen LaMotte (2019, p. 134) noted, “You don’t get a medal for sustained nobility. You get it for the impetuous action of the moment, an action quite out of keeping with the trend of one’s daily life.”

The second feature of the moral training involved in children’s stories about heroic violence, is teaching children how they should react to what they see. We teach them that following the story of violent conflict is worth paying attention to, but we also teach them that the story is fun and entertaining, that the violent resolution of the conflict is a good ending, and that we ought to we admire the hero and disdain the villain.

Perhaps most importantly, we teach them that killing is the right thing to do, that violence is a part of virtue. We teach them that killing – in the right circumstances – completes us as moral agents. Powell, upon killing the bad guy, once again becomes an instrument of justice. Littlefoot, upon killing the T. Rex, cements his friendship with his little crew. Luke, upon killing the stoat, finds justice for his wife and peace for the would-be future victims. Had any of our protagonists failed to kill, when the ends seemingly required it, it would have been a moral failure.

If it’s true that these stories of defensive violence train children – both how to focus their attention, and how to interpret and react to what they see – it should lead us to wonder if we are not teaching our children to be thrilled at the thought of certain kinds of killing.

The skeptic will wonder whether this is necessarily bad. Afterall, people like seeing things as entertainment that they do not actually want to see happen in real life. People who enjoy watching horror movies do not actually want to see people being tortured and dismembered in real life.

If there is something to the skeptic’s objection, I do not think it can be the whole story. Consider, for example, that while primetime television, mainstream movies, and video games for children are filled with scenes of violence and killing, there is comparatively little sexual violence, and even rarer, child abuse. It is a particular type of violence that we want to see portrayed for our entertainment. Some violence is beyond the pale. One way we might understand this distinction, between violence that entertains us and violence that repels us, is that we align certain kinds of violence with virtue. If so, then what we are doing when we surround our children with scenarios of violence and killing is teaching them to enjoy the “good” kind of killing and to abhor the “bad” kind.

The stories that we tell affect not only the way children think about killing and war, but also the way we theorize about the morality of killing and war. If we look at just war theory, we can see that it, too, is underpinned by a version of the basic story. Just war theory’s central case is one where an aggressing state attacks a peaceful state, and where the only way to stop the aggressing state is to prosecute a defensive war. The general assumption is that in the face of aggression, killing is a necessary response. That is, killing is required as a way to lodge moral protest (“You can’t treat me this way!”) and/or to effectively defend one’s rights against aggression. But this assumption, that violence is either morally or pragmatically necessary in the face of aggression, produces a methodology – a way of thinking about our problems and conflicts – that propels us, in our thoughts and in our deeds, towards violence and war. This is what I will try to show in the next section.

3 Theoretical Mistakes and Real-Life Problems

Let me bring our attention to four ways in which just war theory’s version of the basic story, when considered through our cultural understanding of violence as virtuous, makes it difficult for us to consider pacific or nonviolent solutions.

First, when we run through the basic story, we tend to identify as the party who is unjustly aggressed against. This means that we start thinking through the hypothetical case by imagining that they attack us, and with no good reason. From the get-go, we have staked out our position as the rights-holder who has been wronged. And like a plaintiff building her case, we get the first opportunity to establish the narrative by sifting through the facts, and marshaling those that are supportive of our cause of action, thereby circumscribing a certain temporal scope. Here is when they violated my rights, here is when they threw the first punch, here is when they violated our sovereignty. Here is when the story starts, and we do not consider as relevant anything that might have happened before.

If I imagine myself to be the rights-holder, the one who has been wronged, and I take my position as one from which I make demands and remonstrations, then the moral landscape can become very stark. There is right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice. Then from the moment we start thinking about the basic story, we cannot help but see ourselves as morally superior to our foe.

Second, we start our thinking not only by seizing the moral high ground, but also by wielding the belief that might makes right. Not, perhaps, in the sense that Thrasymachus advances in Plato’s Republic, where whoever is stronger gets to determine what justice is. But in the sense that whatever we (Americans) do, as the stronger party, is justice because we are virtuous. Our might makes right. One can bring to mind here the trope that looms large in American storytelling, of the wild west vigilante who becomes the town sheriff after killing all the bad guys.¹

For a real-life example, we can look to George W. Bush’s (2001) proclamation after 9/11, that “whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” What was he proclaiming? Since our violence is virtuous, it does not much matter whether we use legal or extralegal means. It’s all justice.

If violence can make things right, and is the only way to make things right (which, again, is what makes killing ostensibly necessary), then we can only draw the same conclusions about pacifism as its critics: Pacifism, or the attempt to find nonviolent solutions to international conflict, is a failure of moral agency or political responsibility (Elshtain 2002), and demonstrates an unwillingness to defend important values like resisting aggression and defending the lives of one’s fellow citizens (Orend 2013).

We can now see how the first and second problems I have just identified – imagining ourselves as the aggrieved party, and closely aligning might with right – work together to shape the way we think about the permissibility of killing and war. In identifying with the position of the aggrieved party, we circumscribe our thinking by focusing our attention on the ways in which we have been harmed, and ignoring the question of how we got to the situation we are in now. Then, in closely aligning might with right, we stop our thinking by characterizing pacifism as an immoral political doctrine.

The third way in which the basic story urges us towards war and violence, is in its conceptualization of war or violence as a tool. We use it when we need it, and we use it precisely; and when we no longer need it, we put it away and store it for when we might need it again. But this instrumental characterization of war and violence is deserving of more critical attention. Hannah Arendt, in her sharp examination of the relationship between violence and power, argued that while we can never control the outcomes of our actions, this is especially true when using violence. The further into the future the end that we hope to achieve through violence lies, the more unpredictable the results, and the less rational it becomes to use violence (to the extent the rationality of using violence depends on means-ends reasoning). And the further into the future our end lies, the greater the risks that the means will overwhelm the end – by undermining the end, or making the end impossible, or displacing the initial end by creating new conditions that give rise to new ends – and the greater the risk that “the practice of violence” will seep into “the whole body politic” (Arendt 1970, p. 80).

Simone de Beauvoir (1948) also warned against the instrumental conception of violence, as it assumes not only that the agent has great predictive powers, but also that the agent, the violent means, and the goodness of the end sought are all radically independent from each other.² But in fact, the agent is not separate from the instrument, and the instrument is not separate from the end.

Arendt’s and Beauvoir’s insights into how using a tool can change a tool-user are largely ignored by theories that justify war, which operate under the assumption that it’s possible for a democratic society to emerge from a defensive war, relatively unchanged with respect to its most important values. But one of the lessons learned from war is that he who is mightiest at wielding the sword wins, and as theorists such as Neta Crawford and Ned Dobos have argued, this is a lesson that comes home to roost – in the militarization of the police in democratic societies (Dobos 2020), and in the weakening of democratic norms and institutions (Crawford 2021).

Finally, the fourth way that the basic story turns our thinking away from pacifism and towards war is in its reliance on harmful gender hierarchies. As much as theorists of war may try to use gender-neutral or gender-inclusive pronouns when referring to combatants, the fact remains that, for the most part and for most of history as we have it, it is a he who wields the sword (Goldstein 2001). Our conception of the warrior is intimately bound up with our conceptions of masculinity, and even our rules of war that separate combatants from civilians are bound up with our conceptions of masculinity and femininity (Kinsella 2006; Mann 2014; Parsons 2020). The more we justify war and celebrate the warrior, the more we entrench a gender binary, and celebrate men over women and the “masculine” virtues over the “feminine”: thinking over feeling, aggression over gentleness, competition over cooperation.

It is difficult for us to reconcile martial virtue with gender equality, when martial virtue discounts the ethics of care and erases the work that women traditionally do. On the whole, women do not have statues erected of them in public squares, do not get roads named after them, do not get to go to the front of the line at the airport, do not get cheered by crowds during the 7th inning stretch.

And so even if we start with what looks like a reasonable position – that defensive war is permissible because killing is necessary for justice – we are propelled along an ever more violent and unjust path.

4 The Tragedy of Justifying War

In Obama’s retelling of the basic story, when we fight wars, our aim is always a just and lasting peace. But for all its mention as the aim of a just war, peace remains largely under theorized and is understood primarily as the absence or cessation of war. The concepts associated with peace deal mostly with how to regulate the conclusion of a war, e.g., the signing of treaties and the cessation of open hostilities, the payment of reparations, and the administration of justice through war tribunals. With this negative understanding of peace, it makes sense to try to fight our way to peace; it makes sense to build up huge armaments and armies, since then we can intimidate evil-doers into peace by vigilantly and at all times threatening war. As Bertrand Russell (1915, p. 138) noted during World War I, “Every great nation believes that its own overwhelming strength is the only possible guarantee of the world’s peace and can only be secured by the defeat of other nations.”

For me, this is the great tragedy of just war theory – in accepting its promise that, in the face of unjust aggression, wars fought in adherence to its system of moral rules is the only way to peace, we turn all our attention to perfecting a system of war, and entrench ourselves in segregated moral communities from within which, I suspect, peace will never be possible.

5 The Answer

When our thoughts turn to the future, the stories and possibilities that we imagine, in addition to helping us set goals and make plans, give us a way to exercise our moral imagination. By playing out different scenarios, we practice the conversations we might have, so we can be careful of content and tone. We try out the emotional reactions we might have to disappointments and successes. We are given an opportunity to exercise moral decision-making without actually having to make a particular decision. We are given a quiet moment before we have to act in the world.

But wondering about the future can also go bad. If our moral imagination is filled with scenarios of failure, betrayal, or some other moral disaster, as they are when we think about war, we become very restricted in the kinds of moral personalities we try on. As these disastrous scenarios fill our horizon and colonize our thoughts, we might become obsessive or deeply suspicious of others, and, after enough such practice, find it difficult to escape.

I began this paper with a hard question: How should we talk to children about war? The way we talk to them now, when we tell them stories of heroic killing, we teach them that the world is fundamentally split into good and evil, and that war and killing are sometimes necessary and just. But by raising children to believe that war is inevitable, and by shaping their moral development to accommodate the “reality” that war is an unavoidable part of human life, we mold their moral personalities and constrain their imagination in ways that make it difficult for them to seek genuine peace.

As parents and caregivers, we can help children to develop a more critical eye with which to examine the basic story in all its tantalizing iterations. We can find ways to give children more space to imagine, to tell different stories, so that in the face of injustice or tragedy, their options are not so quickly and inexorably reduced to killing. We can encourage children to engage with more complex narratives, so that they might learn to adventure away from the well-trod and familiar path laid by the story of just war.

Each student is then given an opportunity to drop the stone in the bowl, while sharing with the class a kind thing that they had done. Chloe holds the stone for a while, silent. But she does not drop the stone into the bowl; she passes it on to the next student.

The book is not explicitly about nonviolence or pacifism. But it offers many challenges to just war theory’s basic story, and here I would like to mention three. One, our protagonist recognizes that she is in a position of privilege with respect to Maya – Chloe has more friends, she has better clothes, toys, and food, and she is wealthier. So instead of starting with a protagonist who is an underdog, or with antagonists who are seen roughly as equals, Chloe develops a hostile relationship to Maya from a position of relative power.

Two, Chloe’s main struggle is not about what she is owed by others, or about how others have violated her rights. Instead, Chloe’s struggle is about how she has wronged another, and how she can accept responsibility for what she has done. She sees her position as one from which she must make demanding moral judgments not of others’ behavior, but of her own.

And three, instead of providing a neat, triumphant, and feel-good ending, Chloe’s closing reflections are heavier, and more ambiguous and open-ended. She is sad and regretful, but we also get the feeling that through her self-reflection, Chloe has changed, and we can be hopeful that she will act differently in the future.

The story in Each Kindness is simple enough for a kindergartener to follow, but the narrative is complex. And this is the kind of complexity that makes pacifism the more challenging route, when compared to the basic story discussed earlier in Section 2. Pacifism, unlike the basic story, cannot lay out at our feet the singular path that we must follow. Rather, the pacifist must make her own path, which will often be marked by struggle, self-doubt, uncertainty, and surprise. What pacifism offers us is a way of orienting ourselves to peace, of understanding ourselves in relation to others (Ryan 1983), and of shaping our aspirations and our hopes (Chae 2020). In short, pacifism is a way of life.

And so talking to children about war will be an ongoing and ever-evolving conversation.³ If children can learn to see war from within a pacific frame, then they will lose interest in questions like Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? Who started it? Instead, they might start with Jane Addams’ (1902) recognition that “[e]very child on the face of the earth represents someone’s care and thought,” and then ask along with her: Why should children be set forth to be wantonly destroyed? That our children may bravely raise this question in a great chorus; that’s the hope of all the world.⁴