{"id":302396,"date":"2025-09-08T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302396"},"modified":"2025-09-03T05:08:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T04:08:46","slug":"is-violence-justifiable-in-self-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/is-violence-justifiable-in-self-defense\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Violence Justifiable in Self-Defense?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Violence, in all cases, including the urgent defense of oneself or others, is immoral. It\u2019s not what I think, and often not what I \u00abwould like\u00bb\u2014my primary impulse; it\u2019s what I have to accept and disseminate, because science says so, which, in contrast, demonstrates that the only efficient methods of defense are peaceful ones, beginning precisely with the natural, spontaneous order of societies, and then others such as prevention, deterrence, negotiation, psychological influence, leadership, etc.<\/p>\n

Those who do not accept this scientific postulate will be complicit in extremely serious acts that harm them, their families and friends, and society in general, if they do not take they don\u2019t care to try to scientifically prove the opposite. That is, they have a grave obligation to explain why violence is, in some cases, valid, or to accept that it never is. Of course, for any scientific demonstration, empirical facts are not enough; they must be supported, explained, and developed by a rational, scientific, and serious theoretical framework.<\/p>\n

Because all those who justify violence argue that empirical facts (\u00abreality\u00bb) support them, which is false. On the contrary, empirical facts conclusively show that violence always destroys and worsens any situation. But even supposing that \u00abreality\u00bb proves them right, that is not enough; these \u00abrealities\u00bb must be supported by a rational, scientific, and serious theoretical framework.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin by studying what science is. According to Jacques Maritain, scientific law never does anything other than extract, in a more or less direct and unconventional manner, the property or requirement of a certain ontological indivisible, which is none other than what philosophers call nature or essence[i]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That is to say, science limits itself to discovering and explaining what actually occurs in nature, such as the law of gravity or chemical reactions, often using scientific language like mathematics. And technique, technology applies these scientific laws to, precisely, technological developments.<\/p>\n

Okay, now that we know what science is, let\u2019s see why violence is inevitably destructive and, therefore, cannot be rationally justified. Aristotle, concluding a long list of philosophers, says that \u201c\u2026whenever there is a cause outside of beings that compels them to do what is contrary to their nature or their will, it is said that these beings do what they do by force\u2026 This, then, will be for us the definition of violence and coercion: there is violence whenever the cause that compels beings to do what they do is external to them; and there is no violence from the moment that the cause is internal and is in the very beings that act.\u201d[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

And Saint Thomas Aquinas adds, taking it from Aristotle, that: \u201cViolence is directly opposed to the voluntary as well as to the natural, insofar as it is common to the voluntary and the natural that both come from an intrinsic principle, and the violent emanates from an extrinsic principle.\u201d[iii]<\/a> Thus, Etienne Gilson asserts that for Aquinas, \u00abThe natural and the violent are mutually exclusive, and it is inconceivable that something simultaneously possesses both of these characteristics.\u00bb[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, violence is that which opposes the voluntary or the natural, everything that is extrinsic. Violence, precisely, is extrinsic to people, it is extrinsic to natural development, to nature; therefore, it is destructive, disorderly, and not only does it not constitute a law of nature worthy of scientific study, but, on the contrary, it destroys nature and its spontaneous (scientific) development, according to science.<\/p>\n

And what is morality? There is a very erroneous idea that it is a set of norms established or dictated by some \u00abauthority\u201d state, civil, cultural, religious, or any other kind that must be followed to be a \u00abgood person.\u00bb This is definitely not true. No one has sufficient authority to establish or dictate morality.<\/p>\n

Morality is a science[v]<\/a>. It is the science that\u2014like all sciences, as we have seen\u2014studies and describes the laws of nature, in this case, so that humankind can fully develop. Hence, violence is immoral in all cases, precisely because it violates the natural development of humans.<\/p>\n

Thus, it is a fact that human beings have evolved historically and come to understand that violence is immoral. In the Middle Ages, for example, torture and murder were justified for ideological and religious reasons, and even simply at the whim of the lord of the county. Today, this is unthinkable, at least theoretically. Thus, as societies mature, human beings acquire wisdom and intelligence, and they discover, understand, and accept scientific postulates.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this maturation is very slow, and there is still a vast majority who justify violence in certain cases, such as supposedly urgent defense[vi]<\/a>. This is a primitive, primal reaction\u2014of human beings as animals\u2014that they do not only don\u2019t bother to rationalize but rather despises the possibility of rationalizing it by praising this primitive reaction in favor of violence. In this way, they commit grave complicity with serious immoral acts.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> See \u2018Les degr\u00e9s du savoir\u2019, Paris 1932 (Spanish trans. Descl\u00e9e, Buenos Aires 1947). Thus, according to P. Duhem (cf. \u2018La th\u00e9orie physique\u2019, Rivi\u00e8re, Paris 1914), a physical theory is not an explanation of a \u2018fabricated\u2019 phenomenon, like the instructions on a television set, but rather a system deduced from a small number of principles, which are intended to represent as simply and completely as possible a set of experimental laws that occur, by their very nature, in the cosmos.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> \u2018The Great Morality\u2019, I, XIII (in Aristotle, \u2018Moral\u2019, Espasa-Calpe Argentina SA, Buenos Aires 1945, p. 46).<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> S.Th., I-II, q. 6, a. 5.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> \u2018Thomism\u2019, Second Part, Chapter VIII, EUNSA, Pamplona 1989, p. 438.<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Adam Smith was not an economist, but a moralist, a professor of Moral Philosophy, and his first work was \u00abThe Theory of Moral Sentiments.\u00bb For Friedrich Hayek \u2014one of the fathers of the Austrian School of Economics\u2014 a group of prominent Thomists, professors of morality and theology at the University of Salamanca, were precursors to a serious and systematic development of market theory.<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Practically all those who exercise violence claim to do so \u201cobjectively\u201d in \u201cdefense,\u201d and who is right? Certainly none.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Alejandro A. Tagliavini – As a young man, I graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires, but later took various courses in philosophy, economics, and social sciences. I was a member of the Department of Economic Policy at the School of Economics and Business Administration. I currently work in private investment and academic activities. Since 2006, I have been a member of the Advisory Board of the prestigious Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, USA. I have lectured at prestigious institutions around the world, such as the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome). I have received several honorary degrees, including the “Guardian of the Treasury” award from the Governor of the State of New Mexico, USA.\u00a0<\/em>@alextagliavini –\u00a0<\/em>www.alejandrotagliavini.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Violence, in all cases, including the urgent defense of oneself or others, is immoral. It\u2019s not what I think, and often not what I \u00abwould like\u00bb\u2014my primary impulse; it\u2019s what I have to accept and disseminate, because science says so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[101,100,1837,802,444,1243,1779,308,99,695,3353,126],"class_list":["post-302396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonviolence","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-just-war","tag-morality","tag-nonviolence","tag-nonviolent-action","tag-nonviolent-communication","tag-philosophy","tag-structural-violence","tag-theology","tag-thomas-merton","tag-violence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302396"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302400,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302396\/revisions\/302400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}