Toward a Conception of Violentism

Many anti-pacifist arguments take the form of what Blake Hereth calls “bottom-up intuitive arguments” (2023, p. 2). Cases of interpersonal threat are presented where it seems intuitive that an agent ought to commit violence, and that intuitive force implies that pacifism is too counterintuitive. While Hereth argues that bottom-up intuitive arguments, in fact, do not have the degree of intuitive force their proponents claim, I am interested in what causes proponents of bottom-up intuitive arguments to take them to be so intuitively decisive in favor of violence. I suspect their apparent intuitive force stems at least in part from a general bias in favor of violence—a bias I will refer to as violentism. In this paper, I develop the concept of violentism. My primary goal is expository—presenting some of violentism’s conceptual components as well as potential examples of violentism. I argue that violentism can manifest in ways analogous to what Liao and Hansen call “expressions condemning oppression” (2023, p. 74), such as racism and sexism; and I argue that, like racism and sexism, violentism can lead to serious social harm.