I don’t usually try to make bold, blunt, philosophical assertions. But I thought that today I would stick my neck out, and accept whatever shame and embarrassment it earns me.

I am an empiricist. I privilege observations of physical phenomena over all other means of knowing. I am a mathematical empiricist. I believe—supported by ubiquitous observational evidence—that the universe follows mathematical principles. Mathematics is the most effective language for describing the world. It makes the most accurate predictions.

If you want to change the world, prediction is everything. Unless you seek chaos. But I seek order. As do most people, I believe. Not absolute order—there is no such thing. For me, and many people, increasing order specifically means more justice. The empirical form in which I seek to realize justice is in reduced violence.

Violence is a greatly contentious concept. Moreover, it is a value judgement. It is an appraisal.

What makes an act violent? It requires interpretation—judgement—to call another act violent. Are all acts violent? If so, how would one reduce violence, except by reducing the sum total of all action? How would one even measure such a thing?

I don’t think we need to be so extreme. There are varying degrees of violence in different actions. There are also acts which are extremely violent, yet offering little or no benefit to anyone. Such actions can be disposed of, with little or no loss to collective quality and success of life.

This brings in another question of interpretation. But I assume that violence is a deliberate act, which harms one entity, in order to benefit another.

What makes an “entity” is debatable. It may not be the best word. I use it to mean: a living thing; or an ecosystem; or a distinctive natural feature of the Earth. The last references specifically a region with an enduring physical environment, featuring a consistent pattern of temperate, moisture, fluid dynamics, and nutrient flows. It hosts a distinct ecosystem, whose members depend upon that feature to survive. The physical and ecological features together comprise a biome.

Examples of entities: human, dog, sunflower, ant, lichen, forest, meadow, river, ocean, desert.

The Earth herself is an entity—the pre-eminent entity, upon which we all depend. Other planets, moons, dwarf planets, asteroids, and even the Sun, might also count as entities, if not now, then in the future.

The universe is a place of change. Features come and go, created and destroyed. But not all destruction is violence. And not all violence is unjust. Some destruction is inevitable. Life on Earth relies on birth and death. Organisms kill and eat one another to survive. We must make peace with killing, for life as we know it to exist. Perhaps it will not always be so.

Because violence is a quality defined solely by judgement, we will never agree on it. Two people will see different degrees of violence in the same action. This is especially true of indirect violence. As with anything indirect, the challenge of interpretation is enormous. Perhaps insurmountable. But we can at least be conscious of it, and consider ways to reduce the contention.

The assessment of violence is instrumental. We only care about violence against what we value. If we don’t care about an entity, or a thing, then we also don’t care about violence against it. In fact, such destruction will not even count as violence, to such a perceiver. This is the crux of so many human disagreements, and so many human difficulties. Can we make any headway at all?

I wish to be pragmatic. A violent world, or a culture which tolerates violence, is more likely to enact violence against me, or the people, entities, and things that I value. This is true for everyone. Or so I believe. Others believe different.

Many believe that they have power, and that this power makes them less vulnerable to violence. Perhaps they are right. But a statistically more violent world still increases the probability that they will be negatively affected by violence. It is to everyone’s benefit to have less violence. If only we could persuade people of this fairly simple and self-evident fact.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest flaws in human thinking is our poor ability to recognize and evaluate risk. As such, people have incredibly distorted understandings of the sources of danger in the world, and what determines how or when they might be victims of violence.

Some people, perversely, simply love violence for its own sake. They love chaos. We should probably do more to understand such people. They play a role in many problems which plague society, and cause much unnecessary suffering. We should certainly learn how to recognize such people, and develop better means to prevent them from acquiring and abusing power.

An intractable issue with violence is that, often, the only way to prevent great violence is with lesser violence. This is not only a painful compromise of non-violent principles. It is also highly speculative. It requires us to make predictions about the impact of certain events on future incidents of violence, and to choose what we evaluate to be the “lesser of two evils”. Whether humans can actually make such evaluations, outside of highly constrained and contrived scenarios, is uncertain. It relies on a fantastical utilitarian calculus.

This is the real Achilles’ Heel of any practical theory of non-violent justice: we cannot model the entire world, or run experiments to compare the outcomes of different strategies. This is the problem with all forms of utilitarianism. We cannot measure every experience. And experience itself is subjective. We cannot even measure a single experience. Although we can devise measurements for objective events which can serve as proxies for subjective experience.

An example is torture. Torture is universally acknowledged to be violent. No one wants to be tortured. Torture is also practically useless. Torture is certainly unjust. (Someone will disagree. Someone always disagrees with every value assertion. That doesn’t mean their opinion is valid.)

Premature death is violent and unjust. As is mutiliation. We can be pretty certain that, aside from mythological demonization of victims by untrustworthy assailants, these acts are wrong. A more just world will have few incidents of them.

These are forms of direct violence. Things become much murkier, perhaps completely opaque, once we try to assess indirect violence. Unfortunately, a lot of causes are so murky. Including global warming and climate change. But not, I don’t think, pandemic health measures like masking, let alone vaccination. In any case, every attempt to call out acts of indirect violence can be met with counter-arguments that are very difficult, if not impossible, to judge objectively. We defer to emotions, and cultural and aesthetic preferences. Which are meangingless, on a universal scale.

The fact is, we live in a world overrun by people who subscribe to violent cultures. Such cultures exist in an endless state of war with other, competing cultures. They not only tolerate but celebrate acts of violence upon their eternal enemies. Such mutual antagonism is inimical to any kind of stability or global peace. Such cultures are inherently, not only destructive, but self-destructive and apocalyptic. In fact, many of them are overtly in favour of the destruction of the world.

How can we hope to reduce violence in a world of cultists who seek only destruction?

This is a difficult thesis. While it is shaped by my empirical outlook, I am extremely aware of its ultimate subjectivity. I would prefer the world to last a long time. Even as one with no children, it seems inherently wrong, immoral, to risk the whole world. I won’t see the end. I could appease myself with lies and fantasies. I could focus on the good in people, and tell myself that the good must eventually win. But I fear that would be the height of dishonesty.

We need to find some way to get along. We need to find some way to prevent the fanatics from destroying the world. This seems to me to be the only goal worth pursuing.