Ted Honderich - Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy

Violence for Equality, first published in 1989, questions the morality of political violence and challenges the presuppositions, inconsistencies and prejudices of liberal-democratic thinking. This book should be of interest to teachers and students of philosophy and politics.

Violence for Equality

Inquiries in Political Philosophy

Ted Honderich

First published in 1989
by Routledge

This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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1976, 1977, 1980, 1989 Ted Honderich

The right of Ted Honderich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 88030360

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-82998-5 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-315-73750-8 (ebk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-138-83000-4 (pbk)

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VIOLENCE FOR EQUALITY

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The first, fourth, and fifth essays in this collection were published in the USA as Political Violence by Cornell University Press 1976
First published in Great Britain as Three Essays on Political Violence by Basil Blackwell 1977
Published under its present title by Penguin 1980
This revised third edition, with enlarged introduction and new second essay, published 1989
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

1976, 1977, 1980, 1989 Ted Honderich

Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London
Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Honderich, Ted
Violence for equality: Inquiries in political philosophy 3rd.
1. Politics. Violence. Ethical aspects
I. Title
172.1

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Honderich, Ted.
Violence for equality : inquiries in political philosophy / Ted
Honderich. Enl. and rev. ed.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Violence. 2. Government, Resistance to. 3. Democracy.
I. Title
JC328.6.H66 1989
172.1dc19

ISBN 0415026229.ISBN 0415026237 (pbk.)

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TO RUTH AND BEE

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I am grateful for comments on particular arguments and ideas to colleagues and past colleagues at University College London, especially Jerry Cohen, Malcolm Budd, and Myles Burnyeat; to Brian Barry, George Brennan, James Griffin, David Hamlyn, Alastair Hannay, John and Kiaran Honderich, David Lloyd-Thomas, Mihailo Markovic, Helen Marshall, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Adam Schaff, Amartya Sen, Timothy Sprigge, and Allen Wood; to graduate students who attended a terms seminar on John Rawls's book at University College London; and to critics in many university audiences.

I thank Katherine Backhouse, Helen Betteridge, Christine Jones, Diana Perry, and Wendy Robbins for exemplary work in the preparation of the manuscript.

The first, fourth, and fifth essays were published as Three Essays on Political Violenc (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977) and Political Violence (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1976). All essays but the second appear in the first edition of Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy (Penguin Books, 1980).

Part of the new introduction to the present volume, a speech to the Oxford Union Society, was first published in New Humanist, 1987.

The first essay is also published in Nature and Conduct: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures (Macmillan, London, 1975), edited by Richard Peters.

The second essay is an enlargement of The Problem of Well-Being and the Principle of Equality, which appeared in Mind, 1981.

The third essay comes from Clean Hands, a lecture to the Workshop on Justice at the University of Calgary in 1977.

A lecture to the Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium, from which much of the fourth essay comes, is published as Appraisals of Political Violence, in Issues in Law and Morality, Proceedings of the 1971 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy (The Press of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and London, 1973), edited by Norman S. Care and Thomas Trelogan. Issues in Law and Morality, incidentally, also contains a reply to the lecture by Edmund L. Pincoffs, and my rejoinder. The journal article from which the fourth essay also derives is The Use of the Basic Proposition of a Theory of Justice (Mind, 1975).

A considerably shortened version of the fifth essay, On Democratic Violence, appears in Violence and Aggression, Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the International Society for the History of Ideas (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1974), edited by Philip P. Weiner and John Fisher. The essay also appears in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1973.

The final essay, Four Conclusions about Political Violence of the Left, comes from a speech to a UNESCO conference on The Rights and Duties deriving, for States and Groups, from the Establishment of a New International Economic and Cultural Order, Paris, 1978.

I am grateful to the various publishers for permissions.

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The Oxford Union Society decided not long ago that one of its debates would concern the justification of political violence generally. As usual, a number of speakers from outside the university were invited, and agreed or at any rate were expected to take part. These included political and academic figures, and also Lady Ewart-Biggs, the widow of the British ambassador to Ireland who was killed by the Irish Republican Army. It was then announced by the Union Society that Mr Gerry Adams, MP for West Belfast and head of Provisional Sinn Fein, usually referred to as the political wing of the IRA, would also take part in the debate. Also, the motion to be debated would not be a general one but rather This house believes that IRA violence is not justified in pursuit of a political solution for Ireland. Lady Ewart-Biggs and the political and academic figures withdrew from the debate, as was prominently reported in the press, and there was pressure on the Union Society to withdraw the invitation to Mr Adams, or indeed cancel the debate, which it did not do. My speech, from the cross-benches, will serve decently to introduce this book.