Thus, the Utopians hire a vicious and money-grubbing people, the Zapoletes, to do their fighting for them. Take for example, More’s Utopia, which goes to great lengths to imagine a society in which, although citizens receive some military training, they are kept from using weapons in practices of deadly force, not in order to limit their freedom, but to ensure they are capable of becoming excellent in certain virtues.įor instance, More tells us that Utopians consider both butchery of animals and hunting “unworthy of free men” because it can accustom people to “brutal pleasures” and create a “cruel disposition.” A similar line of reasoning undergirds Utopia’s strenuous anti-militarism, which not only makes its citizens loath to go to war but maintains an elaborate policy such that in cases where it cannot be avoided most fighting is done by mercenaries. Thomas More, Utopia (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons) Although neither of them had a simple or absolutist view of weapons, both entertained seriously the possibility in their major works that the habituation by citizens to the use of arms in the exercise of lethal force was destructive to virtue. This question is inspired by two of the greatest humanists of the Renaissance period in Europe, Erasmus and Thomas More. The question I’d like to pose-one inspired by the virtue ethics of Renaissance Christian humanism-is what dangers do arms hold specifically as instruments of moral formation? Or put slightly differently: what are the potential spiritual and moral hazards of increased societal armament? While attention is spent on what an arm can do to others as an instrument of violence, not nearly enough thought is given to the problem of what an arm might do to the user. Much of the debate over the Second Amendment rightly focuses on what can or should be classified legally as an “arm” and whether such an instrument is reasonable for personal use. This is clearly a kind of personal power to do violence that would be completely unrecognizable to both the legal theorists and the military technologists of 1787, when the U.S. What is a weapon, or a firearm, as defined by the constitutional “right to bear arms”? In light of the most recent mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen children and two adults dead, more and more people are posing this question.Īfter all, the AR-15 rifle used to murder an entire classroom full of children has been described as designed for mass murder with the capability to “explode” human bodies. (Image credit: Frank Versteegen/Wikimedia Commons) Facebook Tweet LinkedIn Email Statue of Erasmus in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
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