FOR PACIFISTS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume IV, Issue 223, 1 September 1936, Page 8

FOR PACIFISTS.

SUICIDE SUGGESTED. Way Out C! Awkward Moral Position, PROFESSOR'S OPINIONS. Suicide in the event of another war is recommended by Dr. C. D. Broad, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University, for pacifists unwilling to live by the efforts of nonpacifists. He thinks, too, that any conscription law should impose the death penalty for refusal to undertake war service. Really conscientious objectors, he adds, should welcome it. These views arc expressed by Professor Broad in an article in the Hibbert Journal, on "Ought we to fight for our country in the next war?" He assumes that the war is important, in the sense that "there is real uncertainty as to whether England will win or lose it." and that its loss would be as disastrous for us as the Great War for the defeated nations. "If you are to go on living in England at all during the war. you will be dependent for your food and protection on the fact that there is a majority of persons of military age whose consciences are less sensitive than yours or work in a different way," he says. Plainly there is a prima facie obligation not to put yourself in this situation of onesided dependence on what you must regard as the wrong actions of people less virtuous or less enlightened than yourself. "Oh the whole, suicide is the course I should recommend to those who do not think there is an overwhelming obligation not to take one's own life. "The next life, if there be one, must be bad indeed if it is worse than this life will be in time of war. And the gas in your oven is no less deadly and fai more merciful than that which you will encounter on the battlefield or in the streets of your own town if it should be bombed." Professor Broad explained to an interviewer that he was not blinding himself to saying he would himself commit suicide. He was simply pointing out that pacifist such as he had described might, in the next war, find himself in such an awkward moral position that suicide was the only logical solution. "It is for him," he added, "to decide whether he should accept the logic of the position. If he thought suicide also was wrong, Heaven knows what would happen. "I would rather not say what my personal view is on this question. I do not know what I should do if another war broke out. But I think the conclusion I reach in my article is one that a man could quite reasonably arrive at."