Before, behind and within the statistics and theories regarding violent conflict, poverty, violation of human rights and the misery that these realities bring, there stands the laughter and tears of ordinary human beings longing for peace. In his remarks before various meetings at the United Nations, President Obama gave a concrete illustration of a just peace philosophical pragmatism. It is an approach that speaks to the aching human desire for peace and requires real life results.

In his remarks to a ministerial meeting on Sudan, President Obama recalled his visit to a refugee camp in Chad before he was president. He said: “What I saw in that camp was heartbreaking – families who had lost everything, surviving on aid. I’ll never forget the man who came up to me – a former teacher who was raising his family of nine in that camp. He looked at me and said simply, ‘We need peace.’ We need peace.”

Just peace theory says there are at least 10 steps to just peacemaking: nonviolent direct action; independent initiatives to reduce threats, cooperative conflict resolution; acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice; seek repentance and forgiveness; advance democracy, human rights and interdependence; foster just and sustainable economic development; work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system; strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights; reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade; encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations. (taken from Just Peacemaking: the New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War, 2008.)

I place these ten steps into three broad moral categories: truth, respect and security. Just peace holds that justice precedes peace; that truth, respect, and security are the mind, soul, and body of peace. Just peace works to prevent the moment of crisis that can lead to violent conflict. It searches for nonviolent strategies and tactics that can bring the world together in ways that can build a lasting and positive peace, a peace predicated upon justice and where enemies become friends.

In chapter seven of Just Peacemaking, in the essay “Work With Emerging Cooperative Forces in the International System”, Paul W. Schroeder says that there are for trends that “have sharply altered the nature of the international system” (159): decline in the utility of war; the rise of trade; increase in international exchange and communication with more international, supranational and transnational organizations and institutions; slow and steady rise of representative democracies and market capitalism (159). These developments make the strategy of working with cooperative forces in the international system all the more vital and possible.

Schroeder argues that it is important to note rules, norms and functions of various states in the international system and to be intentional about how the parts may work together as a unified whole. There are lessons from history to guide us. He writes:

“The long period of peace under the Concert of Europe (1815-1853) resulted not from a balance of power but from the influence of transnational ideas and forces, agreements carefully worked out among governments on a practical definition and structure of peace; a system of benign hegemonies or spheres of influence mutually agreed upon or shared; a consensus on norms and rules, rights and the rule of law; and finally a sense that Europe constituted a community of nations with shared responsibility to preserve the system” (163).

President Obama, for the most part a just peace president in my opinion, is working with the cooperative forces of the international system and relying upon the principle of the inherent human dignity of the individual and upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as transnational ideas and moral goals that all nations have an obligation to preserve. In his remarks before the UN General Assembly, speaking of the UDHR and of human dignity, he said:

“The idea is a simple one – that freedom, justice and peace for the world must begin with freedom, justice and peace in the lives of individual human beings. And for the United States, this is a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity.”

President Obama is working, not only to strengthen the United Nations, but he is working in cooperation with smaller groups within the international system. He stayed in New York for several days to meet with international leaders in groups -ASEAN Leaders and Ministerial Meeting on Sudan – and in bi-lateral meetings – China, Japan, and Columbia. He introduced his wife, Michelle Obama, at the Clinton Global Initiative, and he spoke before the Millennium Development Goals Summit. There were consistent themes in his remarks. He spoke of peace through economic development, regional peace initiatives, the importance of civil society, dignity and human rights, especially the human rights of women and girls, reaching agreements through mutual respect, cooperative efforts on nuclear nonproliferation, and climate change.

He spoke of the G-20 as “the focal point of international coordination.” He spoke of the importance of humanitarian aid. However, he also spoke of punishment for recalcitrant countries and promised isolation for nations that do not meet their international obligations. He said there would be no tolerance for those who perpetrate violence and who obstruct peace.

At his various meetings, President Obama expressed a willingness to do the hard work that would yield results. In his remarks at the Millennium Development Goals Summit, he said his administration is changing the definition of development from the measure of the amount of dollars spent and food and medicine delivered to a measure of how far a nation has progressed from poverty to prosperity. The test is whether or not there has been a measurable material difference in the lives of people. The ideas of intrinsic human dignity and the goals of the UDHR have no value, they have no meaning, unless there are practical results. In this regard, we can not only understand President Obama as a just peace president, but as a just peace pragmatist.

When President Obama spoke of the moral and the pragmatic necessity of freedom, justice and peace in the lives of individuals, I do not know if he was speaking from the perspective of philosophical pragmatism. However, pragmatism is born from the same parent as practicality. From the perspective of a just peace pragmatism, freedom, justice and peace are not only end results, but a way of conceptualizing a philosophical morality upon which humanity can build just peace. They are at once a starting place and the consequences of our moral acting.

Philosophical pragmatism is anti-foundational and is suspicious of truth claims that exist in the air somewhere apart from the grit, grime, blood, sweat and tears of flesh and blood human beings, nature and creation. Ethics asks the questions: what is right to do? How do we know? Ethics interrogates morality in the sense that it asks if the morality that derives from our mores is still moral. Ethics demands an explanation and an accounting. For an ethics based in philosophical pragmatism, we find the answers to those questions in the results of our moral acting. Is the individual fully participating in the sustenance and joy of life or not?

The starting place for our moral reasoning regarding peace is the individual and h/er moral obligations. Writing in an essay “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism” American philosopher Richard Rorty has no use for the idea that human rights and human dignity are intrinsic to human individuals or that the moral obligation that accompany these ideas are ahistorical. Such makes humanity itself a moral idea. Instead, human beings are biological creatures embedded in family, community, nation and history with various moral traditions. Rorty writes: “I would argue that the moral force of such loyalties and convictions consist WHOLLY in this fact, and that nothing else has any moral force” (333). For Rorty, the particularities of an individual, h/er biology, history and traditions, does not make the moral claim upon us. Our own biology, history, and traditions make the moral claim on us to do justice to the Other. Rorty says: “For it is part of the tradition of OUR community that the human stranger from whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity” (336).

For philosophical pragmatists, this is the starting point. But, it is not truth yet. The moral truth is found in the moral effects. William James thinking in the early 20^th century described the pragmatic method as “to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences” (94)

As a good pragmatist, intentionally philosophical or not, President Obama is not bound by any particular ideology -liberal, conservative, neo-liberal, neo-conservative. He uses the ideas of inherent human dignity and human rights along with the moral traditions of the international community found in the UDHR as a starting point for just peace in both the Kantean sense of a right that inheres in the individual and in the Rortean sense of our obligations to the traditions of a community. In this case it is the international community at this moment in history. At the same time, he calls upon the various peoples of the United Nation to look to the best in their particular traditions to find the means and ends to a just peace. Such is pragmatic, and it is problem-solving.

In the area of diplomatic relations, we are accustomed to the “realist” who makes diplomatic decisions based on interests and balance of power considerations. We know the “idealist” who decides the issue based on this or that abstract principle. Then there are the “problem solvers” These are the men and women “for whom the central concern was to try to understand the problem and figure out what, in practical terms, could be done about it” (Schroeder 165).

Just peacemaking requires problem solvers. From the perspective of philosophical pragmatism the truth of the theory is found in its consequences. Moreoever, just peacemaking calls for problem solvers in every area of human life. Just peacemaking is not only a top down process, but it is also bottom up. While world leaders meet at the United Nations and in other international meetings to work to find macro solutions to problems that can cultivate peace, we all have a responsibility to find micro solutions that will cultivate peace within our personal worlds. As President Obama stated in his remarks to the UN General Assembly, “Each of us must choose the path of peace.” It is an individual duty that is a starting place for our moral acting. It is a debt we owe to our traditions, to our history and to our humanity.

Works Cited

James, William. “What Pragmatism Means” Pragmatism: A Reader Ed. Louis Menand. New York: Random House, 1997.

Obama, Barack. http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-and-remarks

Rorty, Richard. “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism” in Pragmatism: A Reader.

Schroeder, Paul W. “Work With Emerging Cooperative Forces in the International System” Just Peacemaking: the New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War. Ed Glen H. Stassen. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2008.