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Similarities Between Martin Luther King Jr And Nietzsche

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The ostensible contradiction between war and morality has resulted in serious moral questions that many ethicists have tried to answer. Is war ever just? Is war just an irremovable part of human nature? Is some war just? The world constantly finds itself in a state of some form of war, and as such it seems that assessing the morality of war is essential. As with any other issue, different thinkers have disagreed on what the standards should be for warfare and how people should behave in such situations. Two thinkers that we have discussed, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Friedrich Nietzsche, held two vastly different approaches to ethics. Based on their differing philosophies as well as their views and influence on historical conflicts, we can …show more content…

He thinks that violence is destructive and only increases the tension and conflict between groups, while nonviolent conflict resolution allows for the creation of a positively reconciled “beloved community” that has been genuinely changed for the better. In King’s mind, the issue with war and violence is that it attacks those individuals who have been susceptible to evil, rather than the evil itself. King believes that the struggle should be against the evil forces, and not those who he describes as being “caught in those forces.” During King’s earlier years, he thought that nonviolence was only useful in the context of group conflicts within nations. Later, as he delved deeper into the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi, and how it worked in the struggle for independence of India, he expanded this belief in nonviolent conflict resolution to an international scale as well. Nonviolence aligns with the principle of love that King lives by, and violence stands directly against it. King also associates violence with hatred and bitterness, and believes that responding to one wrong with another succeeds only in intensifying the hatred that exists in the world. He even makes the point that due to the rapid technological developments of immensely destructive weapons, war is an increasingly dangerous endeavor and that the result of all-out warfare today would be only mutual destruction. King believes that today, mankind’s choice is “nonviolence or nonexistence” and that an ethics of love, instead of war, as he eloquently puts it, is the only way to prevent this

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