Holmes was raised in northern New York State by his parents who died when he was still in his teens. He graduated from Watertown High School in 1953 after serving as president of the student council, editor of the school magazine, and captain of a sectional championship cross country team. He also undertook studies in classical piano at the Watertown Conservatory of Music for ten years and won several awards while competing in New York City, Canada and Washington D. C.[1]
Subsequently, Holmes earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy cum laude from Harvard University in 1957. His honors thesis was "Plato's Concept of God". Soon thereafter he earned an M.A (1959) and Ph.D. (1961) in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, where his dissertation was on "John Dewey's Ethics in the Light of Contemporary Metaethical Theory."[2][3][1]
Career
The Rush Rhees Library at University of Rochester, as seen from the Eastman Quadrangle.
Holmes joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 1962.[4] By 1976 he acquired a fellowship at the National Humanities Institute at Yale University. Subsequently in 1982 he was appointed Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State university.[5] He also served as a Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 1993.[6] In 1998, Holmes was appointed to the newly established Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Peace and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, where he shaped the mission of the chair on instruction, research, and lectures.[7][8][9]
While serving on the faculty at the University of Rochester, his lectures were always eagerly anticipated by students of the humanities as well as the sciences. He received the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2001 and the Professor of the Year Award in Humanities in 2006. At the 2007 convocation ceremony, Holmes was awarded the Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching. Also, Holmes is known for being one of the very few professors to receive perfect or near perfect reviews every year since the university began student review services in 2001.[10]
Holmes is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester but no longer instructs students on campus.[31] In recent years, he has also lectured at the Permanent India Mission to the United Nations during its annual International Day of Nonviolence ("The Significance of Nonviolence in Today's World", 2017).[32] Subsequently, he was also invited to address the United Nations General Assembly in 2021. However, due to the emergence of the COVID pandemic in New York City, his lecture was cancelled.[33]
Moral philosophy
Over the course of the past forty years, Holmes has addressed several interrelated moral dilemmas posed in the modern age including terrorism, nuclear deterrence and armed conflict in general. In his book On War and Morality (1989) he offers a robust philosophical defense of pacifism and its application in a world which is plagued with recurrent outbursts of international violence despite its adherence to upholding the principles of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction (MAD) since the emergence of the cold war era. Holmes rejects a reliance upon such an irrational set of principles and dismisses them as morally wrong. Instead, he advances a form of "moral personalism" based upon the maxim that any intelligible moral theory must include an abiding interest in the lives and well being of all people. In his view, violence is a form of abrogation of this maxim which is prima facia wrong and that Just War Theories in general are inadequate to the task of surmounting such a moral presumption.[34][35][36][37]
Holmes offers a systematic critical review of the two major schools of thought which claim to defend warfare in the modern world. In the first group are the "positivistic realists" who claim that concepts of "right" or "wrong" are irrelevant in international affairs and the "normative realists" who claim that moral considerations should not be permitted to play a role in determining foreign policy. Holmes dismisses the later by observing that they have misread the history of the twentieth century by suggesting the Wilsonian idealism inevitably led to the onset of World War II and confuse morality with moralism.[38][39][40][37]
In the second group, Holmes identifies the defenders of just war theories. Holmes rejects their attempts to justify the taking of innocent human lives in order to save other innocent human lives as morally unjustifiable in so far as both killing and any appeal to violence is morally unjustified in the first place, despite the consequences which may follow from such an act. Even if a war is considered "just" in accordance with the standards of jus ad ballo or jus in bello, it may not be deemed morally acceptable based upon a consideration of the organized violence which it engenders in the modern world[41][42][43][37]
With this in mind, Holmes outlines a four stage argument to support the view that warfare is unjustified even within the context of modern world conditions. First he observes that warfare in general cannot be justified if the means of waging the war are, when taken by themselves, also morally unjustified. Secondly, he contends that modern warfare by its very nature inevitably involves the killing of innocent people. Thirdly, he denies that the presumption against killing innocent people can be overridden by conditions related to the waging of war. Lastly, he identifies nonviolence as an embodiment of a viable alternative to warfare. Specifically, he outlines a Gandhian approach to resolving conflicts, which rejects the utilization of mutual concessions in order to achieve a provisional or temporary standoff between the waring parties. This is replaced with a process of actively creating peace through negotiations which engender mutual progress for all parties involved in the conflict.
Taken together, these arguments suggest that an appeal to nonviolence is a viable ethical alternative even within the modern world.[44][45][46][37]
In his more recent book, Pacifism: A Philosophy of Nonviolence Holmes offers a supplement to the analysis presented above. Here, Holmes ventures beyond philosophical considerations of how to best distinguish between just wars and unjust wars in particular and presents an analysis of what he describes as a more "basic moral question" by exploring the general case of whether war is ever morally permissible. This is accomplished by examining the concept of warfare from a more global perspective, as opposed to concentrating primarily on the particular subjective perceptions of "just" or "unjust" outcomes which may prevail among the combatants. With this in mind, he offers a critical review of the "constellation of social, political, economic, religious and ethical values and practices" which are required to wage war systematically over time. He concludes by arguing that a prima facie presumption against warfare in general is sufficiently compelling in the modern era due to a variety of factors including: the killing of both innocent and non-innocents alike, the inevitable displacement of large populations of people, along with the inevitable harm done to both animal life and the environment in the long term.[47] Stated more simply, "To be a pragmatic pacifist one need only hold that the large-scale, organized and systematic violence of war is impermissible in today's world."[48]
Publications
External videos
You may preview selections from Holmes' book The Ethics of Nonviolence - Essays by Robert L. Holmes on books.google.com
Texts
Included among Robert L. Holmes publications are the following texts:[49]
Philosophic Inquiry: An Introduction to Philosophy by Lewis White Beck and Robert L. Holmes, (1968)[16]
On War and Morality by Robert L. Holmes, (1989)[50]
The Augustinian Tradition Editor: Gareth B. Matthews. Contributor: Robert L. Holmes - "St. Augustine and the Just War Theory" (1999)[51]
Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck Editor: Predrag Cicovacki. Contributor: Robert L. Holmes -"Consequentialism and its Consequences". (2001)[52]
Social and Political Philosophy: Contemporary Perspectives, Ed. Sterba, James P. Contributor: Robert L. Holmes - "Pacifism for Nonpacifists". (2001)[53][54]
Nonviolence in Theory and Practice by Robert L. Holmes and Barry L. Gan, (2005)[55]
The Ethics of Nonviolence - Essays by Robert L. Holmes by Robert L. Holmes, Editor: Predrag Cicovacki, (2013)[56][57]
Basic Moral Philosophy by Robert L. Holmes, (2014)[58][59]
Pacifism: A Philosophy of Nonviolence by Robert L. Holmes, (2016)[60]
Introduction to Applied Ethics by Robert L. Holmes, (2018)[61]
Journal articles
Selected peer-reviewed articles published by Robert L. Holmes include:[62]
"The Case Against Ethical Naturalism". Mind (1964):291-295[30]
"The Development of John Dewey's Ethical Thought". The Monist(1964):392-406[27]
