Life Fighting: Why We Must Sometimes Fight, and How to Do So Well - Paperback

by Robert W. Sweet (Author)

Fighting has gotten a bad name; it should not be so. Fighting itself is neither moral nor immoral; only its object can be said to be so. We may count the ability to fight well, when applied to a just cause, among the virtues. To be moral is not to fight no one; to be moral is to fight those who vitiate life and civilization. In Consilience, Edward Wilson writes that, if "moral aptitude" is like every other trait studied to date, it forms a bell curve, has a natural genetic distribution: some human beings are moral, others amoral or immoral.

Our chief concern should be for, first life, then civilization; fighting may foster life and civilization, and not fighting harm them. That the moral are far less willing to fight than the immoral has always hurt societies. "Many moral advances have consisted not of eschewing force across the board," writes Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, "but of applying it in carefully measured doses." If we truly wish to make the world a better place, we should sometimes fight.

"The art of war is an art with principles," said Napoleon, "and these principles must never be violated." The best study of these principles is the lives of those who applied them best. Life Fighting explicates the principles by which Julius Caesar, Richelieu, Talleyrand, Napoleon, and Bill Gates fought, by which they attained their objects.

The website of Life Fighting is: www.lifefighting.net