Robert L. Holmes

Robert L. Holmes (December 28, 1935) is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Rochester, and an expert on issues of peace and nonviolence. Holmes specializes in ethics, and in social and political philosophy. He has written numerous articles and several books on those topics, and has been invited to address national and international conferences.

Early life
Holmes earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Career
Holmes joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 1962. By 1976 he acquired a fellowship at the National Humanities Institute at Yale University. Subsequently in 1983 he was appointed Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State university. He also served as a Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 1993. 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.

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.

During the course of an academic career which has spanned over forty years, Holmes has held a variety of scholarly positions including: Fulbright Fellow at Moscow State University and visiting professor at Notre Dame, Hamilton College and the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he served as an editor of the philosophical journal Public Affairs Quarterly, contributed to the editorial review board of Social Theory and Practice and participated on the national board of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was also a longtime adviser to the University of Rochester Undergraduate Philosophy Council. In 1992 he also served as president of the professional organization Concerned Philosophers for Peace which strives to improve international understanding and peace through scholarly analysis of the causes of war.

Holmes is the author of several comprehensive texts on the subject of moral philosophy. Included among his publications is a collaborative work undertaken in 1968 with Lewis White Beck - a noted scholar on Kantian ethics (Philosophical Inquiry: An Introduction to Philosophy). Subsequently, in 2001 he served as a contributory author to the book Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck with an essay on Consequentialism and Its Consequences. He also coauthored a work in 2005 with Barry L. Gan - Director of the Center for Nonviolence at St. Bonaventure University (Nonviolence in Theory and Practice). In addition, he has published numerous papers in several academic peer-reviewed journals including: Analysis, Ethics, International Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Value Inquiry, Mind, The Monist, The Philosophical Forum, and The Review of Metaphysics.

As of 2009, Holmes is semi-retired, although he still teaches at the University of Rochester during some semesters.

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 pf 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.

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.

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

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.

Texts
Included among Robert L. Holmes publications are the following texts:
 * Basic Moral Philosophy by Robert L. Holmes
 * Introduction to Applied Ethics by Robert L. Holmes
 * Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of Lewis White Beck Editor: Predrag Cicovacki. Contributor: Robert L. Holmes -"Consequentialism and its Consequences".
 * Nonviolence in Theory and Practice by Robert L. Holmes and Barry L. Gan
 * On War and Morality by Robert L. Holmes
 * Philosophic Inquiry: An Introduction to Philosophy by Lewis White Beck and Robert L. Holmes
 * Pacifism: A Philosophy of Nonviolence by Robert L. Holmes
 * The Ethics of Nonviolence - Essays by Robert L. Holmes Editor: Predrag Cicovacki, Bloomsbury, USA on books.google.com
 * The Augustinian Tradition Editor: Gareth B. Matthews. Contributor: Robert L. Holmes - "St. Augustine and the Just War Theory"

Journal articles
Selected peer-reviewed articles published by Robert L. Holmes include:


 * "The Metaethics of Pacifism and Just War". Philosophical Forum Quarterly (2015):2-15
 * "Just War: Principles and Causes". International Philosophical Quarterly(1997):483-484
 * "The Limited Relevance of Analytical Ethics to the Problems of Bioethics." The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (1990):143-159
 * "Is Morality a System of Hypothetical Imperatives?". Analysis (1974):96-100
 * "University Neutrality and ROTC". Ethics(1973):177
 * "John Dewey's Social Ethics". The Journal of Value Inquiry (1973):274-280
 * "John Dewey's Moral Philosophy in Contemporary Perspective". The Review of Metaphysics (1966):42-70
 * "The Development of John Dewey's Ethical Thought". The Monist(1964):392-406
 * "The Case Against Ethical Naturalism". Mind (1964):291-295