Douglas P. Lackey

Who is Douglas P. Lackey?

Douglas P. Lackey is a US philosopher and playwright.

As a graduate student, he studied under J. N. Findlay at Yale University. His post-graduate work on the ethics of nuclear warfare was influenced by his attention to earlier works by Bertrand Russell. His drama Kaddish in East Jerusalem was produced in 2003. The play was later expanded and revised as The Gandhi Nonviolent Soccer Club.

Lackey divides pacifism into four categories: a universal, Christian view in which all killing is wrong; a universal, Gandhi-based system in which all violence is wrong; private pacificism, following Saint Augustine in seeing personal violence as universally wrong but political violence as sometimes acceptable; and anti-war pacifism, in which personal violence is at times justifiable, but war is never so.