Jonathan Dymond (1796–1828) was an English Quaker and an ethical philosopher who is known for his monograph An Enquiry into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity.[1] [2] [3]
Jonathan Dymond was the son of a Quaker linen-draper of Exeter, County Devon in England. Both his parents were 'Recorded Ministers' of the Society of Friends. He had little formal education but used his time off from working in his father's shop to read and to write essays on religious and moral problems, as well as composing poetry. He determined that he should devote his energies to 'the honour of advocating peace'.[4] In his view war was "an evil before which, in my estimation, slavery sinks into insignificance".[5] In 1825 he attended the annual meeting of the Peace Society in London and went on to help set up a branch of that society in Exeter. He soon had to withdraw from taking an active part due to his failing health.
Three works by Dymond have been published, two during his lifetime, the Inquiry and the Observations, and one posthumously, the Essays. A collection of his published and unpublished letters, poems and writings was made in 1911 by Charles William Dymond.
In his works Dymond extended the pacifist argument against war beyond the purely Christian insight of earlier generations of Quakers to wider more rationalist arguments, as in this against the notion of a distinction between aggressive and defensive war from the Inquiry:
Dymond was a fervent antimilitarist. He saw armies as enemies of liberty and physical and moral subjection as a necessary condition of army life. The opinion he voiced prefigures some of the later objections to conscription made by Quakers and other conscientious objectors.