Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Foreword
- Warm thanks
- The point
- 1 Why are people violent?
- 2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
- 3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
- 4 The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
- 5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity
- 6 Honor and shame
- 7 War
- 8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
- 9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed?
- 10 The prevailing wisdom
- 11 Intimate partner violence
- 12 Rape
- 13 Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration
- 14 Torture
- 15 Homicide: he had it coming
- 16 Ethnic violence and genocide
- Chapter 17 Self-harm and suicide
- 18 Violent bereavement
- 19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
- 20 The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model
- 21 Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather than using some other medium?
- 22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
- 23 How do we end violence?
- 24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research implications
- The dénouement
- References
- Index
10 - The prevailing wisdom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Foreword
- Warm thanks
- The point
- 1 Why are people violent?
- 2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
- 3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
- 4 The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
- 5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity
- 6 Honor and shame
- 7 War
- 8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
- 9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed?
- 10 The prevailing wisdom
- 11 Intimate partner violence
- 12 Rape
- 13 Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration
- 14 Torture
- 15 Homicide: he had it coming
- 16 Ethnic violence and genocide
- Chapter 17 Self-harm and suicide
- 18 Violent bereavement
- 19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
- 20 The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model
- 21 Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather than using some other medium?
- 22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
- 23 How do we end violence?
- 24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research implications
- The dénouement
- References
- Index
Summary
Virtuous violence theory posits that most violence is morally motivated, but that claim does not imply that people have no other motives pushing toward or against violence. People typically have many simultaneous motives pushing and pulling in divergent directions. In some cultures and some contexts where violence is highly restricted and rarely occurs, to perform a morally required killing may require the strengthening of moral and non-moral violence motives and the weakening of moral and non-moral peace motives. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at sadistic, rationalist, impulsive or self-regulatory, dehumanization, and moral-disengagement accounts of violence and how they complement virtuous violence theory, if at all.
Are most killers sadists and psychopaths?
In his book, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy Baumeister (1997) examines newspapers, myths, stories, movies, and the accounts of perpetrators and victims to detail what he refers to as “the myth of pure evil.” According to Baumeister, most people have a folk theory of evil in which perpetrators are sadists who commit violence because they are biologically or dispositionally inclined to gain intrinsic pleasure from causing suffering through intentional harm to purely innocent victims, or, at the very least, they are psychopaths who have no sense of empathy toward those who suffer and feel no remorse for their actions as a result. Psychopathy is not the same as sadism, but it is the most relevant psychological disorder in regard to the belief that violence is perpetrated by “crazy” people. Psychopathy is defined largely in terms of the lack of social motives and moral emotions (Millon et al., 1998; Patrick, 2005), so presumably the violence that psychopaths commit is not often morally motivated, and is truly immoral. So if most acts of violence are perpetrated by psychopaths, it would disprove our thesis that most violence is morally motivated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virtuous ViolenceHurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships, pp. 150 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014