from Tage Rai:
Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.
He is a colleague of Alan Fiske, a very interesting anthropologist.
Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory.
In terms of history, the level of violence today (and the last 25 – 30 years as today) is the lowest in recorded history. When we complain about modern societ(ies) we have to remember the above statement.
True, to a point – but there is some over-fitting going on. I don’t think the mugger that conks you on the head thinks he is acting under moral obligation to take your money – nor the man who abuses his wife. A large amount of the violence people face in practice is this garden-variety selfishness.
From a moral standpoint, the issue is justification. The default for violence is generally “no”, but they we come up with reasons when the violence is (theoretically) pro-social. Morality is the emotional mechanism by which this happens – pro-social norms that are obligatory are more effective than those that seem optional. So, some acts of violence are ok, e.g. the government punishing criminals, or people shooting others in self-defense, nations acting in self-defense (“just war”).
Yes, I think the author may be defining “moral” as to be unfalsifiable, for example that the mugger believes he is taking your money because society has wronged him and/or he otherwise believes he “deserves” your money. Kim Jong-Un kills his uncle because Kim believes he morally deserves to stay in power. I think most of us would say the mugger is behaving immorally, and knows it, because he would not want anyone else to mug him. Kim’s violence is immoral because there is no generally applicable argument that justifies it other than one that tautologically defines anything Kim, and Kim alone, does as moral. After reading the article, I don’t know what would make the author concede that the mugger was behaving immorally, even by the mugger’s own morality. That’s why I question whether the author’s definition of moral motivation is falsifiable.
The author acknowledges that his argument “sounds like cheap relativism”, and it does. I expected to read an explanation that his argument was not cheap relativism, but I didn’t find it. The author concludes that the only way to stop violence and/or convince would-be violent perpetrators that their violence is immoral is to express that all violence is immoral. (“People still hurt and kill one another because they believe that it is the right thing to do….Once everyone, everywhere, truly believes that violence is wrong, it will end.”) Ah, so police need to stop shooting criminals that threaten others’ safety to get those criminals to stop threatening others’ safety. That sounds like cheap relativism to me.
Contra Ben, I think a large number of domestic violence incidents are motivated by these sorts of moral concerns. Being cheated on, or viciously belittled by someone who you love can indeed fill you with a righteous fury that they must be punished.
Read about women trapped in abusive cycles… they are usually not the ones being viciously belittled or cheating. Unchecked anger != righteous indignation
All anger is righteous to those feeling it.
This is an earth shaking idea (at least to me) on the order of what I experienced when Bryan Caplan taught me that the concentrated benefits/diffused cost story did not apply as widely as most believe.
I don’t, however, buy into the experiments that are cited suggesting that this idea is actually true.
Morality is likely ex post justification.
Very few people think they are evil.
The threat of violence in a society is like binary logic in a computer. When the system is functioning well you don’t encounter either except in a highly abstracted form, but it’s always beneath the surface and the system ultimately depends on it.
Reminds me of this recording of a discussion between Hitler and Mannerheim (supposedly the only recording of Hitler talking normally) where it’s apparent that Hitler sees the Eastern Front war as forced upon him by an aggressive and unreasonable Soviet Union.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec
The article doesn’t show much awareness of the past or the lost history of philosophizing on the subject of when various forms of physical violence are either immoral, amoral, or morally compelling. It is really that shocking to grasp that most forms of social rules, norms, and laws are backed up by a credible threat of severe negative consequences, appropriate in character, adequate to achieve the aim, and proportional to the importance of the underlying purpose, and that often physical violence is the necessary tool to achieve those aims? Self defense by innocent parties – even deadly versions of it – is almost universally acknowledged to be one of those instances. Is that surprising, or some kind of ‘problem’ from some purportedly more enlightened perspective?
When anything from small bands to empires set out to conquer new lands and kill or enslave the inhabitants, they didn’t often claim they were under a moral obligation to do so. Certainly attempts to provide post facto moral justification for most intentional criminal violence is seen properly by most reasonably people as insincere excuse-making or crude rationalization at best.
The writer appears to define violence in terms of physical harm. There are groups today that argue that wealth/income inequality is violence. Others argue that patriarchal social structures are violence. Famously some feminists have asserted that “all sex is rape.” These groups justify physical violence (e.g. rioting) as an appropriate response to structural violence. There can never be a society of absolute equals. For those for whom all inequality is violence, there can never be a consensus that only physical violence is immoral.
There’s a famous essay by Jonathan Bennett called “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn.” It makes a related point. Bennett basically uses Huck Finn as an example of “bad morality” because Huck thinks that helping Jim escape is immoral, since he’s stealing someone’s property. Huck pushes away these concerns because he likes Jim and feels sympathy for him. But the basic idea is that morality is about rules and principles, and that the morals rules we live by are probably imperfect, so in order to improve them, we should be guided also by our moral sentiments (compassion, sympathy, guilt). I don’t know if I can adequately summarize the essay in this short space, but Bennett does share the idea that moral principles are cold and dispassionate and so need to be moderated by and revised by our moral feelings.
Violence is often explicitly condoned by what people variously call “honor cultures” or (in Jane Jacobs’ term) “guardian morality”. Humans default to this logic whenever rule of law is not available (e.g., much of the modern world and nearly all of history). The basic ideas are:
1) You have to defend yourself and your livelihood (no law will), or you’ll die.
2) A reputation for extreme vindictiveness is useful for deterring enemies.
3) The best way to get and sustain that reputation is by extreme, attention-getting acts of violence in response to even the slightest offense. For lack of a better word, such violence is “good”. It works.
4) You’re only human, so you’ll need allies. You’ll have to defend them too.
5) If somebody else can’t defend what’s his, you should take it and use it to cement your alliances.
In case it wasn’t perfectly clear:
6) Someone who avoids violence when opportunities arise is probably weak and/or cowardly. See #5, above.
7) Looking weak can get you killed by enemies who will take your stuff, land, and women for themselves. This is “bad”.
One of the interesting results of game theory (and not just for humans, even simple creatures with ‘turf’) is that the rational maximization strategy in long games of many turns is to react to even minor encroachments and trespasses with seemingly ‘irrationally disproportionate’ resistance. One sees this, for example, in David Friedman’s A Positive Account of Property Rights. Borders in land are in a similar psychological category to borders in behaviors, which is why the ancients often used the same words to describe violations of either.
One can see people react in such ways to apparently ‘minor’ offenses any day, it’s clearly part of our human nature and it takes a lot of training and civilizing (and threatening!) to suppress.
Well, that there is a human-nature “supply side” of instinctive intense reactions is mostly uncontroversial. But people rarely focus on the demand side, because it produces a lot of ideological friction.
What I mean is, if human beings evolved to react with intense resistance to slight offenses to status or even hints of minor threats, then they also evolved to expect these reactions as the environmental cues from which they could infer someone’s strength and seriousness, and when experienced, productive of the impulse to back down, de-escalate, or otherwise be deterred, discouraged, or dissuaded from further attempts at transgression.
Which is to say, like animals and young children, there are lots of people out there who won’t stop breaking rules unless they have good reason to expect that most people doing so will have a high probability of being quickly detected and then experiencing immediate and severe physical violence as a consequence. Even the prospect of years of prison may not ‘speak’ in the right language to these folks, to the innate need for these particular kind of signals to which we were evolved. And meanwhile, perhaps even small and quick applications of pain would be more effective deterrents and preventatives than incarceration, which is common observation of parents of the relative effectiveness of rare spanks compared to frequent time-outs.
Anyone uncomfortable with physical violence in general, or sympathetic towards criminals, or especially with the use of that violence by the state against those criminals, is not going to want to believe any of that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not part of the tragedy of the human condition: something with a social optimal level above zero which we can’t ever really civilize ourselves out of.
There’s a similar problem with guns (and more powerful weapons) – they work too quickly for our evolved threat analysis mechanisms. If someone brandishes a spear, you have time to estimate your relative strength/courage/position and decide to back down (or not). A gunfight is too fast; by the time you know what’s going on it’s over. It’s usually not even a “fight” – there’s just a guy who shoots first and a guy who gets shot.