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
Foreword
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
Moralization is the original sin of the behavioral sciences. Scientists of human nature – psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, geneticists, neurobiologists – must be committed, as scientists, to describing the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be. But it’s irresistible to read our morals into reality and describe the world as if it strove to implement our values. Nowhere has this fallacy been more damaging than in the attempt to understand violence. The harder-headed the scientist, the more rigorous he or she claims to be, the more likely that the scientist will assume that violence is the result of a defective gene, a damaged brain, a psychopathology, a contagious public health problem, or a societal malfunction.
The book you are now holding presents a rare escape from this conceptual prison. It presents one of those rare hypotheses that is both flagrantly contrary to expert belief (at first sight yet another example of the tedious “everything-you-think-is-wrong” formula) and at the same time very likely to be true. Having myself tried to make sense of 10 thousand years of human violence, I came to a conclusion that is very similar to the one that Alan Fiske and Tage Rai present in this book: most perpetrators of violence are neither pathological nor self-interested but are convinced that what they are doing is in the service of a higher moral good.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virtuous ViolenceHurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships, pp. xv - xviiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014