Virtuous Violence
Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

This radical and thought-provoking book argues that violence does not result from a breakdown of morality, but is morally motivated.

Alan Page Fiske (Author), Tage Shakti Rai (Author), Steven Pinker (Foreword by)

9781107458918, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 November 2014

384 pages, 10 b/w illus. 1 table
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.62 kg

'Virtuous Violence settles the question of whether violence is a rational act or an expressive gesture triggered by the emotions. Morally motivated violence, the authors explain, is based on emotional experience. But while emotions may be acted on impulsively, there is no reason why a moral stance cannot be arrived at logically and pursued with careful planning. This solution is much more intellectually satisfying than the binary division of one versus the other, and means that the message of the book may be reconciled with the work of diverse theorists.' David Mansley, Theoretical Criminology

What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators' minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents, and prototypes. These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and to many modern murders and everyday acts of violence. Virtuous Violence presents a wide-ranging exploration of violence across different cultures and historical eras, demonstrating how people feel obligated to violently create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships in order to make them right, according to morally motivated cultural ideals.

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
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.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Psychology [JM], Crime & criminology [JKV], Sociology [JHB]