People Are Violent Because Their Morality Demands It

“Especially for the most heinous crimes, we can’t help but see the perpetrators as ‘bad’ people: inhuman monsters who lack basic moral feeling. Baumeister called this phenomenon ‘the myth of pure evil’. A myth because it isn’t true.”

“In spite of widespread beliefs about its existence, sadism is so rare that it is not even an official psychiatric diagnosis. Its closest relative is psychopathy, but psychopathy is not characterised by malevolent joy at the suffering of others. Admittedly, psychopaths lack moral emotions and empathy toward victims. And they can be quite violent: in large-scale studies of criminal offenders, it has been found that around 10 per cent of violent crimes are committed by those who score above the cut-off for psychopathy, whereas such people make up less than 1 per cent of the general population worldwide. Clearly, psychopaths account for more than their fair share of harm.”

“But that still leaves the vast majority of violent crime unexplained. Non-psychopathic people are hurting others in much greater numbers than the psychopaths. These people aren’t monsters. What motivates them?”

“when faced with these seemingly senseless acts, we find ourselves at a loss. What possible purpose could they serve? Fundamentally, why do people hurt and kill one another?”

“At present, there are two dominant approaches to understanding violence. Both fall short. The first is what I’ll call the disinhibition theory. Maybe, the story goes, even ordinary people have violent impulses that are usually held in check. When their moral sense breaks down or is somehow blocked, they give in to their dark side. Picture the man who knows that beating his wife is wrong but who, after a long day at work, loses his temper and takes it out on her. Is he our typical culprit?”

“disinhibition theory sidesteps the question of why we are motivated to be violent in the first place. The impulse has to come from somewhere, and the theory is silent about where that might be.”

“Does our propensity for aggression simply come down to a mishmash of various provocations and triggers? Or is there some universal, underlying pattern, a single key that captures the majority of violence in every culture throughout history? The latter option sounds like an ambitious goal for a sociological theory. But the second general approach to violence, which I’ll call the rational theory, is certainly ambitious.”

“On this view, violence is just a way to achieve instrumental goals. For example, killing rival heirs is sometimes a good idea if you want to be king. Whether it’s fighting among brothers or between nations, these rational-choice models predict that the likelihood of violence increases when its benefits go up or its costs go down.”

“It looks like both leading theories of violence fail, for one reason or another. Neither the disinhibition theory nor the rational theory provides a complete picture for why people hurt one another. And to the extent that we rely on these theories to reduce violence, we will fail too. What are we missing?”

“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.”

“In every case, the violent act is perceived by the perpetrators, observers – and in some cases the victims themselves – as just.”

“if violence is motivated by moral sentiments, what is it motivated toward? What are these perpetrators trying to achieve? The general pattern we found was that the violence was intended to regulate social relationships.”

“Across all cases, perpetrators are using violence to create, conduct, sustain, enhance, transform, honour, protect, redress, repair, end, and mourn valued relationships.”

“Does this mean that it necessarily ‘feels good’ or that people are never conflicted when they engage in it? No. People hate hurting others. It can be extremely distressing and traumatic, and can require training, social support and experience to do it. But that’s true of many moral practices. It can be difficult to tell the truth or to stand up for what’s right. People often resist or fail to do what’s required of them. Most of us would agree that it’s morally right to jump into icy water to save someone who is drowning, but that doesn’t mean we relish doing it.”

“Moral justifications for violence make so little sense as ruses that we have to assume they’re at least somewhat sincere.”

“Perhaps this sounds like cheap relativism. But there’s a psychological tendency here we should take seriously. What, empirically speaking, happens when we stop thinking of moral values as objective facts that are true everywhere at all times, seeing them instead as subjective opinions that differ across cultures and history? Well, in the lab at least, it seems we lose our bearings.”

“One of the most robust findings in criminology is that increasing the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect. People simply aren’t as sensitive to the potential costs of crime as the rational-choice model predicts they should be, and so efforts to reduce it by cracking down have failed to justify the immense fiscal and social costs of mass incarceration. Meanwhile, because most violent crimes are committed by psychologically healthy individuals, legislation that focuses on the mentally ill – for example, by stopping them from buying guns – would lead to only a small reduction.”

“Finally, if violence is not in fact a mistake from the point of view of the perpetrator, strategies intended to help him exercise better control over himself would miss the point.”

“if we really want to cut rates of violence, we must focus on its moral motives.”

“Simply stated, violence must be made immoral. This must hold both for the perpetrators and the people they care about. Only when violence in any relationship is seen as a violation of every relationship will it diminish.”

“In his work reducing gang violence in Boston, the criminologist David Kennedy helps to organise interventions. Killers are confronted by local leaders and the families of victims, who all express the wrongness of killing and insist that violence against anyone undermines their relationships with everyone. Legal sanctions are also present, but they are insufficient on their own. Critically, the message has to come from respected people within the killer’s own community. As Kennedy puts it: ‘their own ideas about right and wrong matter most; the ideas of those they care about and respect matter more’.”

“It isn’t easy to change a culture of violence. You have to give people the structural, economic, technological and political means to regulate their relationships peacefully. Social groups have to learn to shame and shun anyone who hurts others. But it can be done. It has been done in the past, and it is happening as we speak.”

“Cultures do change. Globally, violence is on the decline. People everywhere are finding ways to satisfy their moral motives and social-relational aims non-violently. This does not mean our work is finished. People still hurt and kill one another because they believe that it is the right thing to do. But if their primary social groups make them feel that they should not be violent, they won’t be. Once everyone, everywhere, truly believes that violence is wrong, it will end.”