WHY would anyone hurt you? Why would you hurt or kill someone else? Contrary to popular perception, people are rarely violent simply because they lose control and fail to think about right and wrong. They rarely commit violence because they lack empathy and fail to see their victims as fully human. And almost no one is violent because they draw sadistic pleasure from the suffering of others.
鈥淧eople rarely commit violence because they are sadistic or lack empathy鈥�
Across cultures and history, there is generally one motive for hurting or killing: people are violent because it feels like the right thing to do. They feel morally obliged to do it.
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Loss of control, lack of empathy, dehumanisation, self-interest: these are factors that help facilitate violence, but none of them account for the motives underlying most acts of violence. When people impulsively lash out, on the whole they don鈥檛 simply lash out randomly. The truth is that people engage in violence when they feel it is the morally right thing to do. Violence is not a breakdown of morality 鈥� it is motivated by moral emotions and judgements.
To claim that people are morally motivated to hurt and kill others might sound like a contradiction in terms. This is because many people in the West have been taught to equate morality with the avoidance of pain and suffering. But as laudable as this stance may be, we cannot allow it to cloud our scientific description of the moral psychology that guides human actions.
So here, when we use the term 鈥渕oral鈥�, we mean 鈥渕oral from the perpetrator鈥檚 point of view鈥�. When we say that violence is morally motivated, we are not justifying violence; we are simply describing the motives, emotions and judgements of the person committing the violence. We ourselves judge violence to be repugnant, but it is crucial to acknowledge the empirical fact that morality 鈥� the sense of 鈥渙ught鈥�, 鈥渟hould鈥�, or 鈥渕ust鈥� 鈥� varies between cultures and changes across time. However, violence always functions to create, sustain and otherwise regulate our social relationships. A person鈥檚 moral psychology is not fundamentally or intrinsically oriented toward harm-avoidance, peacefulness or altruism. Ultimately, morality is about regulating relationships, and violence is a powerful means to do so.
Driven by love
If your parents spanked you when you were a child, it was probably because they thought it was good for you. They may have hated to do it, but they did it because they felt they had to, to bring you up correctly. Their parents may have spanked or whipped them in order to raise them as God-fearing, virtuous adults.
Looking more broadly, violence 鈥� the deliberate infliction of pain, suffering, fear, injury or death 鈥� has long been an integral part of many people鈥檚 lives around the world. Violent initiations, for instance, create strong communal ties that bind participants to sacrifice their lives for each other. Likewise, the brutal self-inflicted harm formerly committed by Native Americans on their spirit-quests creates an irrevocable relationship with a spirit guardian who would empower and protect them in battle. In many cultures, some form of surgical modification of the genitals of men or women is felt to be essential to the creation of a virtuous adult, even 鈥� and sometimes especially 鈥� if it is frightening and painful.
When a woman shoots an intruder to protect her children, it is love for her children that motivates her. Likewise, soldiers often kill to protect their buddies. Some violent acts are punitive 鈥� the execution of a murderer for example, or the bombing of those who bomb us. That鈥檚 justice as the perpetrator perceives it 鈥� an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
In some cultures, when someone dies, the principal mourners cut or burn themselves or amputate a finger joint. In some old civilisations, wives and retainers were killed to accompany the spirit of a dead king, or captives were sacrificed in his honour. Thus they honoured the dead, showing their love and commitment.
A person may also harm someone to morally regulate a relationship with someone else. For instance, a youth who wants to join the Bloods gang may have to kill a member of the Crips gang first. In a culture of honour, a man is morally obliged to attack someone who insults his wife or mother.
In short, most violence is morally motivated to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn crucial relationships, according to the cultural norms of the group that people belong to.
None of this negates the fact that people also have strong motives of care and compassion towards those they have communal or pastoral responsibility for. And none of this negates the fact that most of us find committing acts of violence repugnant and traumatic. But moral motives to do harm may grow strong enough to compel a person to be violent. This may happen in an instant, so they do not have time to reflect on the wider moral implications of their violence. Or a person may carefully ruminate about the morality of violence for years while awaiting the right opportunity to violently regulate a relationship. But the motives are equally 鈥渕oral鈥� in either case.
The foundation of Western legal systems is that people are found guilty and punished for intentionally doing what they know to be wrong. But what happens when people know that what they did was right, according to their internal moral compass? If we wish to reduce violence, simply increasing the penalties will not work, because people will do what is morally required if they feel their cause is righteous 鈥� whatever the consequences. It will not reduce violence to simply teach people to step back and consider the victim鈥檚 feelings and whether the victim deserves harm, because often the perpetrator may decide the victim does deserve violence, and may even relish the pain the victim experiences.
Instead, we must reorient potential perpetrators to find non-violent ways to regulate their relationships. Moreover, we must make perpetrators know that their violent actions will violate their relationships with people they care about. Family, friends and leaders must show potential perpetrators that they won鈥檛 put up with violence. They must make it clear that if the perpetrator injures or kills anyone, they won鈥檛 just hurt the victim, they will damage their relationships with family, friends and community leaders.
When, for instance, non-violent African American protesters were hosed and beaten during the civil rights movement, it did not evoke guilt in the majority of white American southerners, but it did elicit the sympathy of the northern states and the international community, and as a result the American South was shamed and pressured into tolerating integration.
Likewise in US cities plagued by gang violence and homicide, the most successful violence-reduction programmes rely on communicating to gang members that their violence is not praiseworthy and that it is hurting the people they care most about. For example, in the Cure Violence programme 鈥� previously known as CeaseFire 鈥� in Baltimore, Maryland, influential local leaders, speaking for the community, publicly tell the principal perpetrators that killing is intolerable, and victims and bereaved families confront the killers with the social consequences of killing. Swift and certain legal sanctions are used alongside these meetings, but are insufficient by themselves: family members and respected community leaders must clearly and forcefully state that violence is wrong.
Changing people鈥檚 motives and beliefs about violence is difficult and takes time, but that is true of many cultural changes in values and practices. Extreme corporal punishment of youngsters used to be ubiquitous, but is now in steep decline and widely judged to be child abuse. Domestic violence used to be commonplace and explicitly condoned; now, an incident of family violence can dominate a news cycle and be widely condemned.
Violence is already less condoned and practised than it used to be. We have a long way to go, but we have the power to stop violence by making it immoral.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淰iolence for goodness鈥� sake鈥�
