Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When murderers and other violent criminals commit their crimes, are they displaying a Breaking Bad style breakdown of morals? Or are they, as claimed by social scientists from UCLA and Northwestern University, mostly responding to a truly surprising impulse – the desire to do the right thing?
A new book, Virtuous Violence, by Alan Page Fiske, UCLA professor of anthropology and Tage Shakti Rai, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, proposes the controversial theory and will be published in January 205 by Cambridge University Press.
In an article from the UCLA newsroom, Fiske says that “When someone does something to hurt themselves or other people, or to kill somebody, they usually do so because they think they have to. They think they should do it, that it’s the right thing to do, that they ought to do it and that it’s morally necessary.”
Co-author Rai explained Fiske’s claim. Killings and physical attacks, said Rai, are often committed in retribution for wrongs, either real or perceived, or as an effort to teach lessons and instill obedience or even in an attempt to rectify a relationship that in the perpetrator’s mind has gone wrong and cannot be corrected in any other way.
“We’re not talking just about the way perpetrators excuse or justify their behavior afterwards,” said Rai. “We’re talking about what motivates them to do it in the first place. When we say that violence is morally motivated, we mean that it is so in the mind of the perpetrator. We don’t mean that we think that violence is good.”
Fiske and Rai base their theory on analysis of a wide range of scholarly research on violence, including thousands of interviews with violent offenders.
The book itself contains quotes from real-life violent criminals as well as those from works of fiction, ranging from The Iliad to Huckleberry Finn. They even uncovered moral motivations behind suicide, war and rape, and the authors say the findings transcend modern and historical cultures.
“When we started writing this book, we thought, ‘We’ll never figure out what really motivates perpetrators of violent acts,’” said Fiske. “But actually it turned out not to be that hard.”
The authors accept that not every criminal has “virtuous motivations” for their violent acts. Fiske and Rai say that those exceptions are mostly psychopathic criminals and represent only a small percentage of the general population, accounting for only a small proportion of violent crime. The authors also say that, when people with other mental illnesses commit acts of violence, they often do so in the belief that they are acting morally and “doing the right thing.”
“Except for a few psychopaths, hardly anybody harming anybody else is doing something that they intend to be evil,” Fiske said. “On the contrary, they intend to be doing something right and good.”
One aspect of violence covered in the book is the beating of children. Although the practice is now unacceptable in many societies, the “spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child” mentality and approach to child rearing was once the norm and used by parents and teachers alike to discipline children. During their research, Fiske and Rai found many parents from the past who expressed concern that a child’s “moral development” might suffer if corporal punishment is withheld.
In the case of “spousal abuse”, the authors also discovered that perpetrators are convinced that they are in the right. Fiske and Rai found that many abusers “feel entitled – even obligated – to use violence to redress wrongs that they perceive themselves to have suffered, and to sustain what seems to them to be the right kind of relationship.”
Other historic uses of violence to redress perceived wrongs are illustrated in the book, including the burning of witches, the killing of adulterers, and even “honor suicides” committed by those who believed they had failed to do their duty.
The book argues that, while violent acts, such as a gang member taking revenge for an attack on a member of his gang, are usually unjustifiable to outsiders, the peers, family, or other members of the criminal’s social circle often see them as “necessary measures.” In many cases, a perpetrator’s peers or family may accuse him or her of being weak or cowardly if they do not act.
“Social workers and newspaper readers don’t think gang members should be killing each other, but within the gang they do,” Fiske said.
The authors are conscious that the book’s message may be seen as condoning violence, which they deny. In order to tackle violence, they say, we must first understand the motivations behind it. They point to successful outcomes from, for instance, gang and spousal abuse intervention programs which aim to convince perpetrators that, though their own belief systems condone it, the world outside sees their violence as immoral and unacceptable.
“All you have to do,” Fiske said, “is convince the people who are violent that what they’re doing is wrong.”
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