How Could They?

September 22, 2015 12:37 PM

Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations. So says Tage Rai, whose research with anthropologist Alan Fiske analysed violent practices across cultures and history.

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 [...]

For years, we have been trying to reduce crime by enacting mass incarceration, by placing restrictions on the mentally ill, and by teaching potential perpetrators how to exercise more self-control. On the face of it, these all sound like plausible strategies. But all of them miss their target [...] if we really want to cut rates of violence, we must focus on its moral motives. Simply stated, violence must be made immoral.

Rai and Fiske have also published a book on this subject: Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

posted by showbiz_liz (56 comments total)

if we really want to cut rates of violence, we must focus on its moral motives. Simply stated, violence must be made immoral.

Of course, that will never, ever happen.
posted by clockzero at 12:52 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Simply stated, violence must be made immoral.

It already is - after all, Jesus goes on and on about violence being immoral.

I mean, the commandment is Do Not Kill, yet it is treated as though it's a suggestion and even ignored entirely. There is no "unless" or "but if" or whatever. It says Do Not Kill.

And we have what we have, because people will chuck the morality the moment it is disadvantageous to do so.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 12:58 PM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

Just because it exists in that one ideal of a moral code doesn't mean it's an actual feature of any given individual's or group's moral code though. The whole point of this article is that morality is intensely context-specific, and reenforced not by books but by interactions with others.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:00 PM on September 22, 2015 [10 favorites]

And we have what we have, because people will chuck the morality the moment it is disadvantageous to do so.

I haven't finished reading the linked article, but surely the point is that Jesus' morality is not the controlling morality in all decisions. The researchers are arguing that violence in these situations is seen as the moral thing to do, and the perpetrators are not, in fact, chucking their morality, but are acting in accordance with their moral codes.

Jesus' moral code is great, but without a social environment that prioritizes it above all other codes, it won't necessarily win out.
posted by suelac at 1:01 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

We don’t have to be monsters: The new neuroscience of genocide and mass murder
posted by andoatnp at 1:01 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is a reminder to me that the basic values I hold and expect member of my community to uphold are radical. Treating people with dignity and human rights or being consistent in viewing violence as immoral is not an easy bar for most of us to pass.
posted by Gor-ella at 1:03 PM on September 22, 2015 [9 favorites]

I mean, the commandment is Do Not Kill, yet it is treated as though it's a suggestion and even ignored entirely

that's because it exists alongside stuff like beat your wife and children if they disobey and kill people eating shrimp and it's okay if i say to kill someone because i'm your god the one true god, let's get those fuckers and their golden calf. once you add even a single "except when" then it's all over.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:08 PM on September 22, 2015 [27 favorites]

This is a reminder to me that the basic values I hold and expect member of my community to uphold are radical.

I get this from watching Game of Thrones.
posted by philip-random at 1:09 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think it would be a big mistake to take away from this article the idea that you (the general 'you') are more moral than those who act in a way that is against your own morality. That's the whole point, that those people are acting according to a moral code. Just not yours. (And, just not your idea of what theirs must surely be.)

That doesn't make it any less right for you to try to make them change their minds, but it seems like a pretty important distinction.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:12 PM on September 22, 2015 [12 favorites]

This very much matches the experiences relayed to me by the inmates I do nonviolence training with.

Most of the men I work with experienced regular violence from a very early age and they readily describe the process of coming to believe that it was the correct way to live as they grew into teenagers. They often talk about their past violent behaviors as a perceived duty to protect the honor of their loved ones, their property, and themselves. One of the tropes I hear over and over again has to do with disrespect. It sometimes seems to me like their entire lives are centered around ideas of respect and disrespect and violence is generally seen as a necessary response to save face in light of disrespect from others.

I've never really thought about the training in this light, but a lot of it focuses on challenging the moral perceptions of the people we work with. They as a (self-selected) group do want to get rid of their violent and destructive behaviors, but they struggle on two fronts: first, it's very difficult to convince them that words can mediate conflict - their peers view them as soft or weak when they don't "fight back" physically, and as you can imagine, they have an extreme fear of being perceived as weak in a prison environment because they feel it further causes them to be a target. Second, they have no idea what to replace violate behaviors with or how to navigate the realities of life in prison without them.

I will say that, contrary to the common perception, the inmates I deal with are by and large normal everyday people. The thing that most separates them from those on the outside isn't sociopathy or mental illness, it's the early experience of violence, usually combined with very chaotic and unstable home lives.
posted by zug at 1:13 PM on September 22, 2015 [75 favorites]

Yes showbiz_liz, I was careful about saying that it's hard for us. All of us!

And the hardest thing for some, as zug talks about, is that violence works for a lot of people and a lot of situations. It's easy for me to abhor violence, I'm not very good at it.
posted by Gor-ella at 1:16 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

This essay made me think about the Stand Your Ground laws. Those laws codified that violent action is an acceptable way of behaving, even when non-violent solutions are possible (e.g., retreating). They send a moral message to people about the acceptability of violence within a society. While it is often said that you cannot legislate morality, I believe that laws do set the lower threshold for acceptable behaviors. That an ABA report found that states with these types of laws experienced an increase in homicides compared to states that did not have these laws suggests that something like this might be in play - that condoning violence when non-violence was an option changes the moral floor of at least some people in a given socio-cultural setting.
posted by palindromic at 1:18 PM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]

“I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.” - Oscar Wilde

posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 1:22 PM on September 22, 2015 [17 favorites]

It already is - after all, Jesus goes on and on about violence being immoral.

And then he himself gets so mad he tears up the temple moneychangers. Chased them out with a whip.

The Bible is a land of contrasts.
posted by davros42 at 1:26 PM on September 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

The researchers are arguing that violence in these situations is seen as the moral thing to do, and the perpetrators are not, in fact, chucking their morality, but are acting in accordance with their moral codes.

Seems right. 'Morality' is what you do when the chips are down - not what you think you would do, what you said you would do, or what you agreed to do in church.

So is 'morality' a post-hoc descriptive, not an aspirational, behavior-set?
posted by j_curiouser at 1:27 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sebastian Junger wrote in his book War:

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It's just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn't where you might die -- though that does happen -- it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

To eliminate violence between people, we will need to acknowledge the fact that it can be thrilling. Chris Hedges wrote that "war is a drug", and I think he's on to something.
posted by theorique at 1:30 PM on September 22, 2015 [19 favorites]

Men are forever doing two things at the same time: acting egoistically and talking moralistically.--Constantin Brunner.
posted by No Robots at 1:36 PM on September 22, 2015 [6 favorites]

This fits very well with two of the most disturbing nonfiction books I have read this year, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, by Nikolas Wachsmann, and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. Stalin and his NKVD felt perfectly justified in murdering some 4 million, mostly by starvation, and the people who implemented Hitler's murder of 10 million more were equally sure they were doing something difficult, but morally right.
posted by bearwife at 1:36 PM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

Theorique - I actually ran across this article while reading up on another book I'm planning to read, On Killing, which details various ways in which modern (particularly American) militaries used research to figure out how to increase a soldier's willingness to kill (and that thrill is part of it). The author asserts that the majority of soldiers in wars like WWI and the Civil War actually never even fired their weapons due to an innate resistance to killing. (He would probably have suggested that it was 'innate' in humans in general; this article would suggest that it was merely innate in their culture.)
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:39 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

If anyone hasn't read to the end of the article, please do. It ends on a very hopeful note.

BTW, on the topic of the problem of moral violence, I can't help but throw in a little C.S. Lewis --

Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

This is different from the topic of the article, though, because Lewis posits a false consciousness about the real reasons for the violence which the article doesn't.
posted by edheil at 1:56 PM on September 22, 2015 [18 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted; not certain this was the intended reading, but metacommentary about MetaFilter itself doesn't belong on the blue.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:58 PM on September 22, 2015

Yes. 100%.

I haven't done any active research in this topic, but I feel like one can notice in the history of modern movies how the acceptability of violience in movies has changed over time. Again, this is idle speculation, but I get the feeling that for several decades we've been playing wack-a-mole in terms of trying to find appropriate justification for the spectacular violence that we want to see.

Self defence has always been necessary, but watching Schwarzenegger mow down dozens of mooks who only made the mistake of taking the wrong shift on the security detail... well it feels dated. Today we have zombies which are by definition okay to kill, and comic book movies where everything is punch punch and people rarely die even while cities are being destroyed. And as we process these things further and see more and more that every avenue for justification is ultimately empty, maybe one day indeed we will simply run out of ways and give up the whole enterprise.

The optimism at the end of the article was nice.
posted by Alex404 at 2:26 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

I've long maintained that the so-called apocalypse isn't coming, it's already here. So the question isn't, what should we do when the shit hits but what are we doing? And the good news is that very many so-called civilized humans are not going on zombie hunts, certainly not real ones. I wonder how much of our bloodlust and/or what Junger called "the insane excitement of war" is sated or at least diffused by our engagement in dangerous sports and the like, and/or various movies and games. We aren't logical, rational animals by default. That takes work and maybe some of that work involves the blowing off of certain negative energies.
posted by philip-random at 2:37 PM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

...and I thought the take away message here was that it proves that violence is necessary to maintain moral society?

More seriously though... isn't this basically what numerous philosophers have been saying since Hobbes? That violence is intrinsically connected with social and cultural meaning. - see Schmitt, Foucault, Girard, Freud, etc..
posted by mary8nne at 2:50 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

"All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem."

- Dr. James Gilligan

From Wikipedia: Dr. Gilligan was brought in as the Medical Director of the Massachusetts prison mental hospital in Bridgewater, Massachusetts because of the high suicide and murder rates within their prisons. When he left ten years later the rates of both had dropped to nearly zero.
posted by krinklyfig at 3:21 PM on September 22, 2015 [24 favorites]

perceived moral rights and obligations, such as those that come from fundamentalist, extremist religions.
posted by Dashy at 4:30 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I mean, the commandment is Do Not Kill, yet it is treated as though it's a suggestion and even ignored entirely. There is no "unless" or "but if" or whatever. It says Do Not Kill.

You know, there's a wide variety of behaviors between non-violence and murder. Like a fist-fight in the hallway because someone's girlfriend keeps texting you.
posted by pwnguin at 5:11 PM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

To eliminate violence between people, we will need to acknowledge the fact that it can be thrilling.

Heh, I think Hollywood acknowledges this a few billion of times a year. Ka-ching! :)

The basic formula for a blockbuster is:
1. Set up a scenario so incredibly implausible (and/or impossible) that it "allows" someone to dish out some sweet sweet violence with our blessing instead of our disgust.
2. VIOLENCE VIOLENCE VIOLENCE! BASK IN ALL THE EXCITEMENT! (But you're not a baddy for being excited - the Implausible Scenario makes it A-ok to loooove the violence! )

(3. Profit.)
posted by anonymisc at 5:34 PM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

showbiz_liz - On Killing is also an interesting book about the behavior and psychology of soldiers in wartime. Its findings seem to have a lot of implications for the incidence of PTSD and other adverse symptoms in soldiers after war. I recommend it also.

anonymisc - agreed. Although I think there's a difference between vicarious, simulated violence and actually being the guy in charge of the turret gun or whatever.
posted by theorique at 5:39 PM on September 22, 2015

I actually think using the "moral" argument would be less effective than using the ineffective in the long term argument.

I think in the fairy tales there are animals who can talk and flower fairies and tree spirits because deep down, in our most fantastical dreams... we wish we could live without destroying those around us. That instead of killing and slaughtering the life around us to life, we could instead befriend them... and they could grow empathy for us.

I see no reason not to hope. But I think to understand and challenge the violence in humans we may want to understand and challenge the violence imbedded in this planet and it's creatures. Question the when and why of species that turn to violence. Are they really incapable of empathy, do species tend toward violence only in times of famine, disease or scarcity or is it really "The way of things" as many believe. Well not just that it's the way things are but that they should be that way.

There are many horrors in this world, let us stop making them into sacred things that must continue simply because they have existed. Let us start challenging the idea that simply because one is hungry, another should therefore die, as if it is a sacred code. That the more powerful thus deserve to prey on those they can capture.
posted by xarnop at 6:32 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Related: on culture of honor, violence, & the American South.

In a honor-based culture, if ones honor (& by extension one's family/clan honor) is even questioned, violence is the socially expected ( & sanctioned) response.

Of course, one can accept an apology, but the other party would then be dishonored by not standing by his word, and so men engage in violence.

Honor is a medieval concept; modern legal statutes don't recognize defending it as a defense against charges of assault/murder.

But there are places in the world today where it absolutely is.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:08 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

It is typical in our day to seek to root the human predilection for violence in nature. However, there is a difference between violence in nature in general and violence in man. To quote Brunner again:

If we want to use the word ‘moral’ in the usual sense, we must say that man is morally the lowest of all animals; for he is the torturer and murderer of every possible animal, of myriad other species. To some extent he does this out of the interest of sheer necessity, but largely out of the unrestrained interest of his own pleasure. He is also the one who tortures and murders within his own species, out of the conviction that he is better than his brothers and sisters.... We are the most immoral animals because we cultivate moralism, and the most irrational because the interest of the moment overwhelms us. --The Tyranny of hate, p. 23.

Our whole approach to biology is an attempt to allow man to feel good about his destructiveness.
posted by No Robots at 7:15 PM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

As an advocate for victims of intimate partner violence, we always talk about the myths of the root of the abuser's violence: mental illness (does he hold a job and have friends?), drug abuse (what about those who are addicts and aren't violent?), alcohol (same as previous). The message that hits hardest is "What does your abuser value the most?" The abuser mostly values him or herself over others, values what they think is right. Most abusers act within their own morality. I believe this. And when confronted, truly confronted (which is rare), the abuser will try his or her damnedest to show that they were morally right in their decision, often turning their decision as one made against a worse decision made by the victim. It is morally right for him to check her phone, accuse her of being a whore, isolate her from her evil family and friends, protect his children from a terrible mother, teach her how to spend money, work, etc. It is gross. Morals are gross. The author spent just a moment to speak about it, but only in the context of Ray Rice. My community has at least 10 Ray Rices a day.
posted by psylosyren at 7:18 PM on September 22, 2015 [19 favorites]

How did this work for Vikings or Mongols? Did raiding folk involve perceived moral rights and obligations, or does this model mostly work for people engaging in violence against members of what they consider to be their community?
posted by sebastienbailard at 9:46 PM on September 22, 2015

I mean, the commandment is Do Not Kill

This is an oft-repeated misconception. It is more properly translated as "You will not Murder." This is more consistent with the rest of the material it is associated, since killing is a required punishment for many, many crimes, and there's even a charming scene later in the old testament where god punishes the Israelites for failing at complete genocide during their conquering of the lands they consider theirs.

Morality is a minefield, often because it's essentially a set of arbitrary rules set by individuals guided by other arbitrary rules enforced or promulgated by the culture/religion/society the individual lives in. It's emotionally and mentally easier to follow the "moral" rules arbitrarily pre-determined, or to react to violence with more violence, then it is to break a cycle. If everybody on this thread is determined to never get even again, that's great - but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that's normal for everybody else. The impulse to judge, too, is so strong that it customarily takes training to break it.

If there was something I'd say it's never too late to start teaching people, it's that the ends never, ever justify the means. Am I going to say that bad things never happen, or that they should never be done? I'm not really quite that naïve enough to believe that in a complicated world, but maybe we should start thinking about having war crimes trials for the winners after the wars are over. We won't, but it's food for thought.

None of us is as cruel as all of us.
posted by Strudel at 3:43 AM on September 23, 2015 [7 favorites]

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.

Black and fucking white and we still have the death penalty.
posted by Talez at 6:10 AM on September 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

"The ends never, ever justify the means." But that is also too simple. You wouldn't kill a school shooter to save the school children? That's a case of the end justifying the means, a case of justified homicide.

I have way too many thoughts on this subject to fit into a comment box. So I'll just add my endorsement to the "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," recommendation (I don't always agree with Chris Hedges, but that is a frickin' master work) and add recommendations for Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning," and "Moral Tribes," by Joshua Greene. Oh, and Ursula LeGuin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which I wish Greene would've confronted because it is the best critique of his "deep pragmatism" approach to morality, and "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, because it's a much better "no right answers" scenario than most of the ones moral philosphers come up with.

Read all those and you may find it impossible to fully trust any simple maxims like "Thou shalt not kill," "The ends don't justify the means," or "the greatest good for the greatest number." There are always exceptions.
posted by OnceUponATime at 8:45 AM on September 23, 2015 [6 favorites]

Just to clarify a little further -- what I mean by "there are always exceptions" is not that "there is no such thing as right or wrong; it's all just a matter of opinion."

It's more like Goedel's theorem, from mathematics. Most of the time there is a right answer and a wrong answer (or more than one of each.) Just as most mathematical propositions can be either proven or disproven. But Goedel's theorem says that no matter how rigorous your system of axioms and deduction rules is, there will always be some statements which can be neither proven nor disproven. Similarly, no matter how complete your theory of morality, I think it will always be possible to come up with circumstances which constitute exceptions to any general moral rules -- but that doesn't mean the moral rules have no validity. They are valid in most situations. Just not universally.

That's my current conclusion, but I am not very satisfied with it. Newton's laws are also valid in almost every normal case but fail in extreme circumstances... But we were able to invent relativity and quantum mechanics to deal with those circumstances (though they still fail in even more extreme limits.) I still have hope that we may be able to figure out moral quantum mechanics.
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:12 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Doing what the article asks -- coming to a consensus that violence is wrong in the vast majority of cases where it is actually used and enforcing that consensus within our social relationships (not just our legal system) probably doesn't require moral quantum mechanics, though. There's already a vast consensus on those cases, or those people wouldn't end up in jail. Instead it's more a problem of integrating our communities, of having relationships with marginalized people instead of marginalizing them, so that we can use those social-relational tools in the first place.

(Sorry for the three-comments-in-a-row thing. Like I said, too many thoughts...)
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:40 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

The ends don't justify the means, though. I'm not saying we never have to do bad things.

But we should never allow ourselves to stop feeling bad about doing them.

At what point should we justify bombing that always kills civilians even though they're not the target? If people could be killed in the process of protecting more lives, well, that happens, I'm not saying no effort should be made, but we should feel guilty afterwards. Kill the shooter to save the children, but that doesn't make you heroic; remember that time a woman talked a shooter down instead?

The brain is a remarkable rationalization engine. You can rationalize away anything, but we shouldn't allow ourselves that luxury. When it comes to terrible things, there's no such thing as too much doubt. As long as you continue to doubt, you continue to believe that things could have been better or gone differently. If you don't doubt, you throw up your hands and say, "Nothing could have been done," or "the system can't change."

We don't need to justify our terrible things that we do. We need to live with them the rest of our lives and promise ourselves that we'll find a better way next time. Hence my comment about war crimes trials.
posted by Strudel at 9:46 AM on September 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

"The ends never, ever justify the means." But that is also too simple. You wouldn't kill a school shooter to save the school children? That's a case of the end justifying the means, a case of justified homicide.

Why do you immediately jump to kill?

This is what it means by "the ends never, ever justify the means". Is the shooter a current threat? Is everyone in the immediate area safe and therefore you can take time to consider the situation? Is there time to charge them while they reload? Is there a way to disable them with a shot instead of killing them? This is why courts rarely give out justifiable homicides for self defense. Especially if you live in an area that requires a duty to retreat. Rarely is there a situation where justified homicide is called for. Retreat is almost always an option.
posted by Talez at 9:46 AM on September 23, 2015

People hate hurting others.

Clearly the guy's never seen Mean Girls
posted by IndigoJones at 9:55 AM on September 23, 2015

The ends don't justify the means, though. I'm not saying we never have to do bad things. But we should never allow ourselves to stop feeling bad about doing them.

I agree with that, sort of. I mean when you break a moral rule in service of some other moral rule, I think you can both tell yourself that it's "justified" by the other rule (in the sense that you would do the same thing again in the same situation, and would not seek punishment for someone else who made that same judgement call) and still feel bad about it, because hey, you did break a moral rule. And I think that is an appropriate response, although some people end up beating themselves up way too much... They didn't create the impossible situation, after all. But yeah, you may have done the "right thing" and you may have been "justified" but that doesn't mean you didn't also do something horrible, and I would hope that doing horrible things would make someone feel bad, regardless of the reason.

(For anyone who wants to dispute that such situations really exist, who wants to say that in the real world there are no moral dilemmas which require you to choose between your principles or to choose which person to hurt, without offering the option of hurting no one... I'm not going to argue that point. If your own observations haven't already convinced you that such situations exist, I'll just point again at the books and stories I mentioned previously, which discuss the subject with much more nuance than I could in this forum.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:12 AM on September 23, 2015

Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

Explains the hypocracy in the state monopoly on it. Murder is wrong - oh, uh, unless it's capital punishment.
Never got that one.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:15 PM on September 23, 2015

Murder is wrong - oh, uh, unless it's capital punishment.
Never got that one.

Because, when the State does it, it is not 'murder'. Murder, as a crime, is a crime against the State. As the State cannot commit a crime against itself, capital punishment cannot be murder as defined by law.
posted by Thella at 3:02 PM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

'Murder' and 'killing' aren't equivalent; 'murder' means 'unlawful killing.'
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:08 PM on September 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

There has to be more to it than that, otherwise we'd only have one criminal offense (that of committing a criminal act).

Surely murder is deliberate, personal and premeditated killing. State execution is definitely murder, but the state gives itself a free pass. Because it can, and because people somehow feel better about other people (important, that) killing "bad guys". Sometimes (as in the UK during the 1950s an 60s), the condemned prisoners' innocence or mitigating circumstances can make the populous squeamish, and the state is deprived of its license to kill. In other cases (c.f. Texas) it doesn't seem to make any difference.
posted by Grangousier at 4:25 PM on September 23, 2015

1) For some reason, I thought this was already common knowledge. No one's the villain in their own story, etc.

2) I do think he downplays too much the idea of violence for gain — distinguishing between cases more clearly would have helped his article.

3) Ends justify means all the time, and the notion that this means that the proper approach is to do things knowing they're regrettable and then regret them is essentially the same thing as using morality to justify violence. But to just posit that the ends don't justify the means is to cling to a naive adage as a false source of clarity.

4) Damn, No Robots, do you get a percentage off Brunner sales? I think you link to him in about half your comments.
posted by klangklangston at 5:21 PM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is Violence a modern obsession, or is it an unavoidable part of humanity? Either way violence is designed into our society.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:46 PM on September 23, 2015

I used to get hung up on the ends vs means conundrum until someone put it to me thus: until we evolve to the point where we grasp that the means are the ends, we will continue, as a species, to push toward catastrophe and ultimately extinction. That is, if it takes murder to achieve that golden dream we have, we are a murdererers, not dreamers. And in a world that has nuclear weapons and the like, those dreams will only be nightmares anyway.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

For some reason, I thought this was already common knowledge. No one's the villain in their own story, etc.

Sure, but we like to tell ourselves that the people who have elevated their villainous selves to the hero of the story must be radically wrong. We believe they're operating from a lack of ability to set sensible limits on behavior, lacking empathy, completely misinterpreting common structures. But not only are they not seeing themselves as the bad guy, they're also not concocting some sort o sci-fi narrative that the rest of us wouldn't recognize. They're in a story that would seem utterly pedestrian.
posted by phearlez at 12:00 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I agree with the "nobody's the villain in their own story" thing.

A lot of the inmates I work with are deeply aware of the lives they have destroyed with their crimes, not only their victim's lives (in the case of murderers) but their families, friends, their own lives, etc. They experience a lot of anguish trying to understand how they could have been so immoral as to do the horrible things they've done. This is one of the major things they have to confront during their process of healing their lives and accepting nonviolence.
posted by zug at 12:09 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Zug - I'm curious whether the people you've worked with thought they were doing villainous things at the time that they were doing them, or only in retrospect?
posted by OnceUponATime at 6:35 PM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Honor Cultures and Violence" (Oxford Bibliographies)

“Honor” means different things to different people at different times. In modern societies, honor refers primarily to a form of social status that attaches to integrity and sound character. But honor has an older meaning still found among some groups today—a form of social status founded on the willingness and ability to use force. Honor in this second sense can result in two types of violence.

The first occurs predominately between men (indeed, honor is often equated with masculinity). An honorable man will not hesitate to use physical force to combat any assault, theft, insult, or other attempt at subordination of himself or his group (family, gang, or nation). For honor, unlike the more stable value of dignity, can be won or lost. Honor rises and falls when one man (or group) publicly challenges the willingness of another to physically defend himself, his intimates, or his property and hence his right to be treated as an equal. To uphold his honor a man need not beat his opponent, but he must display a willingness to fight him…

Traditional honor cultures tend, also, to be highly patriarchal, subordinating women and treating their sexuality as family property. In such cultures, a second type of honor violence may be found—men beating or even killing their female relatives for loss of chastity or other conduct that threatens male rule…

In short, all honor cultures have high rates of violence principally among men; some also have high rates of violence by men against their female relatives

posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 2:15 PM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

> I'm curious whether the people you've worked with thought they were doing villainous things at the time that they were doing them, or only in retrospect?

With the caveat that I hear a lot less about their thoughts and feelings then compared to now, the stories that I have heard usually revolve around "getting them before they get me" or revenge against a spurned lover, plus tons of drug and alcohol abuse. Not too many of them seem to have committed their crimes while sober.

But no, I don't think most of them considered their crimes to be wrong at the time they were committing them. At most, they considered it as "stuff I knew other people would think was wrong but was right in my situation".
posted by zug at 12:12 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

I should probably clarify that we never ask about their history or past, so this stuff is all self-volunteered. That might make it more honest, or it might just lead to reporting bias where only the ones who thought they were in the right feel comfortable talking about it. Hard to say.
posted by zug at 12:14 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]