Virtuous violence from the war room to death row

Abstract

How likely is it that someone would approve of using a nuclear weapon to kill millions of enemy civilians in the hope of ending a ground war that threatens thousands of American troops? Ask them how they feel about prosecuting immigrants, banning abortion, supporting the death penalty, and protecting gun rights and you will know. This is the finding from two national surveys of Democrats and Republicans that measured support for punitive regulations and policies across these four seemingly unrelated issues, and a fifth, using nuclear weapons against enemy civilians (in survey 1) or approving of disproportionate killing with conventional weapons (in survey 2). Those who support these various policies that threaten harm to many people tend to believe that the victims are blameworthy and it is ethical to take actions or policies that might harm them. This lends support to the provocative notion of “virtuous violence” put forth by Fiske and Rai [A. P. Fiske, T. S. Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (2014)], who assert that people commit violence because they believe it is the morally right thing to do. The common thread of punitiveness underlying and connecting these issues needs to be recognized, understood, and confronted by any society that professes to value fundamental human rights and wishes to prevent important decisions from being affected by irrelevant and harmful sociocultural and political biases.

The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization.

“…We experienced the outcome of cognition and context interacting when running a political experiment in our own lab. One strongly conservative participant, who had grown up in a homogeneous political environment and scored high on trait intolerance to uncertainty, emphatically explained that he was no longer interested in policy making—but rather in putting up a fight against the liberals who are out to “destroy his way of life.” More generally, political adversaries tend to ascribe outgroup aggression to hate, while ascribing aggressive ingroup behavior to love—a motive attribution asymmetry bias (Slovic et al, 2020; Waytz et al, 2014). These interpretations cannot both be true at once, demonstrating that our perceptions of others’ intentions are often inaccurate and instead align with how we want to see the world (Yudkin et al, 2019).…”

Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts Between Sharing and Caring Versus Controlling and Holding Evolved Strategies

“…is special and entitled to unequal access to resources and thus to exploit other groups for one’s own benefit. SDO is associated with the belief that it is okay to drop nuclear bombs on people and blame them for doing so ( Slovic et al, 2020 ). Indeed, humans are well known to enjoy seeing others suffer if they are perceived to be the threat or “the enemy.”…”

A Resolution of St. Petersburg Paradox

“…A similar saturation of sensation occurs for major disasters for which human moral intuitions are not well-calibrated to the extreme scales of deaths. This is called moral numbing (Slovic et al (2020)). Martin (2008) argued that limiting the utility function by some value is a quite subjective procedure.…”