Moral violations and Honour 1

Virtuous Violence

GYW assert that aversion to harm is a core aspect
of the cognitive template for moral judgment. The
notion that moral judgments are geared toward the
avoidance of harm is found in most prominent theories
of moral judgment (Haidt, 2007; Hauser, 2006;
Mikhail, 2007; Turiel, 1983). Within these theories,
support for violence can only be interpreted as a moral
violation, an error in moral performance, the influence
of a competing moral foundation, or a necessary evil
toward bringing about a greater good. In contrast, Rai
and Fiske (2011) argued that people often judge—and
feel—that it is good to do violence to others: People
believe that in many cases hurting or killing others is
not simply justifiable, it is absolutely, fundamentally
virtuous. People feel that violence is moral when the
violence sustains an important social relationship.
And in virtually every culture, cultural norms obligate
everyone to hurt or kill certain others when the
violence is necessary to protect crucial relationships.
In short, in many situations, people regard pain and
death as good, and indeed morally necessary.
It should go without saying that we offer
this as a descriptive scientific theory of virtuous
violence—obviously we are not making a prescriptive
recommendation for violence. We ourselves abhor all
violence; butmost people inmost cultures regardmuch
violence as morally good. Examples include killing in
wartime, torture, vengeance, honor-related violence,
lover’s quarrels, violent punishment of disobedience,
retributive justice, circumcision and excision, initiation
rites, self-flagellation, suicides motivated by shame or
guilt, violence committed under orders, execution, ethnic
cleansing, hate crimes, drone assassinations, human
sacrifice, headhunting, and violence committed by
gods and heroes. Acts of morally motivated violence
are not merely tolerated; they have often been celebrated
as spectacle, such as in the picnics at hangings
during the 18th and 19th centuries. Sometimes the people
involved perceive the harm they inflict as an unfortunate
but necessary means to an overriding end, but often
they perceive the harm as an intrinsically good end
in itself. Virtuous violence can be morally satisfying.
None of this is to say that committing violence
comes easy. Like many moral acts, committing violence
toward another human being can be difficult,
requiring training, social support and modeling, effort,
practice, and experience before it becomes second nature.
As with many difficult moral practices other than
committing violence, people often resist or fail to do
what is morally required of them, even when they have
no doubt about whether they should do it. When people
do commit moral violence to others, they often feel
guilt, shame, remorse, sadness, nausea, or horror because
of antiviolence motives that operate alongside
the moral violence motives. But the fact that people
have competing motives to refrain from violence, yet
often overcome those motives to achieve virtuous violence,
does not make their violence any the less moral.
It just means that humans are complex creatures, with
many motives pushing in different directions.
One potential argument against our proposed conceptualization
Of importance, Relationship Regulation Theory suggests
that the extent to which a character trait is moralized
will depend on the relationship within which it is
considered. For example, judging someone to be indecisive
or unintelligent will take on more moral weight
when the person being judged is a leader in a hierarchy.
How might we test the social-relational hypothesis
of intention, character, and moral judgment? One
approach would be to examine whether the difference
between moral judgments of intentional and accidental
moral violations can be predicted based on the judgment
of the relationship value of the actor. For example,
Young and Saxe (2011) have already demonstrated
that intention plays less of a role in purity violations,
such as incest, than in harm violations, such
as feeding peanuts to someone with a peanut allergy.
We hypothesize that whereas Young and Saxe found
that disgust, experienced emotion, perceived control,
perceived knowledge, and perceived intent failed to account
for differences in the role of intention in moral
judgments of harm versus purity violations, differences
in the extent to which participants view the relevant
social relationship as irreparable will predict these differences.
Thus, accidentally feeding peanuts to your
cousin who has a peanut allergy does not necessarily
ruin the relationship, whereas accidentally having incestual
sex with her does. Another approach would be
to investigate the role of relationship value directly.
Will the difference in moral judgments of intentional
versus accidental actions be reduced in cases where the
value of the existing relationship is lower, such as when
dealing with undesirable strangers low in warmth and
competence (Harris&Fiske, 2006) or people who cannot
stop themselves from committing the same transgression
in the future? In the context of intoxication,
will stronger beliefs that alcohol reveals true character
predict more severe judgment of accidental violations?
Finally, will priming different relational models (e.g.,
authority ranking vs. market pricing) lead to different
valuation of character traits (e.g. decisiveness vs.
frugality)?

Gray, K., Young, L., & Waytz, A. (2012). Mind perception is the essence of morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 101-124.