Virtuous Violence

What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt
and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or
assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and
radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they
genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators’ minds,
violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social
relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents, and prototypes.
These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the
Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and to many modern murders and
everyday acts of violence. Virtuous Violence presents a wide-ranging
exploration of violence across different cultures and historical eras,
demonstrating how people feel obligated to violently create, sustain, end,
and honor social relationships in order to make them right, according to
morally motivated cultural ideals.
ALAN PAGE FISKE is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of California, Los Angeles, where he has also served as Director
of the Behavior Evolution and Culture Center, and Director of the Culture,
Brain, and Development Center. He has worked abroad for eight years as a
Peace Corps Volunteer, World Health Organization consultant, and Peace
Corps Country Director as well as conducting ethnographic fieldwork. He is
widely known for his relational models theory, the only comprehensive,
integrated theory of human sociality, which has been tested and applied in
numerous studies by hundreds of researchers.
TAGE SHAKTI RAI is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Ford
Center for Global Citizenship in the Kellogg School of Management at
Northwestern University. He is known for developing relationship
regulation theory, which argues that morality cannot be understood
independently of sociality, and that diversity in moral judgments and
behaviors is driven by patterns in the social relationships within which they
occur.
“With its wealth of eye-opening ethnographic and historical comparisons
and its contrarian but well-argued analyses, this book is a fascinating
exploration of violence and a major contribution to our understanding of the
human condition.”
Steven Pinker
“It’s so hard for us to think clearly about violence because acts of violence
trigger such strong moral condemnation. Fiske and Rai strip the moralism
out of our own minds and put it where it belongs – in the minds of the
perpetrators, who usually think their acts are justified. This astonishing
book offers a unified approach to understanding the most ghastly events,
from street crime and honor killings through war crimes and genocide. This
book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand and
ultimately reduce violence.”
Jonathan Haidt
NYU Stern School of Business and author of The Righteous Mind
“It’s not possible to have a clear understanding of the past, present or future
of war, terrorism and torture without knowing the basic message of Virtuous
Violence.”
Richard E. Nisbett
Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan
“In our preferred world of liberal democracy, tolerance of diversity and
distributive justice, violence – especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed
– are generally considered pathological or evil expressions of human nature
gone awry, or a collateral result of good intentions. Not so, argue Fiske and
Rai, in this deeply reasoned and well-documented survey of violence,
universally considered by its perpetrators to be mostly a matter of moral
virtue. Virtuous Violence aims to explain the emotions and intentions that
give rise to various kinds of human violence by understanding its
generation in both our species-wide and culture-specific moral psychology,
which is geared to regulate social life. Building on earlier ground-breaking
work on the fundamental forms of social relationships in all cultures, the
authors show that the most sustained and consequential forms of human
violence – across history and cultures – result from beliefs that it is right
and necessary to hurt and suffer harm, and to die and kill, to protect and
foster those relationships. Through compelling analyses ranging from
primeval forms of human sacrifice to contemporary torture, ancient wars to
medieval jousts, contact sports to gang fights, violent revolutions to suicide
terrorism and mass murder, Virtuous Violence lays bare the moral motives
for murderous passions, as a sort of evolutionary impetus to manage the
interpersonal and intergroup interactions upon which societies depend,
often aided by gods, spirits and abstract causes to which no creature but
man is subject. Happily, however, the authors also show that violence isn’t
always necessary to keep things in line, so that modern prescriptions for
non-violence within and between societies increasingly have a chance,
provided they are grounded in understanding social facts rather than in
wishful thinking or pure reason.”
Scott Atran
Directeur de Recherche, Anthropologie, CNRS / Ecole Normale
Supérieure, Paris and author of In Gods We Trust and Talking to the Enemy
“A provocative tour through the (long) world history of violence. You
won’t think about violence and its many manifestations – or read a
newspaper – the same way again.”
Dov Cohen
Professor, University of Illinois
“We have all watched movies where violent actions occur as part and
consequence of social relations, and where the art of the movie consists of
letting the audience share exactly the same emotions and motives that make
that violence inevitable and feel right. At the same time, the mainstream
social psychological arguments rarely pick up on these motives. This book
provides a powerful argument in favor of scientifically considering these
causes of violence. It is a scientifically important book, which touches on
many issues we are concerned about as citizens, and will surely attract
much attention and discussion as well as hopefully influencing future work
in the social and behavioral sciences on this topic.”
Thomas Schubert
University of Oslo
“The authors of this exciting book convincingly show that most individuals
and groups engage in violence believing that what they do is right, moral
and even obligatory. This well-written book shows the great challenge of
preventing such righteous violence, and provides the knowledge base to
engage with this challenge.”
 Ervin Staub
Author of The Roots of Evit, The Psychology of Good and Evil and
Overcoming Evil.
 Virtuous Violence

Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and

Honor Social Relationships

The social-relational, moral motivational psychology, cultural

anthropology and history of war, torture, genocide, animal
and human sacrifice, obedience to gods, religious self-torture,
homicide, robbery, intimate partner conflict, rape, suicide and
self-harm, corporal and capital punishment, trial by ordeal
and combat, policing, initiation, castration, fighting for status,
contact sports and martial arts, honor, the Iliad and the
Trojan War, injurious mortuary rites, and homicidal
mourning

Alan Page Fiske

Tage Shakti Rai
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the
pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels
of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107458918
© Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai 2015
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of
any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press.

First published 2015

Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Fiske, Alan Page, 1947–
Virtuous violence : hurting and killing to create, sustain, end, and honor
social
relationships / Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-107-45891-8 (pbk.)
1. Violence. 2. Violence – Moral and ethical aspects. I. Rai, Tage
Shakti. II. Title.
HM1116.F583 2014
303.6–dc23
2014023810
ISBN 978-1-107-08820-7 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-107-45891-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites
is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Gwendolyn, Colin, Zoé, Kai, Wyatt, and Benjamin:
may your lives be forever full of love and free of violence.
To Arjuna:
Julia and I will carry you in our hearts until you return.
 Contents
Figures and tables
Foreword by Steven Pinker
Warm thanks
The point

1 Why are people violent?

What we mean by “violence”
Natural aversion to killing and hurting
What we mean by “moral”
Conflicting moralities and post-hoc justifications
Pain and suffering are not intrinsically evil
Forerunners of virtuous violence theory and how it goes beyond
them
Scope: what we are and are not discussing
Illegitimate, immoral violence
2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
Fundamental ways of relating: the four elementary relational
models
Cultural implementations of universal models
Constitutive phases
Metarelational models
3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
Defense and punishment
Vengeance
Metarelational retribution
Violence due to conflicting models
4 The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently
enforce their authority
Corporal punishment of children
Violence in the military
Violent policing
Violence by gods
 Explanations of accidents, misfortune, and suffering
Trial by ordeal and combat
Metarelational aspects of authority-ranking violence
5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity
Knighthood in medieval Europe
Gang and criminal cultures
Fighting among and alongside the gods
Sports
Fighting among youths
Metarelational aspects of fighting for respect and solidarity
6 Honor and shame
Guest–host relationship
Honor killing
Honor violence in the United States
Honor among thieves
How the metarelational honor model organized the violence of the
Trojan War
7 War
The motives of leaders and nations
The moral motives that move soldiers to go to war
Killing under orders
Killing for your comrades
Extremist violence and terrorism
8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
Gods command violence
Sacrificing animals and humans to the gods
Self-sacrifice to the gods
China
American Indians
Christian monastic asceticism
Christian and Muslim self-flagellation
Theoretical elaboration
9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how
is it computed?
Defining the moral space
Distinguishing between moral and immoral relationship regulation
What are the cultural preos delimiting violence?
 Going beyond the culturally prescribed limits to violence
Is morally motivated violence rational and deliberative or emotional
and impulsive?
10 The prevailing wisdom
Are most killers sadists and psychopaths?
Are killers rational?
Are killers impulsive?
Are killers mistaken?
11 Intimate partner violence
Intimate partner violence is widespread
Intimate partner violence is morally motivated to regulate
relationships
12 Rape
Rape in war
Gang rape
13 Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation,
circumcision, and castration
Initiation rites
Circumcision and excision
Eunuch opportunities
14 Torture
Motives of leaders who order torture
Motives of torturers
Motives of the public that approves of the use of torture
15 Homicide: he had it coming
How many homicides are morally motivated?
Mass murder
Homicides committed by the mentally ill
Metarelational motives for homicide
16 Ethnic violence and genocide
Violence against African-Americans in the US South
Genocide
Null attitudes and dehumanization in the perpetuation of mass
violence
17 Self-harm and suicide
Non-suicidal self-injury
Suicide
18 Violent bereavement
Why are people sometimes enraged by death?
19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
Robbery for equality-matching vengeance
Robbery for authority-ranking status
20 The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model
Communal sharing violence: indexical consubstantial assimilation
Authority-ranking violence: iconic physics of magnitudes and
dimensions
Equality-matching violence: concrete ostensive operations
Market-pricing violence: arbitrary conventional symbolism
21 Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships,
rather than using some other medium?
Criticality
22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
23 How do we end violence?
Civil disobedience and hunger strikes
Urban gang homicide
24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research
implications
Evolution
Philosophy
Law
Psychology
Research
The dénouement
What do we mean by “most” violence?
The need for general explanations

References
Index
Figures and table
Figure 2.1 The primary motivation for violence is to constitute a social
relationship.
Figure 2.2 Relationships with others may motivate violence against a
third party.
Figure 2.3 Indirect ties may potentiate multiparty violence, or inhibit
violence.
Figure 2.4 Violence-enhancing metarelational models involving four to
six relationships among four persons.
Figure 2.5 Violence to constitute the perpetrator’s relationship with
another, and with a second or third party.
Figure 2.6 Violence to constitute multiple relationships simultaneously.
Figure 6.1 The core metarelational configuration at the root of the Trojan
War.
Figure 6.2 The metarelational model connecting the key relationships in
the Trojan War.
Figure 6.3 The “full” metarelational model of the Trojan War.
Figure 22.1 Violence-reducing metarelational models.
Table 10.1 Explanations for committing and not committing violence
 Foreword
Moralization is the original sin of the behavioral sciences. Scientists of
human nature – psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, geneticists,
neurobiologists – must be committed, as scientists, to describing the world
as it is rather than as we wish it to be. But it’s irresistible to read our morals
into reality and describe the world as if it strove to implement our values.
Nowhere has this fallacy been more damaging than in the attempt to
understand violence. The harder-headed the scientist, the more rigorous he
or she claims to be, the more likely that the scientist will assume that
violence is the result of a defective gene, a damaged brain, a
psychopathology, a contagious public health problem, or a societal
malfunction.
The book you are now holding presents a rare escape from this
conceptual prison. It presents one of those rare hypotheses that is both
flagrantly contrary to expert belief (at first sight yet another example of the
tedious “everything-you-think-is-wrong” formula) and at the same time
very likely to be true. Having myself tried to make sense of 10 thousand
years of human violence, I came to a conclusion that is very similar to the
one that Alan Fiske and Tage Rai present in this book: most perpetrators of
violence are neither pathological nor self-interested but are convinced that
what they are doing is in the service of a higher moral good. As I put it in
introducing the section on “Morality” in The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined:

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the
homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of
religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless
crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides,
they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and
conquest. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds
of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of
violence that bring them no tangible benefit. The torture of heretics
 and conversos, the burning of witches, the imprisonment of
homosexuals, and the honor killing of unchaste sisters and daughters
are just a few examples. The incalculable suffering that has been
visited on the world by people motivated by a moral cause is enough to
make one sympathize with the comedian George Carlin when he said,
“I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy [bum] who’s
lying around all day watching game shows … and I’ll show you
someone who’s not causing any [freaking] trouble!”
(As George Carlin fans might guess, my brackets and ellipses here
conceal saltier wording in the original.)

Though I came to conclusions similar to those of Fiske and Rai, the

convergence is not completely accidental. I have long thought that Fiske’s
theory of relational models is the best – indeed the only – overarching
theory of social psychology. For starters, the theory acknowledges the
fundamental fact about human sociality, the first observation that the
proverbial Martian biologist would notice about our species: we don’t act
the same way to everyone, but have radically different kinds of thoughts
and feelings about people depending on the relationship that holds between
us. We have different thoughts and feelings about our mothers and fathers
than we do about our siblings, distant relatives, spouses, lovers, friends,
rivals, enemies, and strangers. Yet, if you read the chapters on “social
psychology” in the major textbooks, with their discussions of generic
processes like stereotyping, attribution, and attitude formation, you would
have no inkling that human beings treat each other differently depending on
the qualitative nature of the relationship that binds them.
Relational models theory also tackles the paradox that social behavior
varies radically from one society to another, and from one historical era to
another, yet, throughout this variation, a few themes seem to pop up again
and again in different guises. People in all cultures are obsessed with
solidarity and warmth, with dominance and authority, with fairness and
equity, and with complex rules and formulas, albeit to different extents and
in different ways in different contexts. As with language, human
relationships seem to conform to an abstract universal grammar that is
instantiated in different ways in different cultures.
 I like relational models theory for a third reason. Various subfields within
evolutionary psychology have mapped out the distinct adaptive rationales of
different kinds of social relationships. The inclusive-fitness calculus that
selects for feelings of solidarity among kin is different from the hawk–dove
game that results in dominance hierarchies, which is different yet again
from the iterated prisoner’s dilemma that gives us the sense of fairness
which polices reciprocal altruism. And all of these evolved strategies differ
in turn from the cool cognitive calculations by which we reckon and
regulate our lives by formal rules. Relational models subsumes them all
under a comprehensive theory and, more interestingly, shows how the
choice among them gives rise to the complexity and variation in human
social life.
I’m not only a fan of relational models theory but also a user. As a
psycholinguist, I had long puzzled over the mysterious rituals of
euphemism and innuendo that govern everyday conversation: why it’s
emotionally so much easier to say Gee, officer, is there some way to settle
the ticket here? than If I give you $50, will you let me drive away? or why it
eases feelings all around to ask Would you like to come up and see my
etchings? rather than Would you like to come up and have sex? Fiske’s
theory that violated expectations of communality, authority, or equality are
emotionally awkward was the missing piece in the puzzle of why we are so
likely to sidestep and shilly-shally rather than blurt out what we mean, and I
gave it pride of place in my analysis of these phenomena in The Stuff of
Thought and subsequent papers.
My analysis of innuendo relied on the observation by Fiske and his
collaborators that when one person violates the relational model that
currently governs his relationship with another person and the violation is
unintentional or transient, the response of that person and of third parties is
typically one of awkwardness or puzzlement. But when the violation is
deliberate and ongoing, the reaction can be one of shock and outrage, and,
as Fiske and Rai elaborate in this book, it often leads to violence. That’s
why I found relational models theory so useful in solving a second problem,
the role of the moral sense in violence, which was a major theme of Better
Angels:
 How can we make sense of this crazy angel – the part of human nature
that would seem to have the strongest claim to be the source of our
goodness, but that in practice can be more diabolical than our worst
inner demon?
To understand the role of the moral sense in the decline of violence, we
have to solve a number of psychological enigmas. One is how people
in different times and cultures can be driven by goals that they
experience as “moral” but that are unrecognizable to our own
standards of morality. Another is why the moral sense does not, in
general, push toward the reduction of suffering but so often increases
it. A third is how the moral sense can be so compartmentalized: why
upstanding citizens can beat their wives and children; why liberal
democracies can practice slavery and colonial oppression; why Nazi
Germany could treat animals with unequaled kindness… And the
overriding puzzle, of course, is: What changed? What degree of
freedom in the human moral sense has been engaged by the processes
of history to drive violence downward?

Virtuous violence theory resolves these puzzles and more. With its wealth
of eye-opening ethnographic and historical comparisons and its contrarian
but well-argued analyses, this book is a fascinating exploration of violence
and a major contribution to our understanding of the human condition.

Steven Pinker
 Warm thanks
Gabriel Rossman discussed nearly every chapter with us, providing novel
suggestions, innumerable references, and cheerful support; his many
contributions added new dimensions to the book, for which we thank him.
For reading the entire manuscript and offering many wise and wonderful
comments, we are extremely grateful to Maroussia Favre Carlen, Hans
IJzerman, Steven Pinker, Linda Skitka, Diane Sunar, and Sven Waldzus.
Clark McCauley and Thomas Schubert reviewed several chapters and
offered suggestions that reshaped the whole book. We also greatly
appreciate the perceptive comments on parts of the manuscript kindly
contributed by Daniel Bartels, Vivian Bohl, Rodrigo Brito, Alan Ehrenhalt,
Zoé Robin Fiske, Jeremy Ginges, Jesse Graham, Jon Haidt, Katharina
Kugler, Brian Lucas, Francesco Orsi, Julia Ortony, Beate Seibt, Christopher
Stephan, David Tannenbaum, Zsolt Unoka, and Adam Waytz. We also
received many perspicacious perspectives on our basic conceptualization of
violence from the audiences of colloquia Alan Page Fiske delivered at the
University of Tartu, Würzburg University, Tilburg University, the
University of Oslo, UCLA, the Rotterdam School of Management of
Erasmus University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, ISCTE-IUL
(Lisbon), the Technical University of Munich, and the Sintra, Portugal,
workshop on Embodiment and Relational Models. Following presentations
by Fiske on our metarelational theorization of honor and the Iliad, we
received many insightful comments from colloquium audiences at VU
University, Amsterdam; the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig; the University of Tartu; the University of
Würzburg; Tilburg University; Erasmus University; UCLA; and
participants in the Barcelona Workshop on Honor and Shame. Insights from
audiences of colloquia Rai delivered to the Chicagoland Morality
Researchers Group; the Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Moral Psychology
Conference at Korea University, Seoul; the Research Centre for Human
Values at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the Department of
Psychology at the University of Iowa were also instrumental in refining our
conceptualization of moral psychology and the implications of our theory of
virtuous violence.
Participants in our seminar on moral motives for violence helped us
develop our ideas and think about the data. Sheryl Fulgencio helped locate
and review some of the hazing and initiation practices, Megan Mehany
searched the literature on the corporal punishment of children in the
contemporary United States, and Magaly Chavez reviewed much of the
literature on female genital modification.
At Cambridge University Press, Rebecca Taylor, Carrie Parkinson, Hetty
Marx, Joseph Garver, and Jonathan Ratcliffe magnificently transformed our
work from manuscript to publication. Aras Karimi kindly created a
beautifully intriguing design for the cover which unfortunately we could not
use here.
In many respects this book is a conversation with all of these partners.
Some sentences consist of our interpretations of ideas our colleagues
contributed, while many passages and a few chapters are responses to
points they raised. We look forward to continuing and widening this
conversation.
Thank you, all!
 The point
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event, –
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, – I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
 Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, scene iv

Violence is often considered the antithesis of sociality – people think that

violence is the expression of our animal nature, breaking through when
learned cultural norms collapse. Violence is also considered to be the
essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of
violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just
the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because
they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory
to be violent. Moreover, the motives for violence generally grow out of a
relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, or their relationships
with third parties. The perpetrator is violent to make the relationship right –
to make the relationship what it ought to be according to his or her cultural
implementations of universal relational moral principles. That is, most
violence is morally motivated. Morality is about regulating social
relationships, and violence is one way to regulate relationships. That’s our
thesis.
Shakespeare expresses this in Hamlet’s soliloquy: Hamlet berates himself
as a rationalizing coward for not yet having done his moral duty to kill his
uncle Claudius (his father’s brother) to avenge Claudius’ murder of
Hamlet’s father and Claudius’ “incestuous” marriage to Hamlet’s mother.
Hamlet’s moral sentiments grow out of the links among several interlocking
social relationships: his duty as a son, his father’s relationship to the brother
who murdered his father to become king, his father’s marriage to Hamlet’s
mother, and his mother’s marriage to the usurper Claudius. Hamlet
experiences his moral motives to kill his uncle as shame because he has not
performed his duty as a son. He compares himself to the soldiers who are
ready to die merely for fame, fighting over a prince’s claim to a bit of land.
With growing anger, he concludes that his thoughts must be violent or they
are worthless.
This book systematically develops Shakespeare’s point that violence is
morally motivated by culturally informed variants of universal social-
relational models. Our aims in this book are to establish beyond any doubt
the ubiquity of virtuous violence, to reveal its moral motives, to show that
people intend their violence to constitute four elementary forms of social
relationships, and to illuminate the specific constitutive phases that people
aim to realize through violence. We also show that much violence emerges
from combinations of relationships, where specific configurations of
relationships motivate moral violence that none of the component
relationships would evoke on their own.
We do this for the most part ethnologically, by examining a great variety
of violent practices in a great many cultures across the span of history. To
explain human violence, it is essential to know about most of the kinds of
violence people do – not just in one culture at one point in history, but
everywhere, throughout history. While our primary goals are to understand
the psychology and cultural meanings of violence, we also get invaluable
perspective by comparing human violence with the violence other animals
do, and we reach another level of understanding by considering the adaptive
functions of violence. The pattern that emerges is clear, revealing
something fundamental about violence, morality, and social relationships.
At the same time, by comparing these diverse kinds of violence we
illuminate each instance of violence. So we hope that this book and the
theory we set forth in it will be interesting to all social scientists and
humanists, as well as to anyone who wants to understand themselves and
other humans.
Our theory of virtuous violence integrates aspects of many other theories
of violence, and in doing so illuminates the nature of impulsivity,
rationality, instrumentality, emotions, motives, and, above all, moral
psychology and social relationships. While this book is a work of empirical
science, toward the end we suggest that our characterization of the nature of
the real world may have some profound implications for prescriptive
morality and law.
Our goal in this book is to understand the motivations for violence: the
emotions and intentions that give rise to violence. We want to explain why
and when people are violent. So we have relatively little to say about the
experience and consequences of fearing, expecting, suffering, surviving, or
remembering violence. Those are important topics, but not our topics.
 A theory of perpetrators’ motives for engaging in violence must account
for most of the violent practices that humans enact in every type of culture,
in every historical period; the theory should make sense in comparative
phylogenetic perspective, and there should be plausible evolutionary
processes that would select not just for the propensity for violence but also
for a propensity tuned to social systems and relational circumstances.
Virtuous violence theory does all this. Our theory will certainly need to be
refined and modified to fit future findings of studies specifically designed to
explore the moral motives for violence. We simply hope that virtuous
violence theory provides a solid framework to build on.
Readers may not find it absolutely necessary to read the whole book.
Readers primarily interested in particular kinds of violence could get
something worthwhile out of any of the topical chapters read by
themselves, but then might find that they would develop a deeper
understanding by reading some of the conceptual chapters (1, 2, 9, 10, and
20–4). Conversely, those with primarily theoretical orientations could read
the conceptual chapters, browsing and sampling among the topical chapters.
But the whole is more than the sum of the parts. It’s not pleasant to consider
so many of the gruesome things that people have done or now do to others,
nor is it agreeable to recognize that people who do violence usually feel
they should do it or absolutely must do it. But our view is that we should
consider all this carefully if we wish to understand ourselves, our species,
our communities, and our cultures. Or if we are committed to reducing
violence.
Chapter 1 lays the foundations for the book, stating the theory in the
simplest terms, then explaining what we mean by “violence” and what we
mean by “moral,” and then briefly comparing virtuous violence theory with
previous approaches that address the morality of violence. Chapter 2
presents the analytic structure we will be employing throughout the book to
understand the social-relational nature of violence: the four fundamental
relational models, their essentially cultural implementation, their
constitutive phases, and how they are linked into larger metarelational
configurations. This completes the foundation and erects the framework of
virtuous violence theory. Chapter 3 makes the crucial point that people
often feel that it is right and necessary to use violence for defense,
punishment, or retribution. Chapter 4 explores the moral motives for violent
enforcement of legitimate authority, while Chapter 5 illuminates the moral
motives for regulating relationships consisting of contests of violence such
as jousts, martial and contact sports, or confrontations between gangs.
Chapter 6 characterizes honor and shame as motives for violence in many
cultures and subcultures, and we unpack the metarelational moral motives
for violence that comprise the framework for the Trojan War and Homer’s
account of the violent regulation of relationships among the ancient Greeks.
Chapter 7 describes national leaders’ moral motives for going to war, and
soldiers’ moral motives for killing and dying. Then in Chapter 8 we
consider how humans violently constitute social relationships with gods and
spirits, including human sacrifice and excruciating self-torture.
After showing that these six types of violent practices are morally
motivated to constitute critical social relationships, we pause to explicate
virtuous violence theory more precisely. Chapter 9 considers more deeply
the links between moral and immoral motives for violence, showing that
morality is not defined by forms of actions or their material consequences.
Rather, morality is culturally defined by local precedents, prototypes, and
precepts for implementing the four universal relational models (RMs). We
also show that both impulsive and reflectively considered violence are
mostly morally motivated. This allows us in Chapter 10 to show how
virtuous violence theory either encompasses or complements previous
theories that violence results from sadism, psychopathy, rational cost-
benefit calculation, or, conversely, failures of rationality.
Then we tackle forms of violence that people may be loath to
acknowledge could be morally motivated, but, in fact, often are: in Chapter
11, intimate partner violence; in Chapter 12, rape, including gang rape and
rape in warfare. Chapter 13 demonstrates that moral motives to constitute
critical relationships with or among their children drive people to perform
violent initiation rites on boys, to excise or infibulate girls, and to castrate
boys. We discover in Chapter 14 that moral motives drive the leaders who
order torture and their minions who enact torture on victims, as well as the
wider public who condone torture. Chapter 15 investigates the motives of
killers; we see that most homicides are morally motivated and the killers’
peers and neighbors feel that they did exactly what they should have done.
Even mass murderers and mentally ill killers typically kill because they
genuinely feel that their victims deserve to die. Chapter 16 analyzes
lynching and genocide, which sustain what the perpetrators and their
reference groups perceive as legitimate, natural, and morally necessary
relationships with their victims’ ethnic group or race. When we look at
suicide and non-suicidal self-injury in Chapter 17, we discover that violence
against the self is also intended to rectify critical relationships: the person
who hurts herself feels that violence makes the relationship right. Chapter
18 illuminates the final constitutive phase of violence. In quite a few
cultures in diverse parts of the world, people mourn the deaths of loved
ones by seriously injuring themselves or others, or by going out to kill some
random innocent person – and then, eventually, by also killing the witch or
sorcerer or manifest assailant whom they hold responsible for the death.
Then we conclude our empirical ethnological and historical investigations
by considering robbery in Chapter 19. Though robbers have obviously
instrumental motives, it turns out that often they are highly morally
motivated to regulate relationships with victims who don’t deserve what
they have, or shouldn’t have flaunted what they had.
We conclude the book with five chapters of further theoretical
explorations building on virtuous violence theory. In Chapter 20 we
consider whether the way people hurt or kill is a function of the particular
kind of relationship they are regulating. In Chapter 21 we ask when and
why people constitute their relationships violently, rather than in any of the
other ways that people usually constitute relationships. Throughout the
book we will see that metarelational models commonly motivate violence:
perpetrators are often motivated to hurt or kill a victim in order to constitute
one or more relationships with third parties, or because of the dynamic
moral implications that any relationship has for other relationships linked to
it. Chapter 22 considers the converse: how metarelational models known as
cross-cutting ties can blunt, reduce, or prevent violence. Chapter 23
addresses how people can often quite effectively resist illegitimate state
violence through non-violent interventions by catalyzing common
knowledge of the metarelational ramifications of violence and disapproval
of it by third parties and the larger community. Finally, in Chapter 24, we
ask how “natural” virtuous violence is and consider the ethical, legal, and
psychological implications of virtuous violence theory. We go on to discuss
several empirical lines of research that emerge once it is understood that
violence is morally motivated to regulate relationships.
 The book ends with a very brief coda reflecting on the nature of theory
and the merits of inductively generating theory and broad explanations by
observing and comparing the widest possible range of naturally occurring
phenomena.
 1 Why are people violent?
We, the authors, must make clear at the outset that, prescriptively, we judge
most violence to be immoral. But in every culture, some people sometimes
feel morally entitled or required to hurt or kill others. Violent initiations,
human sacrifice, corporal punishment, revenge, beating spouses, torturing
enemies, ethnic cleansing and genocide, honor killing, homicide, martial
arts, and many other forms of violence are usually morally motivated. The
fact is that people often feel – and explicitly judge – that in many contexts it
is good to do these kinds of violence to others: people believe that in many
cases hurting or killing others is not simply justifiable, it is absolutely,
fundamentally right. Furthermore, people often regard others’ infliction of
violence against third parties as morally commendable – and sometimes
acknowledge or even appreciate the morality of violence inflicted on
themselves. We wish this weren’t true – we abhor it. But it is true, so to
understand or reduce violence, we must recognize its moral roots. Most
violence is morally motivated. People do not simply justify or excuse their
violent actions after the fact; at the moment they act, people intend to cause
harm or death to someone they feel should suffer or die. That is, people are
impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social
relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate,
desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying. In short, most
violence is the exercise of moral rights and obligations. Working within the
framework of relational models theory (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2004) and
relationship regulation theory (Rai and Fiske, 2011), our thesis is that
people are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect,
redress, terminate, or mourn social relationships with the victim or with
others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.
Virtuous violence theory is not a theory about crazy people. It’s about
ordinary people trying to create, sustain, modulate, and repair the
relationships that matter to them, to terminate relationships that become
intolerable, or to mourn the loss of a partner. For the most part, agents of
the violence fully appreciate that they are hurting fully human beings, and
judge that it is right to hurt them. More specifically, we investigate
normative cultural practices in which, in the subculture or reference group
that practices violence, “everyone” in the relational situation of the
perpetrator does it, everyone should do it, and people assume it’s natural
and necessary to do it. Virtuous violence theory is based on the observation
that people often judge that to constitute or regulate crucial relationships
they are morally required to hurt or kill another person, and that obligation
makes local sociocultural sense. In other cases, violence may not be
absolutely required in order to regulate important relationships, but it is
condoned, praised, and admired.

What we mean by “violence”

We need some term that encompasses intentional infliction of pain, physical
harm, and killing; “violence” seems like the most apt.1 For the purposes of
this book, “violence”consists of action in which the perpetrator regards
inflicting pain, suffering, fear, distress, injury, maiming, disfigurement, or
death as the intrinsic, necessary, or desirable means to the intended ends.
To some degree, the perpetrator may perceive the pain, suffering, fear,
distress, maiming, disfigurement, or death as ends in themselves – or at
least as the appropriate medium for the perpetrator’s purposes. This
definition thus excludes action where pain or suffering is incidental, or
necessary but undesired or irrelevant. For example, it is violence when boys
being initiated are made to fear the pain of circumcision and, to prove their
manhood, must stoically endure it without flinching; it is not violence when
infants are circumcised for religious or health reasons by adults who
perceive the pain as unfortunate, or who would prefer to use anesthetics if
they could be used. So virtuous violence theory does not explain and is not
meant to explain actions whose purpose is not to hurt or kill. We also
exclude from consideration here practices such as painful surgery and
physical rehabilitation because the distress or injury involved is regarded as
undesirable but necessary to achieve the aims of the sufferer. The goals of
such practices are primarily practical, although people sometimes feel that it
is virtuous to overcome the necessary suffering in order to achieve difficult
goals. So the primary focus of this book is on actions meant to activate
nociceptive neurons, to damage tissue, or to cause death. To maintain focus
and to keep this book from being impossibly long, we do not investigate
imprisonment, isolation, ostracism, shaming or humiliation, deprivation,
and intentional evocation of high levels of fear and anxiety. While we
imagine that virtuous violence theory could be directly extrapolated to
encompass such practices, we simply could not include them in a book of
reasonable length.
Violent action, like all action, varies in the agent’s degree and explicit
awareness of his intention, as well as others’ attributions of the degree and
the nature of intent. We exclude from our definition of “violence” action
that “accidentally” results in harm to the extent that it was not the agent’s
intent to harm and the risk of harm was not readily foreseeable. We are
aware that the concept of “intent” is extremely complex and problematic,
while any doctrine of “due and reasonable care” is also tendentious. But
since we cannot resolve the issues involved, pending further philosophical
and empirical clarification, we will have to leave the meanings of those
constructs to intuition. So let us just say that for the purposes of virtuous
violence theory, “violence” is harm, suffering, or killing that people do on
purpose. Hence, we do not address “structural violence” and the noxious
externalities of everyday actions that result in harm, when the agents are
largely oblivious or indifferent to the consequences of their actions. This is
a real path to real harm, but it is outside the scope of our theory and our
book.

Natural aversion to killing and hurting

[Aunt Polly, speaking of her foster son, Tom Sawyer]
He ’pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my
dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute
or make me laugh, it’s all down again and I can’t hit him a lick. I ain’t
doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness
knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I’m a
laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full of the Old
Scratch, but laws-a-me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy, poor thing, and
I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my
conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart
most breaks.
 (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)

Now, for the most part, people hate hurting others. It is extremely
distressing to directly kill or injure another person face-to-face, no matter
how socioculturally justified or legally obligatory it is (Baumeister, 1997:
203–12; Chirot and McCauley, 2006: 52–3; Collins, 2008; Grossman, 2009;
MacNair, 2002; Milgram, 1974). Like many other moral acts, killing or
hurting others can be difficult, requiring training, social support and
modeling, effort, practice, and experience before it becomes second nature.
Few people become unambivalently dedicated to moral violence or do it
easily, but that is true of many difficult moral practices other than 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. Like many sorts
of moral action, most people are able to commit only the moral violence
they know they should commit because their moral motives are reinforced
by fear of being shamed, fear of failing their loved ones, and fear of
punishment (Grossman, 2009; Mathew and Boyd, 2011). When people fail
to commit moral violence even though their moral sensibilities tell them
they ought to do so, it is because they have countervailing moral or non-
moral motives they cannot overcome. Conversely, people may feel guilt,
shame, remorse, sadness, nausea, or horror before, during, or even after
committing moral violence because of antiviolence motives that operate
alongside the moral violence motives. Humans typically have multiple
conflicting moral sentiments, derived from distinct aspects of their social
relationships (Rai and Fiske, 2011, 2012).
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. Moral motives may lead a person to
jump into icy waves to rescue someone; the rescuer’s horror at the waves
and abhorrence of cold water do not make his heroic rescue any less moral
– indeed, they make it more morally laudable, because they demonstrate
that the rescuer overcame huge motives impelling him not to jump in. The
fact that sometimes it is very hard to do harm to others, that in some
important respect agents are averse to doing it, or that some people are
unable to go through with doing what they should do, does not make a
violent or harmful act any less virtuous. Violence is virtuous if the agent,
her reference group, and her audience truly regard it as the right and moral
thing to do, however difficult.

What we mean by “moral”

A definition is merely a declaration of intentions about the use of a word,
but some ways of using words get in the way of understanding the world,
while other ways of using words help us delineate and discriminate natural
kinds in the world – real entities or processes that interact in consistent
ways with other natural kinds. Suppose that, coming from a certain modern
Western sensibility, we define polygamy as “immoral cohabitation among
three or more persons.” In most cultures throughout history, men or women
have commonly had multiple spouses simultaneously – but, empirically, the
participants, their kin, and everyone else in those cultures have regarded
having multiple spouses as natural, legitimate, and often admirable. So
defining polygamy as “immoral cohabitation among three or more persons”
would exclude from consideration, a priori, most instances of actual
polygamy – and would impede understanding the motives or moral
perspectives of the people involved. In short, we have to keep our
ethnocentric values out of our scientific definitions; indeed, we have to
totally separate ethics from ontology, even when we are defining
“morality.”
So we define morality in two ways, which we believe coincide and are
indeed two sides of the same psychology. Morality consists of a certain set
of evaluative emotions, as well as a certain set of intentions. The motives
and emotions concern the feelings that something should or should not be
done, while the intentions concern making relationships what they should
be. When we posit that most violence is morally motivated, we mean that
the person doing the violence subjectively feels that what she is doing is
right: she believes that she should do the violence, and she is actually
moved by moral emotions such as loyalty or outrage. At the same time,
moral refers to the evaluation of action, attitudes, motives, or intentions
with reference to an ideal model of how to relate. In the next chapter, we
briefly review relational models theory, which characterizes the four
elementary models that people use to generate, understand, coordinate,
regulate, and evaluate all social relationships (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2004). A
core tenet of relational models theory is that people experience these four
elementary types of relationships as intrinsically desirable, fulfilling,
meaningful, and necessary: such relationships are motivating ends in
themselves. People seek to create and participate in relationships that
realize these four models, and evaluate all social action with reference to
them: they are emotionally imbued moral ideals. They are the ways that
people must relate. Morality thus concerns the realization of ideal models
for relationships. What is morally good, what is right, what is obligatory is,
therefore, relating according to the four ideal relational models (RMs)
(Fiske, 1990). Morality is relationship regulation (Rai and Fiske, 2011,
2012), and moral motivation is the motivation to make actual relationships
correspond with culturally implemented ideals of the four RMs.
Contrary to popular opinion, morality is not synonymous with pure
altruism; it can be instrumentally rational and self-serving if the intended
benefit is consistent with culturally appropriate realization of the right
social relationship. Moreover, the social relationships that give rise to moral
standards and motives need not be with other living humans: they can be
relationships with deceased ancestors, spirits, or deities. Is it not moral if
people know they should be peaceful, fair, and giving in their relationships
with other people, but they only do so because they fear God’s wrath and
wish to be sent to heaven and not cast down to hell? Is it not moral if a child
strives to be honest and obedient, but only because she wants to avoid
ending up on Santa’s “naughty” list? If you agree that moral motives can be
instrumentally motivated by relationships with supernatural beings, then,
logically, you must acknowledge that moral action can be instrumentally
motivated by the culturally shaped social relationships among humans. If
you don’t acknowledge that people are morally motivated when they act in
accord with their perceptions of the will of their ancestors, spirits, or god(s),
then you are effectively excluding the moral lives of most humans
throughout most of history. Actions that are motivated by culturally
prescribed models for relationships within a community or culture,
including actions intended to avoid being shamed or humiliated, actions that
restore honor, and actions that enhance honor, respect, and status within a
community, are still morally motivated if the actions are aimed toward
realizing ideal models for relationships.
 Moral action is also not restricted to thoughtful, reasoned, controlled
action. Most of the time, people have strong, intuitive, emotional reactions
to moral situations, which they rationalize only later, if ever (Haidt, 2001).
In the moment of action, people may have no sense that their actions serve
some selfish end; instead, they only feel the moral emotion and they act on
it. If people experience intense moral emotions and they act on them in an
uncontrolled fashion, such as by lashing out at someone who has insulted
them, their actions are still morally motivated, regardless of whether they
are acted upon “automatically” in the moment, or planned strategically for
years (see Chapter 9).

When we use the term moral in this book we always mean “moral from the
perpetrator’s point of view.”
That is, we use the term descriptively, not prescriptively. Prescriptively, we abhor all
violence. But our prescriptive judgments – and the reader’s prescriptive morality – are
irrelevant to the scientific explanation we seek. We seek to understand what motivates
violence; once we do, we can consider the prescriptive implications of our
understanding. Understanding violence will help us to minimize it. To understand
violence, it is essential to maintain a clear distinction between our own moral
judgments and the motives of perpetrators at the moment they commit violence.
Furthermore, for the most part, perpetrators’ moral sentiments are consistent with the
sentiments and judgments of their own cultural communities, however much they may
differ from those of other cultures, including the writers’ or readers’ cultures.

Conflicting moralities and post-hoc justifications

The most fundamental finding of anthropological research is the descriptive
fact that morals are culturally relative (Brandt, 1954; Edel and Edel, 1959;
Fiske, 1990). Quite simply, many actions that people judge to be right in
any given culture are judged wrong in many others.2 A man walks into the
yard of his neighbor, who is away, takes an ax, and tells no one that he took
it. Is this wrong? Well, if the man and the neighbor are joking partners in
West Africa, it’s perfectly appropriate; he didn’t do anything wrong. A man
sends a boy to ask another man for two chairs to seat important visitors, and
then never returns them. Is this wrong? If the man who sent the boy is the
chief of a Moose village in Burkina Faso, he “owns” everything in it and
has a perfect right to expropriate whatever he wants within the boundaries
of the village. So the chief of the village where I (ApF) lived kept my
chairs, and everyone agreed that he was entitled to them. When he visited
me and saw some rope lying on my wall, he just took it; it was his, after all.
(I learned to keep my movable property out of sight; it would not have been
right for the chief to search the house.) As these examples illustrate, an act
that’s “theft” in one culture, and therefore wrong, is “joking” or “taking
what’s rightfully his” in another culture, and therefore right. A married man
arranges with a 17-year-old girl’s parents to have his friends abduct her
against her will, and then makes her have sex with him. Kidnapping and
rape in one culture. Correct and legitimate polygamous marriage among the
Moose and in many other cultures, where all concerned – including the girl
– judge that her parents’ giving her to the man was a virtuous, generous act
of gratitude, requiting his years of generous gifts and service to them.
Throughout this book we will describe actions that would be wrong in one
culture (say, our own), but are right and even obligatory in others. None of
the moral motives for violence we describe here will be intelligible without
accepting the empirically irrefutable premise that actions that outsiders
perceive as wrong are morally right from the cultural perspective of
insiders. What is virtue in one culture is evil from the perspective of some
other cultures – but the perpetrator is motivated by the morality of his own
culture, not the moralities of other cultures he doesn’t know or care about,
or outsiders’ standards that perhaps he may need to take into account
pragmatically but that don’t motivate him.
Diversity of moral perspectives is also common within a culture, a nation,
or a community, and among the participants in a particular interaction. Is
abortion murder, or a woman’s right to choose and to control her own body?
Is your partner’s joking and dancing with that attractive man disloyalty, or
just having innocent fun? If you grew up in an honor culture and feel
morally entitled, indeed obligated, to threaten the man with violence and he
doesn’t back down, when you kill him you may be doing what you feel you
had to do. Your conviction is that you just did what any self-respecting man
should do. But your partner from a liberal culture may judge your action to
be evil, the judicial system of a modern Western state may punish you for it,
and, of course, we the authors and you the readers judge homicide to be
wrong.
 Our aim in this book is to show that when a person is violent, he is
usually morally motived to do what he does. Often, the victim shares the
moral perspective of the perpetrator, and so do third parties from the
perpetrator’s subcultural reference group. But it’s quite common for people
to differ in their moral judgments. The person who violently retaliates for
an affront to honor generally expects that others share his evaluation of the
situation, and hence condone his acts. However, the honor motivation of the
perpetrator is the same, regardless of whether or not his victim, his
girlfriend, the other people at the party, the police, the prosecutor, the jury,
the journalist, the public, or the law professor share his culture of honor
perspective. If the potential perpetrator knows (and cares) that some of
these other people do not share his sense of honor, he may restrain himself,
or simply be more careful in planning to avenge his honor. But his honor is
his honor, his motivation is his motivation, either way. His moral
motivation may be more intense if he knows that all concerned will mock
and disparage him if he fails to defend his honor, but will hold him in
esteem and praise him if he does. Others’ moral evaluations do matter to
him – their evaluations affect his relationships with them. Moreover, as
scientists, we can use the judgments of others from the perpetrator’s
subculture and reference group as one kind of evidence for inferring his
motives (as we sometimes do in this book). But a person may be sincerely
and truly morally motivated to do something that many other people
involved judge to be wrong. If he doesn’t take others’ judgments into
account, or his moral motives are so intense that he ignores others’
condemnation of his act, he is nonetheless morally motivated. It is
specifically the perpetrator’s motives and intentions we are trying to
explain, not everyone else’s.
Of course, people may deploy moral language to justify violence that is
actually motivated by amoral ends (Haidt, 2001; Tsang, 2002). However,
justification presupposes relevant moral sentiments that others regard as
legitimate: the actor seeking to justify his violence and those to whom he
appeals take for granted that if his violence fits the moral standards to which
he is appealing, it is moral. In other words, justifications reveal the moral
standards of those being appealed to (Austin, 1956). So even if
Machiavellian psychopaths are the perpetrators of some mayhem, any
acceptance, legitimation, or praise of their violence is based on moral
frameworks in which such violence can be construed as virtuous. Another
way of putting this is that the moral justification in question could only
have arisen and would only be accepted if it tapped into a valid framework
for judging action and reflected a socially accepted moral motive in the
local culture. Thus, even justifications are informative about the conditions
under which some people would be morally motivated by culturally
legitimate standards for relationships.

Pain and suffering are not intrinsically evil

In the present cultural historical context in which life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness are the ultimate goals that humans “naturally” pursue,
and should pursue, and hence are the most fundamental human rights,
virtuous violence theory’s proposition that most violence is morally
motivated seems a contradiction in terms. It is axiomatic to contemporary
Western folk psychology and folk ethics that the core of morality,
reciprocity, and social reason consists of minimizing harm, especially to
others. For example, Mikhail (2007) suggests that humans have a universal
moral grammar, one of whose principles is a prohibition against “intentional
battery.” Gray et al. (2012) go further, arguing that all moral judgments
derive from a cognitive template that involves a prohibition against one
person intentionally harming another person.
Pain and suffering are aversive, by definition. But being aversive does not
logically or empirically imply that experiencing them is evil. Pain and
suffering can be morally commendable. In certain cultures in certain
periods of history, and in certain contexts in a great many cultures, it is
good to accept naturally occurring pain and suffering, to seek them out, or
even to inflict pain and suffering on oneself. And throughout most of
history people expected suffering – it was taken for granted as a natural,
intrinsic, inevitable aspect of life.

Late medieval European culture, for example, was notable for the
tremendous positive significance identified in pain. Suffering was not
to be dismissed, vanquished, or transcended: suffering was to be felt
with an ever-deepening intensity… The use and application of pain …
were considered aspects of a teleological, all-embracing civilizing
 process. By approaching what one wished to avoid, argued medieval
thinkers, one could perfect one’s self.
(Cohen, 2010: 4)

Across all domains of life,

The logical conclusion deriving from the utility of pain was that the
more it was inflicted, the better. What we now consider cruelty, such as
slow, painful executions … was often viewed as a force for betterment.
(Cohen, 2010: 260).

Still more wonderfully, earthly pain, like the fires of Purgatory, purified the
body to prepare and qualify it for Paradise. William of Auvergne, for
example, asserted that pain can cleanse by burning away vice and
cauterizing against temptation. Fire is ideally suited for this.

Vice is too deeply embedded to be washed off, for it alters the very
nature of mankind. To be removed, it must be destroyed, totally
annihilated … Like a surgeon’s knife, it [fire] removes the sickness
[sin] with all that surrounds it. Pain is therefore destructive of vice and
constructive of internal strength. Working inward, so to speak, it
obliterates evil.
(Cohen, 2010: 33)

Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Protestant religious manuals

explained to and persuaded readers that suffering is good because it
purifies, purges, and perfects; these manuals instructed readers that pain is
“useful, refining, elevating, reassuring and even delightful” (Mayhew,
2009: 321).
If the experience of pain and suffering can be praiseworthy, can indeed be
morally exalting, then it is logically and empirically false to posit that the
foundation, source, or core of morality must be, or even could be, that
inflicting pain and suffering is intrinsically evil. On the contrary, in some
contexts they are good, and people are praised for suffering, even seeking
and inflicting pain or suffering on themselves. Pain and suffering can be
admired, praised, and revered as morally meritorious. Pain or suffering may
provide opportunities to be virtuous, may be inherently virtuous, or may
indexically demonstrate virtue. It is just a fact that pain, suffering, and
moral goodness are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, pain and
suffering can be essential media for moral virtue. In contemporary Yap
(Micronesia), for example, willingly assumed pain and the acceptance of
suffering are indices of love and the capacity for compassion: suffering in
the service of others is good because it shows that one sacrifices, and at the
same time can appreciate others’ suffering (Throop, 2010). To be a good
person, one must suffer – suffering is necessary to make a person virtuous.
Our central concern in this book is with the moral motives for and
virtuous evaluations of perpetrating pain and suffering on others or the self,
not with the virtue of experiencing pain or suffering. But to make sense of
our thesis, it is essential to acknowledge right off that people do not
necessarily perceive pain and suffering to be inherently evil. To appreciate
the plausibility of virtuous violence theory, it is necessary to realize that the
painfulness of pain does not imply that the person experiencing the pain, the
person causing the pain, or impartial third parties perceive that it is morally
evil to experience pain, let alone immoral to cause the pain. The same is
true of any kind of suffering, and even death: in many salient respects they
are intrinsically aversive, but that does not mean they are judged as morally
wrong, nor does it imply that causing suffering or death is intuitively felt or
reflectively judged to be morally wrong. Pain is noxious, suffering is
aversive. But that doesn’t mean that pain or suffering must be
psychologically, socially, or culturally evaluated as moral evils. The
fundamental core of human moral psychology and most cultural-historical
standards of virtue do not revolve around, let alone reduce to or develop out
of, an ethics of not harming anyone.

Forerunners of virtuous violence theory and how

it goes beyond them
More than a century ago, Westermarck (1908) surveyed what was known at
the time about the world’s cultures to catalog culturally legitimate practices
involving moral sentiments condoning killing strangers (vol. I, p. 338);
killing the aged and ill (vol. I, pp. 386–93); killing infants, including
ancient Greek and Roman practices (vol. I, pp. 393–413); human sacrifice
to the gods of the Greeks, Hindus, and many other cultures (vol. I, pp. 434–
72); human sacrifice to accompany the dead (vol. I, pp. 472–6); and suicide
(vol. II, pp. 229–64). However, Westermarck aimed to describe moral
cultural practices and evaluative responses to actions – he was interested in
how people evaluate violence. But virtuous violence theory goes further,
positing that most violence is motivated by moral sentiments. Pinker (2011)
made a similar suggestion, but his focus was primarily on the decline in
violence over time. Hence, he did not investigate in depth what violence
may be morally motivated toward – what its aims are. Our thesis is that
moral sentiments are the most common proximate motivations for engaging
in violence: the perpetrator’s intentions are to realize ideal models for social
relationships.
In this regard, our thesis converges with that of Black (1998; see also
Cooney, 1998), who posits that most violence is moralistic insofar as it is
“self-help,” a form of “social control” that functions to restrict morally
deviant behavior. However, Black’s “pure sociology” explicitly excludes
psychology and indeed acknowledges no persons at all, so he entirely and
purposefully disregards motives, emotions, sentiments, judgments, or any
sort of cognition, addressing violence purely in terms of societal structures
and processes. His account is functional, addressing the social system-
maintaining effects of violence. In contrast, virtuous violence theory is an
account of the motivational sources and aims of violence. Moreover,
whereas Black focuses on violence as moralistic punishment for
transgression, we will demonstrate that beyond redressing wrongs, much
violence creates or enhances social relationships, sustains or modulates
social relationships, mourns the loss of a relationship, or simply is the
relationship – is the substance, conduct, practice, process, or performance
of the relationship.
Our approach is also congruent with that of Gould (2003), who argues
that conflict – and violence in particular – occurs when people contest
dominance and submission. Drawing on European historical records, Gould
argues that conflicts are more frequent when social rank is contestable.
Hence, formal organizations, precedence rules, well-established traditional
cultural cues, and other explicit semantically formulated ranking principles
reduce violence. Whereas Black (1998) is limited by his focus on violence
as a form of redress, ignoring violence tied to the constitution, conduct,
modulation, and termination of relationships, Gould (2003) is limited
insofar as he only focuses on one kind of relationship – dominance. We will
show that violence grows out of all four of the fundamental types of social
relationships (Fiske, 1991, 1992) and that people are violent to constitute
relationships in many ways, not merely to contest them. Similarly,
Baumeister and colleagues (Bushman and Baumeister, 1998; Baumeister et
al., 1996) have argued that one motive for violence is “threatened egotism,”
and have found that people high in narcissism are especially prone to
respond with violence to ego threats. As we will demonstrate in the book, in
many cultures a great many people are often morally motivated to engage in
violence in order to maintain their status. To the extent that narcissists
believe they are particularly deserving of high status, they will be
particularly sensitive to any provocation that threatens that status.
Research on a few specific kinds of violence have anticipated specific
elements of virtuous violence theory’s global claim that violence is morally
motivated. Both Haidt (Graham and Haidt, 2011; Haidt and Bjorklund,
2008) and Baumeister (1997; Baumeister and Vohs, 2004) have argued that,
within large groups, violence can take on moral or idealistic dimensions and
overwhelm motives that would have previously restrained violence if it
were built into an ideology, leading to many cases of mass killing and
intergroup violence. Chirot and McCauley (2006) have argued that when
people genocidally kill, rape, or drive out a whole category of persons, the
perpetrators’ motives are usually moral. In particular, they observe that
perpetrators may feel that another group’s presence or intermarriage
pollutes their collective essence, making it necessary to wipe them out to
purify and cleanse the endangered essence of the perpetrating group.
Baumeister also argues that individual violence often occurs in response to
perceived insults or slights, but he stops short of referring to these motives
as “moral.” Finkel has referred to these as “provocations” and “instigating
triggers” in his work on intimate partner violence (Finkel et al., 2012;
Slotter and Finkel, 2011). Other studies of intimate partner violence have
suggested that it is more likely to occur in societies that valorize violence
by men against their partners and have established social norms to morally
exculpate it (Dobash and Dobash, 1979; Jewkes, 2002). Researchers who
study honor cultures have argued that aggression in these settings is the
result of perceived affronts or threats to one’s honor that must be rectified in
order to salvage important social relationships (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996;
Schneider, 1971). Jeremy Ginges and Scott Atran have argued that the
motives of terrorists are quintessentially moral. They commit violence
because they believe it is the right thing to do (Atran, 2010; Ginges and
Atran, 2009; Ginges et al., 2011). Virtuous violence theory expands on
these works to describe the role of moral motives and how they function to
regulate relationships across the entire spectrum of violent acts, ranging
from everyday acts of harm to large-scale atrocities. The present book is the
first to consider a wide range of violent practices across cultures and
throughout history from a moral psychological perspective, describing in
detail the psychosocial motives and relationship-regulating functions of
violence.

Scope: what we are and are not discussing

Virtuous violence theory focuses on the intrinsic psychosocial motivation
and cultural valuation of violence, not on environmental, technological,
political, economic, or social structural factors. It is probably true that the
frequency, intensity, and lethality of violence are greater the more people
are accustomed and exposed to and intimately involved with guns and other
weapons, hunting, butchering, childbirth, death, and burial; and the higher
the local morbidity and mortality rates. Violence is more prevalent in the
absence, inefficacy, or unruliness of police and judicial systems; in the face
of desperate poverty and hunger; and when violent predation is the most
feasible means of survival. But our concern here is the sociocultural
relational psychology of violence, not its systemic social structural,
political, economic, or environmental contexts. Once we understand the
immediate moral motivations and social-relational functions of violence,
future research will be needed to connect this sociocultural psychology to
the environmental, macrostructural, historical, and technological factors
that facilitate it.
Although this book looks at physical violence, we suspect that people
have the same moral aims when they inflict other sorts of harm. Insults,
taunting, and cursing often precede violence and are motivated by the same
relational intentions that motivate the subsequent violence. Before or after
harming a victim, perpetrators often take or destroy the victim’s property.
And violence is often intended to evoke fear, humiliation, and shame. So we
think that most of our analyses could be extended to morally motivated
non-corporeal harm. But our scope is large enough already – we cannot
possibly encompass in this book all the distress that people intentionally
inflict on each other. So we do not specifically address economic, material,
emotional, or reputational harm, although we believe that future research
will show that all sorts of harm can readily be encompassed by our
framework.

Illegitimate, immoral violence

In this book we will show that most violence is intended to regulate
relationships, and that perpetrators and most others perceive most of their
relationship-regulatory violence to be consistent with their cultural rules.
But not all violence is intended to regulate a relationship. If I desperately
want a drink and I see that you are carrying a bottle of whisky, and so I stab
you purely and simply in order to get the bottle, my assault is not morally
motivated. There is no moral motivation for the criminal violence that drug
addicts, starving people, and psychopaths do simply in order to get
substances they want to satisfy their purely individual appetites. But even
most criminal violence is morally motivated, and in every culture it turns
out that only a tiny fraction of all violence is criminal. Across cultures and
history, most violence is morally motivated to regulate relationships in a
culturally prescribed manner.
People are human, and sometimes transgress relationships. Whether
returning gifts or evenly matching an eye for an eye, people aren’t always
saints: sometimes they don’t give back something that fairly matches what
they received. People violate all facets of relationships, including rules for
violence. Undetected or when circumstances prevent enforcement, the
perpetrator of illegitimate violence may get away with it for a longer or
shorter period of time, but the illegitimacy of the violence jeopardizes the
relationship. Indeed, people often refuse to relate to cheaters, excluding and
shunning them. Hence, illegitimate violence is a problematic, tenuous, risky
way to regulate relationships. It does occur sometimes. But our goal in this
book will be to convince you that, most of the time, the motives for
violence are moral, and that most perpetrators aim to regulate relationships
in accord with the implementations of the four RMs that are prescribed in
their (sub)culture, reference group, or primary group.

People kill because they feel that the victim deserves to die. Usually, the
motivation to harm or kill someone is moral: the perpetrator is moved by
his or her sense of moral necessity. In short, most violence is virtuous, in
the eyes of the perpetrator. It is difficult and traumatic to kill or maim, but
people sometimes feel that they may or must hurt someone in order to
create or regulate a vital social relationship with the victim, or with
someone else. In short, people are violent when they feel that violence is
necessary to constitute essential social relationships. This surprising
discovery violates our intuitions about morality and violence, and it
certainly contradicts most theories of morality, along with most theories of
violence. But in this book we will analyze a great many kinds of violence
that are morally motivated, in the sense that perpetrators mean to constitute
or regulate the social relationships that are at stake, and they feel that
violence is the right way to do so.

1 “Aggression” would be a workable synonym, except that it, too, has been
used to mean “wrongful or wanton harm,” and seems even more evaluative
than “violence,” which is a bit more directly descriptive. But we intend
virtuous violence theory to address essentially the same issues that others
have studied under the rubric of “aggression.” There is also some overlap
with the wider concept of “force.”

2 We use the terms “judge” and “judgment” throughout the book without
any implication about whether the moral evaluation is based on immediate
emotional response or reflectively articulated reasoning; we simply mean
“morally evaluate,” in the broad sense of any attitude, value, emotion, or
motive.
2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social
relationships
Virtuous violence theory proposes that the perpetrator intends to harm or
kill in order to constitute a social relationship to make it correspond with a
prescriptive model of what the relationship ought to be – what it must be
made to be. For our purposes, a social relationship consists of
complementarity between the actions of the participants: each participant’s
actions fit previous actions by the other and presuppose “fitting” actions by
the other(s), such that the actions of each are incomplete without the
congruent action by the other(s). That is, the acts of each are part of a whole
that none of them can bring off alone. We encompass in the terms “act” and
“actions” not simply the morphology of movements, but also, crucially, the
participant’s intentions, moral judgments, and motives (often consciously
experienced as emotions). Furthermore, each participant implicitly or
explicitly aims to induce completion of her acts: she intends to
motivationally evoke and morally invoke the congruent actions that will
complete or dynamically sustain the jointly constructed pattern. That is, a
participant expects the other(s) to do their part, in the predictive sense, in
the hopeful sense, and in the evaluative sense of judging the others’ actions
according to how well they complete the intended gestalt. A football game
is only football if the opposing players hit each other as hard as they can;
the offense can only play offense, blocking and knocking down defenders,
against a tackling defense.1

Fundamental ways of relating: the four

elementary relational models
Relational models theory (RMT) posits that people in all cultures
coordinate nearly all aspects of most social activities by four fundamental
relational models (RMs) (Fiske, 1991, 1992, 2000; Fiske and Haslam,
2005). People use these implicit, intrinsically motivated RMs to generate,
understand, and evaluate interaction. The models are communal sharing
(CS), authority ranking (AR), equality matching (EM), and market pricing
(MP). At this point, over 275 researchers have used a great variety of
methods to study many social and cognitive phenomena in diverse cultures,
and have published hundreds of experimental, ethnographic, interpretive,
theoretical, analytic, and philosophical papers, dissertations, and books
supporting, extending, or applying RMT (www.rmt.ucla.edu). An essential
aspect of these models is the four fundamental motives that underlie most
moral judgment, emotions, and behavior: unity, hierarchy, equality, and
proportionality (Rai and Fiske, 2011).

Communal sharing: unity

We use CS models when we perceive people in the same group or dyad as
undifferentiated and equivalent in a salient feature, while others are not.
Families, teams, brotherhoods, military units, nationalities, ethnicities, and
some close friendships are often organized by CS. The moral motive
guiding CS models is unity. Unity is directed toward caring for and
supporting the integrity of in-groups through a sense of collective
responsibility and common fate. If someone is in need, we must protect and
provide for that person; if someone is harmed, the entire group feels
violated and must collectively respond. If an in-group member is
contaminated or commits a moral violation, the entire group bears corporate
responsibility and feels tainted and shamed until it cleanses itself. A threat
to the group or its integrity, or to any member of it, is felt to be a threat to
all. Unity is partially captured by conceptions of a moral circle (Singer,
1981) and the construct of moral inclusion–exclusion (Clayton and Opotow,
2003; Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1990), whereby only those who are included in
the group are within the scope of moral concern. When motivated by CS
unity, violence is morally praiseworthy if the victim is perceived as a
potential threat or contaminant to the in-group. In other cases, violence
creates the CS relationship, as when urban gangs and African militias “beat
in” new members, or men violently initiate youths.

Authority ranking: hierarchy

When we rank or order individuals along a dimension, we are using an AR
model. AR is a linear ordering of the relative position of individuals in a
linear hierarchy, such as between dominant and subordinate individuals,
between adults and children, among military officers, and among people of
different castes, ages, or genders in many societies. The moral motive
guiding AR models is hierarchy. Hierarchy is directed toward creating and
maintaining linear ranking in social groups. Subordinates are motivated to
respect, obey, and pay deference to the will of superiors, such as leaders,
ancestors, or gods, and to punish those who disobey or disrespect them.
Superiors, in turn, feel a sense of pastoral responsibility toward
subordinates and are motivated to lead, guide, direct, and protect them.
Unlike theories of social dominance (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999) or system
justification (Jost et al., 2004), RMT does not take the position that
hierarchies are inherently immoral, exploitive, or even undesirable. Nor do
legitimate hierarchies emerge out of pure force or coercion. In many
cultures, people perceive hierarchy as natural, inevitable, necessary, and
legitimate (Fiske, 1991; Nisbet, 1993; Tiedens et al., 2007; Tyler and Lind,
1992). In our own lives, Hierarchy is experienced when we expect our
edicts to be followed by those under our care, such as our children,
students, or followers, or simply when we expect subordinates to show us
the respect we deserve as their parents, teachers, or leaders. In turn, we feel
morally obligated to guide, stand up for, look out for, and protect them. AR
hierarchy motivates people to judge that superiors committing violence
against subordinates is often acceptable and may even be praiseworthy if
done to instruct or punish. For example, European and American
schoolmasters used to consistently perform their instructional duties by
striking pupils for errors or omissions; two hundred years ago, naval
captains had crew members severely flogged for disobedience. The pupil’s
parents might fire a schoolmaster who did not discipline their children,
while admirals might remove from command captains who failed to flog
their crews to keep them in line. Conversely, subordinates’ violence against
superiors was very harshly punished: an eighteenth- or early nineteenth-
century sailor who struck an officer might be executed.
AR consists of asymmetrical relationships that participants experience as
natural, good, legitimate, and even necessary. Furthermore, like the other
RMs, AR relationships are intrinsically motivated ends in themselves.
Hence, AR is quite distinct from purely coercive instrumental relationships
in which people pursue non-relational ends by controlling or manipulating
others through force or control over resources. AR is also entirely different
from power, if “power” only refers to the ability to get what one wants,
even when others also want it, or despite others’ resistance.

Equality matching: equality

When people use EM they keep track of whether they are even, or how
many of something one owes the other. More technically, participants
attend to additive interval differences in order to balance the relationship.
EM is manifest in activities such as turn taking, in-kind reciprocity, even
distributions and randomization procedures such as coin flipping. The
moral motive guiding EM models is equality. Equality is directed toward
enforcing even balance and in-kind reciprocity in social relations. It
requires equal treatment, equal voice, equal opportunity, equal chance, even
shares, even contributions, turn taking, and lotteries (e.g., for conscription,
for a dangerous assignment, for choosing ends of the field in sports or in a
duel). Equality provides the moral motivation for maintaining favor-for-
favor forms of reciprocity and pursuing eye-for-an-eye forms of revenge.
Thus, equality accounts for the sense of obligation we feel both in inviting
people to our home after they have invited us to theirs, and in seeking to
hurt people in exactly the same way they have hurt us, an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth. When terrorists attack Americans, the American military
strikes back at the terrorists – and at those who harbor them.

Market pricing: proportionality

MP relations involve the use of ratios and rates to compare otherwise non-
comparable commodities on a common metric, such as in the monetary
exchanges between buyers and sellers in a marketplace, costs and benefits
of a social decision, or utilities in a moral issue. The moral motive guiding
MP models is proportionality. Proportionality is directed toward calculating
and acting in accord with ratios or rates among otherwise distinct goods to
ensure that rewards or punishments for each party are proportional to their
costs, contributions, effort, merit, or guilt. Unlike our earlier example of the
retributive equality of vengeance, US law does not prescribe that someone
convicted of assault be assaulted in turn. Rather, the sentence should be
proportionate to the crime in terms of the time the defendant must serve or
the fine that must be paid. Similarly, in a number of cultures (e.g., ancient
Egypt), people expect their fate in the afterlife to depend on the weighing of
all their good and bad deeds on the scales of justice, implying a belief that
the morality of acts of all kinds could be weighed on the same scale
(Pritchard, 1954). The primary violation of proportionality is cheating,
which we strictly define as referring to instances in which individuals
attempt to gain benefits that, according to cultural standards, are not
proportional to what they deserve. In the framework of proportionality, it is
morally correct to inflict harm or to kill if the benefits outweigh the costs.
In World War II, President Truman was advised that exploding atomic
bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally necessary in the cost-
benefit calculus of winning the war with the fewest American casualties.

Cultural implementations of universal models

The universally shared, innate structures of the RMs are necessary but not
sufficient to coordinate any aspect of any activity or to make any evaluation
(whether intuitive and immediate, reflectively analyzed, or explicitly
discussed). To realize any RM in any given situation people must have
guides that specify which RM to use, and how, with whom, when, and with
respect to what the RM operates. So, for example, to use CS to organize
consumption, participants in an interaction must all know what resource is
to be shared and who may share it, among many other specifications.
Coordination according to AR depends on agreement as to the relative
positions of each person in the rank ordering, when and how ranks are
determined, and a great deal more. To use EM to coordinate work, people
need to know who is participating; whether to divide the work evenly, take
turns, or assign the work by lottery; what counts as a turn; the temporal
intervals between turns; and so forth. MP cannot be implemented without
specifying what is to be compared to what, in what proportion, and much
more besides. The implementation of any RM is guided by cultural
precedents, praxis, prototypes, paradigms, precepts, propositions,
prescriptions, pronouncements, proverbs, and the like. The technical term
for these cultural guidelines that specify how to implement a RM in a
particular contest is preos (Fiske, 2000). No RM can be realized except with
reference to preos.
What this means with respect to morality is that when people are
realizing a RM, they are always realizing the RM according to cultural
preos. Thus, morality consists of intentions, motives, emotions, and
judgments about realizing RMs according to cultural preos. In other words,
morality is regulating relationships to make them correspond to cultural
implementations of RMs.
The same dyad or group may use different RMs at different times to
organize different activities. For example, they might decide by CS
consensus that it would be most efficient (MP) to take turns doing a task
(EM), under the supervision of an expert (AR). Even at any given moment
in time, different RMs may operate in the coordination of different aspects
of the same interaction. So when a chief leads his men to kill an enemy to
avenge a death, AR and EM are operating simultaneously with respect to
different aspects of their action. If they hold everyone in the enemy group
collectively responsible, so that they are indifferent to which individual they
kill, CS is also operating at the same time. Then a judge (AR) or a jury of
EM peers who have to reach a unanimous consensus verdict (CS) might
encompass the entire event by sentencing the individual killer to a prison
term proportionate to his crime (MP). As this example illustrates, the same
RM may operate according to different cultural preos to organize distinct
aspects of the social interaction.

Constitutive phases
The moral motives of each RM generate, shape, and preserve the social
relationships a person needs in six ways. People usually perform these
functions non-violently, but each function can also be performed by
harming or killing someone, so for our present purposes we formulate these
constitutive phases in terms of violence. Each of these six functions may be
oriented toward first, second, or third parties. For example, you can redress
and rectify a relationship by punishing yourself, punishing someone for
something they did to you, or punishing someone for something they did to
someone else.

1. Creation: violence that is intended to form new relationships,

either between strangers or in a way that fundamentally changes a
pre-existing relationship. Creation-based violence may establish a
relationship among the perpetrators, between the perpetrator(s) and
 the victim(s), or between the perpetrator and one or more third
parties.
2. Conduct, enhancement, modulation, and transformation:
violence that comprises the relationship itself – enacting, testing,
enforcing, reinforcing, enhancing, honoring, attenuating, or
transforming it. In some cases, the relationship consists of violence.
Examples are martial arts, contact sports, jousting, dueling,
feuding, and religious self-torture. In feuding and related practices,
each homicide or other act of violence reverses the “debt” or
“balance.” Conduct enhances the relationship when it brings the
relationship closer to its ideal state, such as when partners in a CS
relationship harm themselves in order to prove their love for one
another. Conduct that changes the nature of an existing relationship
in ways that do not create a fundamentally new relationship, such
as when subordinates and superiors legitimately contest rank in an
AR hierarchy, represents cases of modulation and transformation.
3. Protection: people’s belief that they have a moral entitlement to
protect themselves and their relationship partners. Defense-based
violence in the context of an important relationship may be directed
toward anyone who threatens the relationship, including the
relationship partner. Pre-emptive violence to prevent people from
threatening a relationship is protective of relationships in the same
manner as defense-based violence, and pre-emptive violence can be
used to signal future relational intentions or establish a strong
reputation as a relational partner to be reckoned with. It is a
warning. Such violence may also be aimed to make a person cease
doing something that threatens the relationship, in which case its
function is close to rectificatory violence. It may be aimed at
second or third parties, and often both.
4. Redress and rectification: punishment, making someone “pay a
penalty,” retaliation, revenge, purification, restoration of honor,
violent sacrificial offerings, or self-punishments in response to
transgressions that threaten relationships. The function is
restorative, to return the relationship to its ideal or equilibrium
state. Along with protection, this is probably the most common
moral motivation for violence.
 5. Termination: unlike the previous relationship functions, violence
not meant to create, protect or restore the relationship but to have it
permanently cease. In some cases, this violence is meant to free
someone from relational obligations that they can no longer fulfill,
such as in cases of euthanasia or Japanese seppuku. In other cases,
terminative violence is metarelational, meant to fulfill the
perpetrator’s obligations to one party by terminating a third party.
Termination may also occur in cases where transformation cannot
occur without the death of one of the parties, such as when the
former subject becomes king by killing the incumbent. People may
kill and die to end an unbearable relationship, such as love that
cannot be fulfilled. Honor killing to eliminate a family’s shame
terminates the woman’s relationship with her family but redresses
the family’s relationship with everyone else in the community. In
some instances, potential future relationships may be terminated
through violence, such as in cases of clitoridectomy or castration
that reduce sexual pleasure or desire.
6. Mourning: action in response to the loss of an important
relationship due to the other’s departure, defection, or death. As we
will discuss in Chapter 18, in many cultures people do violence to
the self or others that is cathartic, convulsive, transcendent, or a
generalized rage response to the loss of an important relationship.
This is distinct from punitive violence; it has no rectificatory
function. The persons being injured or killed are not being attacked
because of any sense that they are in any way responsible for the
death.

Each of these relationship-constitutive phases may motivate relationship-

regulating violence if cultural implementations of the relationships condone
appropriate violence, and if countervailing social bonds together with
cultural, social, and practical factors do not outweigh the motivation to
commit relationship-regulating violence. For example, the members’
infliction and the initiate’s experience and stoic endurance of the pain of a
severe initiation create or transform a previous relationship into a CS
relationship between the initiate and the group that initiates him, and/or an
AR relationship between initiators and initiates. Opponents in a feud, duel,
or martial arts competition conduct their EM relationship by hurting or
killing each other and modulate their AR rank through the results of the
contests. The soldier or the parent who shoots an intruder and pre-emptively
establishes his reputation for violent action is protecting his CS relationship
with those he loves most. When a schoolmaster strikes a pupil for failing to
follow instructions, he redresses and rectifies the AR relationship that the
pupil transgressed. When a woman kills her partner to be with her new
lover, she does so to terminate the old CS relationship that is preventing her
from creating a new one. Mourning the death of a loved one, a Warramunga
man would cut his own thighs deeply, and a Kwakiutl man would kill
anyone of the same rank as the family member he mourned. As these
examples indicate, a single act of violence may be motivated to perform
multiple constitutive phases.
Depending on the cultural implementations of a relationship, violence
may be essential for any of these constitutive phases, or it may be
facultative. In most martial arts, participation in the relationship is
inherently violent: the conduct of the relationship is violence. Likewise, in
many societies the initiations of warriors absolutely entails inflicting pain
on the initiates. Toward the middle of this continuum, nineteenth-century
American and European parents and schoolteachers were fully entitled and
expected to rap children’s knuckles, twist their ears, or beat them (e.g.,
Muir, 2009), but, presumably, some parents and teachers shirked these
duties without major repercussions. At the optional-permissive end of this
continuum, a romantic couple could consensually agree to the mutual
infliction of pain during love-making if they felt that it enhanced their bond
(so to speak), but no one would hold it against them if they were gentle.

Metarelational models
In the simplest case, the social relationship that motivates violence is just a
dyadic relationship between the agent and the victim of violence. But
generally the links among multiple relationships are crucial to generating
the violence, or suppressing it. For example, A does violence to V or
refrains from violence to B in order to regulate A’s relationship with C, or to
regulate V’s relationship with C. Prescriptive or proscriptive links among
social relationships are called metarelational models (Fiske, 2011).
Metarelational models may involve many entailments or prohibitions other
than violence, but in every case the configuration of relationships defines
moral obligations imbued with regulative emotions. In a metarelational
model, what people do or don’t do in one of the component relationships
has emotional, motivational, and moral implications for the other
relationships. Some metarelational models involve configurations of four or
even many more relationships that have strong implications for each other.
Examination of many violence practices will show that certain
metarelational models require a person to harm another in order to create,
conduct, protect, redress, terminate, or mourn relationships with others.
Conversely, many other metarelational models restrict violence from
occurring in a given dyad because of its implications for the other
relationships linked to it.
For example, when X is Y’s enemy, Z’s violence against X enhances Z’s
relationship with Y. That is, it makes Y and Z allies or even “brothers” in
common opposition to X. On the largest scale, joining in the patriotic
defense of the nation (or in the nation’s grand aggression) bonds the
fighters. Any wounds or disabilities the warriors suffer in fighting for the
nation binds them still more strongly together as patriots. On the other
hand, when X is Y’s kin, friend, or ally, if Z is Y’s kin, friend, or ally, this
combination of relationship morally inhibits Z from harming X – even if Z
has other moral motives to do so, such as motives to regulate his own
dyadic relationship with X.
It is helpful to represent metarelational models graphically, along with
their verbal articulation. We use an arrow to represent violence in a
relationship, and parallel lines to represent other relationships
metarelationally linked to the violent relationship. (To be accurate, the
arrows should be shown within parallel lines indicating the relationship in
which the violence occurs, but, for simplicity in the first four figures, we let
the arrow represent violence understood to occur within a relationship.) P
stands for perpetrator (or potential perpetrator); V, for victim (or potential
victim); O, for other; and A, for another person in the metarelational model.
Hence, Figure 2.1 depicts a dyad in which a perpetrator is violent to a
victim. For example, if the victim V stole money that belonged to a
partnership with the perpetrator P, then P might be morally motivated to
assault V to rectify the relationship.
Figure 2.1: The primary motivation for violence is to constitute a social
relationship

A person’s relationship with someone may motivate him to harm or kill

someone else. Figure 2.2a graphs this: if the perpetrator, P, is motivated to
regulate a relationship to the other, O, and doing so requires P to do
violence to the victim, V, then P may hurt or kill V for the sake of P’s
relationship with O. For example, a soldier may obey a superior officer who
commands her to shoot someone, or an ice-hockey player may fight an
opponent to impress his girlfriend. The more critical P’s relationship is with
O, and the more numerous such relationships P has with others that demand
violence against V, the more likely it is that P will resort to violence and the
more severe the violence will be. Figure 2.2b can represent two distinct
configurations: first, it can depict multiple independent metarelational
models, each of which makes P’s relationship with a single O morally
contingent on P’s violence against V. Second, it can represent one complex
metarelational model in which P’s relationships with each and all of the Os
are contingent on P’s violence against V. For example, suppose that P has
joined with all of the Os in a compact that each of them will kill one enemy
soldier, or each of them will fight one round against V in a martial arts
contest.
Figure 2.2: Relationships with others may motivate violence against a
third party
a: A metarelational model in which P’s relationship with O is constituted by
P’s violence against V.
b: Multiple or complex metarelational models may magnify A’s propensity
to violence against V.

A person’s allegiance to a kinsman often motivates him to fight the

kinsman’s enemies. That is, there may be a metarelational model linking
violence between O and V with a communal relationship between O and P
such that P is morally bound to attack V. My friend’s enemy is my enemy.
Figure 2.3a depicts this. If P has many allies who are all fighting with V,
either separately or within an integrated metarelationship, P is even more
likely to feel morally motivated to harm or kill V. On the other hand, the
friend of my friend(s) is my friend – even if I am angry at him. Although he
has committed a grave offense against me, I don’t want to kill my
daughter’s husband, especially if he is also my brother’s godfather and my
priest’s son. That’s what Figure 2.3b graphs.
Figure 2.3: Indirect ties may potentiate multiparty violence, or inhibit
violence
a: A metarelational model in which P’s bond with O together with O’s
enmity to V prescribes that P be violent to V.
b: The effects are enhanced when there are multiple or complex
metarelational models.

Figure 2.3 also helps us consider the nature of alliances. A potential

perpetrator’s capacity and propensity to successfully use violence against a
victim depends on whether others will support her against her victim, or
vice versa (Gould, 2003: 61). One important case is that in humans and
many non-human species, dominance rank depends on the rank and number
of allies that an animal can count on to support him in conflicts with
competitors (de Waal, 1982; Fiske, 2011). Conversely, the outcomes of
contests of rank between any two persons – especially the leaders of
opposing coalitions or groups – spread to the AR relations between their
respective allies: when a leader falls, his supporters fall with him (Gould,
2003: 150–61). Hence, violence often propagates through interlocking
metarelational models. Gould, (2003: 155–61) demonstrates that Corsican
homicides in 1835–1914 and twentieth-century homicides in France, Italy,
and Finland correlate highly with regime changes; when a leader falls, his
followers become vulnerable to vendetta killings by everyone they have
harmed or offended.
These metarelational moral motives concatenate and extend recursively,
so that, for example, my brother’s enemy’s brother is my enemy, as
depicted on the left-hand side of Figure 2.4. At the same time, usually my
brother’s enemy is my enemy and my brother’s enemy’s brother is my
brother’s enemy. The right-hand graph in Figure 2.4 depicts this.
Figure 2.4: Violence-enhancing metarelational models involving four to
six relationships among four persons

A person may be motivated to violence with the intention to perform any

of the six constitutive phases of any of the four RMs and their
corresponding moral motives. Furthermore, a person’s relationship-
constitutive moral motives may be aimed at the relationships of the person
herself, her partner(s), or her partner(s) partners, and so on (see Black,
1998: ch. 7).2 Figure 2.5 illustrates some of the possibilities. (In this figure
we show the parallel lines around the arrow to remind us that the violence
regulates the relationship between perpetrator and victim.) Figure 2.5a
represents a person who harms himself in order to constitute a relationship
with another person; for example, a suicide intended to terminate a
relationship that the perpetrator dishonored. Another example is self-injury
intended to elicit a partner’s care or evoke the partner’s guilt. Figure 2.5b
represents a perpetrator committing violence against a victim to constitute
the relationship between the two of them; for example, a knight doing battle
against another knight to create an AR relationship between the two of them
and establish their relative positions, or a man attacking someone who
insulted his honor, in order to rectify their EM relationship. Figure 2.5c
shows a perpetrator motivated to regulate the relationship between himself
and the victim, and at the same time regulate the relationship between
himself and another person. For example, a man might whip his son for
disobedience to redress the father’s relationship with his son, while
enhancing the father’s relationship with his pastor, who approves of
discipline enforced by corporal punishment. Along with regulating the
relationship between perpetrator and victim, the aim of violence may also
be to regulate the relationship between the victim and another person, even
when the perpetrator has no relationship with the other person (Figure
2.5d). For example, a father could whip his son to punish him for taking a
stranger’s horse, rectifying his son’s relationship with the stranger. In such
cases, the perpetrator simultaneously intends his violence to constitute his
relationship with the victim: the father is reasserting his authority over his
son.

Figure 2.5: Violence to constitute the perpetrator’s relationship with

another, and with a second or third party

Violence often regulates the perpetrator’s relationship with the victim, the
perpetrator’s relationship with another, and the victim’s relationship with
that other, as Figure 2.6a graphs. For example, a father whips his son for
taking his brother’s horse, rectifying the relationship between the brothers
and enhancing the father’s relationship with the son who took the horse and
at the same time the father’s relationship with the son whose horse was
taken. Or a man may whip his son because his son has disobeyed the man’s
wife.
Figure 2.6: Violence to constitute multiple relationships simultaneously

The same act of violence can regulate any number of relationships;

Figure 2.6b shows, for example, violence that metarelationally constitutes
P’s relationship with V, P’s relationship with an O, that O’s relationship
with a second O, that second O’s relationship with V, and V’s relationship
with the second O. This is the configuration that motivates a woman to kill
her husband’s lover; this terminates the wife’s competitive relationship with
her husband’s lover, reconstitutes the killer’s own relationship with her
husband, terminates the husband’s relationship with his lover, and rectifies
the husband’s relationship with his lover’s husband, the lover’s relationship
with her own husband, and the killer’s relationship with her friend, the
lover’s husband. The same graph could diagram the motives for a man
initiating his son into manhood: the violence creates a CS relationship
bonding his son and himself, while bonding each of them with other adult
men and initiates, while at the same time transforming the mother’s
relationships with all of them. Likewise, a naval captain who has a sailor
lashed for disobeying a lieutenant is rectifying the AR relationship between
the lieutenant and the sailor, while enhancing the AR relationship between
himself and the lieutenant, sustaining the AR relationship between the sailor
and himself, and sustaining the AR relationship between the punished sailor
and other officers and between other sailors and other officers, while
evoking the sailor’s solidarity with other sailors who have been lashed for
similar offenses, and so forth. When he orders the bo’s’n to flog a man, a
good early modern naval ship captain aims to regulate many relationships,
all critical to his legal and moral mandate to maintain discipline and make
his crew into an effective fighting force. Many moral motives and
obligations converge to impel him to order the flogging, even if he hates to
do it. Whether the wife or the husband kill immediately – let us say,
“impulsively” – without self-conscious reflection, or whether they carefully
and thoroughly articulate all of the relational considerations and
metarelational implications involved before they kill, they may have
multiple convergent or divergent motives, most of which are moral.
As everyone knows, and as we shall consider in Chapters 7 and 16,
people are often morally motivated to do violence on behalf of their own
group against another group. Rugby and ice-hockey teams are hitting
opponents with whom they typically have no personal dyadic relationships:
it’s one team against another. Nazi officers killing Jews were acting as
group to group, motivated by the relationships they perceived between the
groups. It’s the same with feuding clans or warring nations. Figure 2.6c
depicts this. For example, violence between groups is predicated on the EM
relationship between the two groups, and at the same time the CS
relationships within each group, so that the violence of a P against a V in
the other group balances out the violence of an other (O) in V’s group
against another (A) in P’s group, because the actors within a group are
interchangeable due to their CS equivalence. At the same time, P’s
vengeance enhances his CS unity with A, and V’s CS unity with O, while
rectifying the EM equality between O and A and between P and V.
Obviously, in the dynamics of the cycle of EM vengeance, each
successive act of violence may motivate a further, reciprocal act that the
agents each perceive as rectifying what they regard as a previous imbalance
in the relationship. This recursion is a kind of serial metarelational model
extended over time. These diagrams are merely static images of what is
actually a dynamic process in which successive actions transform
relationships sequentially and without end.
Any social action, including violence, may be motivated with the aim of
performing any one or several of the six constitutive phases of any of the
RMs for any number of relationships. Any act, including a violent act, may
have constitutive phases that differ across relationships: for example, the
same act may create one relationship while sustaining a second relationship,
rectifying a third, and terminating a fourth. For example, a soldier who kills
enemies attacking his unit sustains his AR relationship with the officer
commanding the unit, modulates his EM relationship with the enemy by
avenging their killing of his comrades the day before, enhances his CS
relationship with his fellow soldiers in the unit (both the dead and the
living), wins a medal and is promoted over them to create a new AR
relationship with them and the replacements who join the unit, but
terminates his relationship with his pacifist girlfriend who is appalled and
disillusioned by his violence. Or consider a knight in the age of chivalry
who, inspired by pride and love for the lady he champions, violently
overcomes an opponent, thereby creating an AR relationship of superiority
over the defeated opponent, enhancing his CS relationship with the lady
whose ribbon he carries, paying off his MP creditors with the purse
awarded to him as victor, being awarded a position as EM peer of his fellow
knights, who admire his valor and skill, and setting in motion EM
vengeance by the brother of the defeated knight, who feels humiliated by
the knight’s excessive display of pride in his victory.
These diagrams illustrate the nature of the moral motivations for violently
constituting relationships, and demonstrate a simple analytic tool for
exploring motivations for violence. But they certainly do not exhaust the
metarelational model configurations that motivate violence. Many of the
diagrams simplify the metarelational psychology of virtuous violence by
representing violence occurring in only one direction, or in only one or two
dyads. And these diagrams are limited to depictions of only four persons
(and just two groups), while the psychology of metarelational models may
connect quite a few persons in many relationships – as we shall consider in
Chapter 6 on honor violence and its exemplification in the Iliad. In any
case, it is abundantly clear that the aim of violence is often to regulate
relationships not just with the victim but also with others. We can’t
understand violence without recognizing the metarelational configurations
that morally motivate it. In Chapter 22 we return to metarelational models,
showing that other metarelational models have the opposite effect: they
generate moral motives to inhibit violence.
 By reconceptualizing violence as morally motivated, virtuous violence
theory enables us to better describe and explain a diverse array of violent
acts, including war, terrorism and self-sacrifice, suicide, violent sports,
execution, corporal punishment, torture, vengeance, honor-related violence,
retributive justice, violence during initiation rites, self-mortification,
violence committed under orders, execution, mass killing, human sacrifice,
and headhunting, as well as the valorization of the violence committed or
commanded by gods and heroes. In these culturally informed relationships,
by killing and by being killed, as well as by being liable to be killed or
obligated to kill, participants constitute and vividly display their social
relationships. In the sources describing these particular practices, there is
ample evidence that the primary motives for violence are at the same time
subjectively moral – people feel they must harm or kill others simply
because it’s the right thing to do – and also moral in the framework of
relationship regulation theory, where morality is the regulation or
constitution of vital social relationships.

1 Note that this definition allows for a person to perceive herself to be a

participant in a social relationship with an imagined being, a deceased
person, an animate, non-human being (e.g., a pet snail), or an inanimate
object. All that is required is that the person expects the imputed partner to
complete the relational gestalt.

2 In principle, this recursion need not end with the third person; it could go
on indefinitely, and probably sometimes does extend to the fourth or even
fifth step. But the moral motivation rapidly grows weaker with each step.
 3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
[Injun Joe and the Spaniard, hiding in the dark outside the home of the
Widow Douglas – Injun Joe speaks first]
“I tell you again, as I’ve told you before, I don’t care for her swag –
you may have it. But her husband was rough on me – many times he
was rough on me – and mainly he was the justice of the peace that
jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain’t all. It ain’t a millionth part of
it! He had me horsewhipped! – horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a
nigger! – with all the town looking on! Horsewhipped! – do you
understand? He took advantage of me and died. But I’ll take it out of
her.”
“Oh, don’t kill her! Don’t do that!”
“Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill him if he was
here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don’t
kill her – bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils – you notch
her ears like a sow!”
“By God, that’s ———”
“Keep your opinion to yourself! It will be safest for you. I’ll tie her to
the bed. If she bleeds to death, is that my fault? I’ll not cry, if she
does.”
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Defense and punishment

Most contemporary theories of violence implicitly limit their scope to
violence that the theorist unreflectively construes as illegitimate: that is,
most are attempts to explain “bad” violence (Betz, 1977). But there are two
constitutive phases of violence that, in varying forms and degrees, are
almost universally recognized as morally acceptable, justified, and even
obligatory: protection in the form of defense and redress in the form of
punishment. Yet most theories of “violence” exclude or simply ignore
defense and punishment, providing no explanation for them or not
integrating the account of them into the overall theory of “violence,” which
is a priori defined to exclude them.
When someone threatens a person’s life, property, or domain, it is
generally agreed in most cultures that the person may use violence to
defend herself. Insofar as the victim is simply protecting her life and body,
in important respects her violence is not virtuous – it is simply self-
preservation. However, people always recognize some rights in their
persons and property, rights that entitle a person to protect what is theirs.
Hence, threats or harm to herself, her family, or her property are
transgressions against the victim, and defensive violence is virtuous. Thus,
when humans violently defend their children, spouses, family, buddies, or
allies, this defense is virtuous violence. It is virtuous because protecting
partners is the core of the relationship. It is a moral obligation to protect
one’s partners, and throughout history humans have accorded great honor to
heroes who aggressively defend themselves, their families, or their
communities. A nation invaded is entitled to violently resist its attackers,
and might be justified in aiming to destroy the invading nation to avenge
the invasion and ensure its future safety. Defense is a very common moral
motivation for violence.
The other most common constitutive phase of violence is redress and
rectification of the transgression of a relationship. People often feel
compelled to respond with violence when they feel that they have been
violated. Moreover, when someone commits a transgression against another
person, most third parties feel that the transgressed party is entitled to
retaliate and punish the transgressor. The proximate cognitive and social
psychological emotions and motives for punitive violence have little to do
with practical considerations of deterrence functions. That is, as far as
conscious intentions go, we generally do not punish people who harm us in
order to prevent them from harming us in the future, or to signal to others
that they will be punished for the same actions. In a series of experiments,
Kevin Carlsmith, John Darley, and Paul Robinson (Carlsmith, 2006;
Carlsmith et al., 2002; Darley et al., 2000) found that laypeople’s
judgments of how much to punish were largely insensitive to factors that
would be important for deterring future crime, such as the likelihood of the
crime being detected when committed or the likelihood of the perpetrator
repeating the crime in the future. Instead, judgments of appropriate
punishment were primarily driven by factors such as the seriousness of the
crime or whether the perpetrator had good or evil motives for committing
the crime. These data suggest that people are retributive. We punish harm-
doers when we believe that it is fundamentally just to do so and when we
are morally outraged by what they have done – not when it is rational to do
so in terms of preventing future harm.
In many cases, defense and punishment coincide. Police, bodyguards,
security personnel, and peace-keeping “forces” have a duty to stop
criminals and defend civilians, even when they have to use force to do so.
Prosecutors, judges, juries, jailors, and executioners have a duty to impose
penalties on criminals, including violent penalties. When a police sniper
shoots an armed kidnapper, or a jury sentences a serial killer to death, they
are following their civic duty to enforce the law. When peace-keeping
forces shoot a suicide bomber driving through a checkpoint, they are
protecting the innocent. When a homeowner shoots a threatening intruder in
order to protect his wife and children, his motivation is moral and most
third parties would approve of his violence. Harming transgressors to
“enforce” the law is virtuous when necessary or required by law. If
someone starts to hit you, you are entitled to defend yourself and retaliate
by hitting back – and you are likely to be quite morally motivated to do so.
In many cultures, if someone kills a man’s brother, he is absolutely
obligated to avenge the death by killing the killer, or killing one of the
killer’s brothers – and his moral motivation to do so will be ferocious, since
his family’s honor and safety depend on his unmitigated vengeance.

Vengeance
In 1991, a fight between children of the El-Hanashat and Abdel-Halim
clans in Egypt ended in two deaths, sparking a blood feud. The most recent
murders were in 2002, when twenty-two El-Hanashat members were
gunned down. In response, a surviving El-Hanashat stated,

“No matter what sacrifices it takes, we are determined to kill as many

of them [Abdel-Halims] as were murdered.”
 (Halawi, 2002)

“Vengeance” is simply a term used to describe retributive punishment that

either observers or the modern state deem as illegitimate. Persons who
perceive themselves to be the victim of a transgression often want to hurt
the transgressor in retribution. Typically, allies and other third parties also
want to violently punish major transgressors. The desire to punish
transgressors is universal and usually intense, though at times other motives
may counteract or prevail against punitive moral motives. In most cultures,
in many relationships, the most natural, intuitive, satisfying punishment for
the grave transgression of any relationship is corporal violence, such as
flogging or execution for theft, heresy, or homicide. And in many cultural
implementations of many relationships, it is common for people to be
morally motivated to hit people to punish them for even relatively small
infractions, such as damaging property or failing to learn a school lesson. In
stateless societies, honor-based retaliatory violence and retribution by
kinship groups and alliances are major causes of morbidity and mortality. In
contrast, the modern state prohibits or restricts self-help retaliatory
violence, claiming for itself the authority to violently enforce the laws that
delimit relationships among citizens and between citizens and the state. But
modern Western states, especially, are diminishing their use of violence to
enforce the law and increasingly restricting citizens’ rights to use violence
to regulate their relationships with each other; this is one of the major
causes of the decline of violence (Durkheim, 1973, 1997; Pinker, 2011).
Yet across human societies and history, the moral obligation to violently
rectify transgression is widespread. For example, in ancient China, “The
Confucian school identified proper vengeance as a highly moral act that
was obligatory to uphold or validate the personal ties that created human
society… The violence of revenge was considered to be a fundamental
constituent of the Confucian moral order and closely identified with the
violence of legal punishments” (Lewis, 1990: 87). Anyone who reads
novels or plays, watches television, or sees movies constantly encounters
psychologically plausible depictions of moral motives for vengeful
violence: violent retributive justice in response to previous transgressions is
one of the most common themes in human stories. Indeed, morally
motivated violent vengeance and retributive punishment are so ubiquitous
that they deserve a book of their own; fortunately, that book has already
been written (twice: Henberg, 1990; Zaibert, 2006; see also Cottingham,
1979).

Metarelational retribution
Well my homeboy had bought some coke, and he said it wasn’t good.
So I told him I would go and fix it. I met the dude [who sold the bad
cocaine] in my neighborhood, and it all went to shit. I told him, “Hey,
if you’re going to buy drugs to sell, you need to get good shit. You
don’t fuck around with this shit.” He then pulled out a small gun, I
think it was a .380. But I had the advantage because I think he was all
fucked up on coke. I told him, “vato (man), what you did, I’m just
coming over to fix it.” That’s when I slapped the gun and I already had
mine on him and boom.
(Valdez et al., 2009: 299)

As this example illustrates, a third party in a metarelational model may be

the perpetrator of violent punishment; in this case, the gang leader took AR
responsibility to look out for and stand up for his “homeboy” (gang
member), killing a drug dealer for violating a MP relationship with the
homeboy. At an abstract level, the metarelational configuration operating
here is similar to that which generates punitive violence when a chief, a
king, or a modern state enforces laws protecting citizens from being cheated
in business or sales.
Likewise, in certain cultures, AR relationships are defined by the
obligation of subordinates to avenge the killing or humiliation of a master.
Warring-States China was an example: in one indicative text, “the
obligation to avenge a murdered lord is treated as so absolute that to fail to
do so is tantamount to killing him oneself… The obligation to avenge is one
of the basic elements of the bond between lord and retainer or father and
son, and the man who fails to perform that obligation dissolves the ties that
linked him to the deceased” (Lewis, 1990: 81–2). Thus, “avenging an
ancestor is a moral obligation and a supremely worthy act” (Lewis, 1990:
83). Conversely, Qin law defined a moral principle of “mutual implication”
or collective responsibility (lian zuo), according to which “punishment for
certain serious crimes did not end with the individual but was extended to
his family, neighbors, and in the case of an official to his immediate
superiors, subordinates, or the man who recommended him to office”
(Lewis, 1990: 91). Anyone implicated in a serious crime in any of these
ways was liable to be executed. In other words, the AR relationship defined
and constituted a CS group that was collectively obligated to undertake
violent retribution for killing their superior, and, conversely, to be
collectively punished for rebellion or malfeasance.

Violence due to conflicting models

There are many reasons for people to violate a relationship, potentially
evoking violent retribution from the person whom they have transgressed
against. One of the most interesting to consider here is that the partners in a
relationship may each be using a different model to generate his own action
and evaluate the relational coordination. In such cases, each participant
perceives his own action as moral, but the other’s as transgressive. If A
perceives a road as a public right of way, in CS, while B perceives the road
as on his purchased property, under MP, they might come to blows when A
uses the road. One such conflict between disparate RMs generated the
violence between nineteenth-century cattlemen in the United States who
saw the land in CS terms as open range, and farmers who homesteaded and
fenced the land. Similarly, when an imperial official perceives himself as a
rightful AR authority over his colonial subjects, while those purported
“subjects” see themselves as his human equals in EM terms, the result may
be mutual violence. In such instances, each sees his own violence as
properly punitive of the perceived violation of the RM he is using, while
seeing the other’s violence as a flagrant further violation. Or two people
may be interacting using the same model, but implemented differently.
Suppose that A perceives that it’s his turn to channel the water into his field
to irrigate it, but B perceives that it’s his turn; the contention may escalate
to violence. Thus, sometimes both participants in a relationship may be
morally motivated to violently punish the other because their perceptions of
the relationship are discordant, and hence each perceives the other as the
transgressor whose initial misdeed is further compounded by his
illegitimate violence.
Protection and redress are the most common constitutive motivations for
moral violence, yet it seems to be precisely because defense and
punishment are so clearly moral that they are often excluded or
mischaracterized when philosophers and social scientists define violence as
the “immoral” or “illegitimate” use of force or harm. Meanwhile,
vengeance is also misunderstood when it is a priori distinguished as
immoral.
We will see in subsequent chapters that the constitutive phases of
protection and redress are common components of motivations for violence.
But these are only two of the constitutive phases that generate moral
violence – there are four others. The crucial conceptual point that has not
been widely acknowledged is that once one recognizes that people are
morally motivated to violently protect and redress relationships, it becomes
clear that people are also morally motivated to do violence to perform the
other constitutive phases: creation, conduct, termination, and mourning.
Every aspect of relationship regulation may motivate violence. Although in
this book we will focus on violent practices whose motivation is less
obviously moral than defense, punishment, and vengeance, these obviously
moral aspects of constituting relationships should be kept in mind
throughout.
 4 The right and obligation of parents, police,
kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
Here is a Chinese story that takes place in the Zhou dynasty (1256–1046
BCE), as set down in the third century CE:

A man, Ho, offered a jade matrix as a gift to King Li, and later again to
King Wu. Each king’s jeweler failed to recognize the gem in the
matrix, and each king ordered one of Ho’s feet amputated for the
apparent insult. Hearing that Ho was weeping, King Wu sent a retainer
to discover why. The retainer inquired, “Many people in the world
have had their feet amputated – why do you weep so piteously over
it?” He replied “I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I
grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of
integrity is called a deceiver. This is why I weep.”
(Han Fei Tzu, c. 235 CE; quoted in Collins, 1974: 415–16)

Ho grieved that an act of deferential respect had been mistaken for an

offense, while taking it for granted that a king may order his foot amputated
for insulting him.
Cultural implementations of AR very often empower and obligate
superiors to hurt subordinates. For long periods of history, men have been
entitled to strike or beat their wives and force them to have sex; parents
have been entitled to whip their children; schoolmasters have exercised the
right to rap their pupils’ knuckles, twist their ears, or cane them; military
officers have been authorized to strike or flog soldiers and sailors; slave-
owners have been freely permitted to beat and rape slaves; and, in general,
elites have had a great deal of latitude to inflict physical abuse on lower
social classes. Often superiors have the authority to harm at their whim,
merely to enact their authority: violence is an integral component of the
conduct of these AR relationships. Much more widespread is the authority
for the corporal punishment of disrespect and, especially, disobedience:
violence is the crucial, prototypical, traditional means for redressing
transgressions of AR. These are not just permissions: superiors are often
required to inflict corporal punishment as part of the correct performance of
their duties. That is, in many AR contexts in many cultures, the necessary,
natural, and proper exercise of authority entails inflicting pain on
subordinates, sometimes to the point of severe distress – and sometimes so
as to inflict permanent injury or death.
Durkheim (1973/1899–1900) posited that the more absolute the authority
of the ruler, the harsher the punishments he imposes. Subsequent research
has supported and extended his thesis. The greater the difference in rank,
the stronger is the moral support for violence against those far below and
the stronger the moral condemnation for violence against those far above
(Cooney, 2009: 186). In post-Han ancient China, for example, “the power
of emperor, mandarin, family head, were indeed upheld by force – above all
by beating (even to the point of death), with bamboo sticks” (Collins, 1974:
430). Although in modern states all citizens are legally equal, in fact,
violence committed against low-status people by high-status people, against
outsiders by insiders, or within “close” relationships, is punished by the
judicial system much less severely than violence by low-status people
against high-status people, by outsiders against insiders, or toward people in
more “distant” relationships (Cooney, 2009). In some cultural contexts,
violence by high-status insiders against low-status outsiders with whom the
perpetrator has an intimate relationship, such as by masters against slaves,
is often applauded. Moreover, people commonly judge that superiors have
considerable moral license to harm or kill subordinates at will, and
especially to order subordinates to put themselves in harm’s way.
Conversely, any violence by inferiors against their masters is severely,
immediately, and brutally punished (Cooney, 2009: 36–62). Indeed, the
least violence by a subordinate against a superior is a profound and
fundamental violation of the AR relationship (Rai and Fiske, 2011),
meriting extreme and often immediate punishment.
Of course, it is a fact that sometimes people – especially psychopaths –
use violence purely instrumentally to control others. But amoral coercive
force is not especially common and is not what we are analyzing here.
Rather, we are illuminating culturally informed AR relationships in which
authorities have the right or the duty to violently conduct and enforce their
authority.

Corporal punishment of children

The earliest and most basic AR relationship is between children and adults,
particularly their parents. In early civilizations such as Shang China, ancient
Mesopotamia, Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt, pre-colonial Yoruba and
Benin, Classic Maya, pre-conquest Aztec and Inca, adults physically
punished children for disobedience and for substandard performance
(Trigger, 2003: 668). Likewise, US parents have long used punishments
such as whipping, isolating, and depriving children of food (Greven, 1977;
McLoughlin, 1971). In contemporary America, many parents, especially
conservative Christians, believe that some forms of corporal punishment of
children are appropriate and indeed good for children (Ellison et al., 2011;
Gershoff et al., 1999; Guarendi, 1991; Knox, 2010; Martin, 2009; Strauss
and Donnelly, 2001; Vittrup and Holden, 2009; Wilcox, 2004). Moreover,
in their eyes, corporal punishment is essential to upholding parental
authority, where respect and obedience are core moral values based on
tradition and the Bible. It fact, as recently as the year 2000, corporal
punishment was the modal practice in America: In various nationally
representative samples of contemporary Americans, 94% of parents of 3- to
5-year-old children reported that they had hit their child in the past year,
and 67–85% of mothers of 2-year-old children said they had spanked their
children in the previous week; those who had spanked their children
reported a mean of 3.2 times the previous week (Straus, 2000). In 1968,
94% of Americans believed that “a good hard spanking is sometimes
necessary,” and in the 1990s, more than two-thirds still believed that
(Straus, 2000). Analyses of large representative samples of ethnographies
show that in about three-fourths of the world’s cultures, parents or other
adults physically punish children by slapping, spanking, hitting, beating,
scalding, burning, pushing, pinching, or switching (Levinson, 1989: 28).
And these parents feel it’s what they should do to raise morally responsible
children.
It was routine for schoolmasters in Europe and America to casually strike
or formally whip their pupils, even young children. “From antiquity to the
early modern period, the methodical infliction of pain was conceived as a
helpmate to learning and memorizing” (Traninger, 2009: 53). To help
children remember the consequences of felony, seventeenth-century French
parents brought children to public executions and caned them there; in
Brandenburg, people beat children on the parish borders to help them
remember where the boundary lay (p. 55). And in early modern Europe, it
was still widely taken for granted that learning Latin necessarily entailed
whipping (Traninger, 2009). But this was not limited to Latin.

For the beating of children outside the home there was a clear
tendency to grant general license: it was numbered among the typical
duties of the magistri [teacher] or the school master… The use of
violence in the school was the expression of potestas [legitimate
authority], which had been invested in the schoolmaster, and not the
application of illegitimate violencia… Both the ferula [cane] and virga
[switch] became the stock items of any European classroom. They
became the insignia, the iconographical attributes of the pedagogue as
well as the emblems of scholastic discipline.
(Traninger, 2009: 42)

While observing the caning of young pupils, other students were sometimes
required to sing hymns to the rhythm of the beating (p. 55). Well into the
twentieth century, many European and American teachers struck pupils on
the knuckles for inattention or failure to learn their lessons; teachers and
parents canned or whipped children for disobedience or disrespect (e.g.,
Muir, 2009; Wilcox, 2004).
This AR violence consists of more than just punishment for infractions –
it is felt to be the morally necessary and natural assertion of authority. In
these culturally informed AR relationships, a superior is or was entitled to
inflict pain to show his displeasure, or simply to exercise his arbitrary
authority. Even today, drill sergeants and coaches exercise legitimate power
to inflict pushups, laps around the track, or climbing the stadium steps until
recruits or players suffer from excruciating cramps, and beyond.
The AR relationship between parents and their children is re-enacted in
other social contexts, licensing and requiring violent enforcement of quasi-
parental authority. In the Eastern Congo, Mai Mai militiamen say that their
commanders are morally entitled to punish them for disobedience, at least
when their commands are legitimate. Many of the soldiers consider the
command structure to be paternalistic. Commanders are like fathers and as
such have to be obeyed implicitly. Speaking about his superiors, one
respondent said,

“I am like his son… [The higher ranking officer] has become like my
father and my mother at the same time. If I make a mistake, it is
normal that he punishes me and I cannot complain. I have to tell
myself if I am punished, I deserve it…” Punishment for disobedience
is harsh and includes imprisonment, flogging, and possibly death.
(Kelly, 2010: 7)

In short, around the world, parental authority and its analogs often
encompass the right and indeed the obligation to use corporal punishment to
enforce the AR relationship. Corporal punishment is morally motivated in
both the subjective and the theoretical sense: subjectively, fathers feel that
they should hit, spank, or paddle their children; others in the community
regard this as right and necessary. Theoretically, parental corporal
punishment is moral insofar as it sustains or redresses the AR relationship
between parent and child. Moreover, it is nearly always metarelational. One
widespread American script is that a child transgresses in an interaction
with the mother, who tells the child that when his father comes home he
will take the child out to the woodshed and whip him. The father thus not
only validates his wife’s verdict in the particular instance but he also
reinforces the mother’s authority over the child – and over the siblings of
the child he whips. Furthermore, accepting her judgment that the child
should be punished and backing her up accordingly, he enhances his
relationship with his wife. In addition, fathers commonly whip children to
sanction the child’s transgression of relationships with other third parties,
including siblings and neighbors (e.g., Muir, 2009). Especially devout
Christian fathers may feel that in corporally punishing a child, they are
obeying God’s will. All in all, like most violence, the moral motives for
violently disciplining children grow out of a number of metarelational
models linking many other relationships to the relationship between the
perpetrator and the victim.
Violence in the military
Until late in the nineteenth century it was common, legal, legitimate, and
even praiseworthy for military superiors in Western and other cultures to
strike subordinates at their whim. Petty officers in the British Royal Navy in
the Napoleonic Wars carried “starters” – ropes with hard, heavy knots at the
end – with which they routinely struck sailors who displeased them in any
way, such as being slow to obey (the novels of C. S. Forester and Patrick
O’Brian depict this vividly). In his role as chief disciplinarian of the ship,
the bo’s’n wielded a cane with which he struck the posterior of any sailor
whose performance or lack of alacrity displeased him. Conversely, the
Royal Navy Articles of War of 1749 decreed:

22. If any Officer, Mariner, Soldier or other Person in the Fleet, shall
strike any of his Superior Officers, or draw or offer to draw, or lift up
any Weapon against him, being in the execution of his Office, on any
Pretence whatsoever, every such Person being convicted of any such
Offence, by the Sentence of a Court Martial, shall suffer Death; and if
any Officer, Mariner, Soldier or other Person in the Fleet, shall
presume to quarrel with any of his Superior Officers, being in the
execution of his Office, or shall disobey any lawful Command of any
of his Superior Officers; every such Person being convicted of any
such Offence by the Sentence of a Court Martial, shall suffer Death, or
such other Punishment as shall, according to the Nature and Degree of
his Offence, be inflicted upon him by the Sentence of a Court Martial.

Note that there is no possible lesser penalty for striking an officer or

threatening him with a weapon: death is absolutely mandated. “Violence
done by officers to men was seen as almost unequivocally good; and
violence done by men to officers just as unequivocally bad” (Nicolson,
2005: 56).
The British naval Articles of War also prescribed death for sleeping on
watch, negligence in performance of duty, failing to engage and pursue the
enemy, cowardice or flight, desertion, enticement to desertion, and arson.
Mutiny, of course, was a capital offense, as was sedition (inciting to
mutiny), as well as concealing mutinous “practice or design” (Article 19).
Orders had to be obeyed, of course.
 11. Every Person in the Fleet who shall not duly observe the Orders of
the Admiral, Flag Officer, Commander of any Squadron or Division,
or other Superior Officer, for assailing, joining Battle with or making
Defence against any Fleet, Squadron or Ship, or shall not obey the
Orders of his Superior Officer as aforesaid in time of Action, to the
best of his Power, or shall not use all possible Endeavours to put the
same effectually into execution, every Person so offending, and being
convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court Martial, shall suffer
Death, or such other Punishment as from the Nature and Degree of the
Offence a Court Martial shall deem him to deserve.
14. If when Action, or any Service shall be commanded, any Person in
the Fleet shall presume to delay or discourage the said Action or
Service, upon Pretence of Arrears of Wages, or upon any Pretence
whatsoever, every Person so offending, being convicted thereof by the
Sentence of the Court Martial, shall suffer Death, or such other
Punishment as from the Nature and Degree of the Offence a Court
Martial shall deem him to deserve.

For lesser offenses, sailors in the Royal Navy (many or most of whom were
conscripts legally kidnapped on the streets by official “press gangs”) were
flogged: with their shipmates assembled to observe, they were tied to a
grating and lashed with heavy whips that cut through skin and flesh to the
bone. Sentences of 10 or 20 lashes were entirely routine, and for desertion,
failure to obey an order, or homosexual acts, sailors were sentenced to
floggings that were certain to kill them. In the British ship of the line
Victory with a crew of about 850, during the course of the year 1804,
Captain Thomas Hardy, Horatio Nelson’s flag captain and a British hero,
ordered 4,560 blows of the lash (flogging sentences were denominated in
units of a dozen lashes) for over 150 “acts of insubordination,” especially
drunkenness but also contempt, disobedience, insolence, neglect of duty,
sleeping at one’s post, or theft (Nicolson, 2005: 139). Nelson himself,
Britain’s greatest naval hero in history, universally loved by his officers and
men and indeed by all England, while commanding the warship Boreas,
over the course of 18 months ordered floggings for 66 of its crew of 142
(Nicolson, 2005: 233). Nelson was renowned for his humanity.
Violent policing
In modern societies, violence that is morally motivated to sustain AR
relationships is evident in moral standards regarding violence committed
against police compared to violence by police against civilians, especially
lower-class civilians. Even in modern democracies, police who harm or kill
civilians, especially lower-class civilians, are rarely sanctioned by their
superiors, very rarely indicted, and hardly ever convicted (Cooney, 2009:
62–78). In the infamous Rodney King beating case, Officer Koon admitted
that the action of the police was “violent and brutal” but justified, stating “it
followed the policy and procedures of the Los Angeles Police Department
and the training” (Linder, n.d.). In American culture, violence against
criminals and suspects is integral to the authority of police (Carmichael and
Jacobs, 2002: 26). Police forces train officers in the use of violence, which
is taken for granted as natural, necessary, and morally salutary (Geller and
Toch, 1996: 183; Stark, 1972: 68). Violence is a potential means of
conducting AR relationships with anyone stopped by the police; the threat
is evident in the guns and clubs carried by police officers, along with
everyone’s knowledge that police are rarely convicted of assault or
homicide against anyone they apprehend. Indeed, the police force
commonly valorizes and glorifies violence against criminals (Baker, 1985:
145, 159; Middleton, 1994: 66). Police also feel that violence enhances
respect for their authority, and hence is integral to their AR relationships
with civilians in general, not just suspects (Lester, 1996: 183; Stark, 1972:
60; Westley, 1953: 38). Referring to clashes between officers and protesters
in Berkeley, California, one officer said, “if the parents of these
cocksuckers had beat ’em when they were young, we wouldn’t have to do it
now… There’s a whole bunch of these assholes who’ve learned some
respect for law and order tonight” (Stark, 1972: 61). A policeman who beat
two youths who threatened another officer told an observer, “on the street
you can’t beat them. But when you get them to the station, you can instill
some respect in them” (Stark, 1972: 81). Thus, officers are enforcing moral
values that support the AR relationship that they believe must be sustained
between civilians and the police force charged with protecting them.
Some police think the criminal justice system is too lenient on offenders,
or is ineffective in deterring criminals, so they dispense their own justice on
the street (Lester, 1996: 183). A veteran detective who shot an armed robber
before giving him a chance to surrender remarked, “[A]fter what I’ve seen
people do to one another, it doesn’t bother me a bit to shoot one of these
people” (Waegel, 1984: 149). One officer expressed his lack of faith in the
criminal justice system, stating; “I no longer believe in the jury system after
some of the cases I’ve seen… We get a guy off the streets and within three
or four days he’s back committing more crimes” (Waegel, 1984: 149).
Police also engage in pre-emptive violence as a deterrent for prospective
criminals (McNamara, 2002: 54; Waegel, 1984: 149). In short, when police
violently take justice into their own hands, they reinforce their AR
superiority over subordinate victims as they believe they must, and their
violence is morally motivated. Of course, they are violating some other
citizens’ cultural preos regarding their AR relationship with civilians, and
so their violence is immoral from the perspective of those others. But their
own motives are nonetheless moral.
Some police sometimes seem to be motivated to be violent to maintain
AR relationships between races, or possibly to cleanse the CS essence of
the community of polluting elements. McNamara (2002) argues that police
see themselves as representatives of a higher morality and believe they are
meant to rid society of “deviants,” and this justifies their use of force
against subjects who they think are morally inferior, and deserve
punishment (Crank, 1998). Such judgments of moral inferiority are often
based on criminal actions, but they may also be based on group-based
boundaries, such as race (Lester, 1996: 184; Stark, 1972: 80). Here,
violence is intended to humiliate the “scum” who must be put back in their
place or even eliminated to purify the community. Moreover, in some police
subcultures, shooting “scum” enhances the prestige of the officer who kills
the suspect, and enhances his solidarity with fellow officers. In the Los
Angeles Police Department, the “Jump Out Boys” had tattoos celebrating
their killings (Faturechi, 2012a, 2012b). Their pamphlet proclaimed, “We
are alpha dogs who think and act like the wolf, but never become the wolf,”
and stated that sometimes the police “need to do the things they don’t want
to do in order to get where they want to be” (Faturechi, 2013).

Violence by gods
Gods, the supreme, absolute authorities, administer the greatest punishment;
they may, must, and do inflict the most terrible violence. In early
civilizations,

Deities were easily offended and capable of great severity in their

dealings with human beings… [They] killed and injured [individually]
innocent and guilty people alike. Moreover, while gods might punish
individuals, ethnic groups, or all humanity for immoral or disrespectful
behavior, they attacked them for more trivial reasons. Mesopotamian
kings dreaded that some inadvertent mistake they made in performing
rituals might result in tutelary deities’ abandoning their city-states to
their enemies.
(Trigger, 2003: 438)

The Vedic god Rudra and his Hindu successor Shiva are creators and
preservers, but, equally fundamentally, destroyers. One avatar of Shiva is
Bhairava, the annihilator (Kramrisch, 1981), who, according to legend, cut
off one of the five heads of Brahma (Sehgal, 1999). Another form of Shiva
is Mahākāla (Sanskrit: ), “great time,” which ultimately destroys
all things (Kramrisch, 1981).
The violence that the Abrahamic God does is good by definition:
whatever Yahweh does is right, ultimately and absolutely moral because it
is He who does it. Indeed, in many religions, the gods may legitimately
harm humans to test them, or just because it pleases them to do so, without
any humanly comprehensible reason. Plagues, starvation, and genocide;
burning and torture; it’s all moral when a supreme god does it. Indeed, in
some religions, God justly condemns most humans to the most horrible
perpetual pain because their ancestors were disobedient to Him. God is also
not gentle with whiners. After the Israelites have escaped from Egypt, they
complain to Moses about the lack of water and the meager, detestable food,
so the Lord sends venomous snakes among them, biting and killing many
(Numbers 21).
Because humans were too noisy, the Mesopotamian god Enlil destroyed
humanity in a flood. Likewise, Yahweh wiped out the entire human race in
a flood – possibly the same one – saving only Noah and his family. And
beyond that massacre, all sinners are doomed to eternal hellfire (Matthew
13:36–43). Likewise, the Koran (4:56) specifies that

Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a
Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them
with other skins so they may taste the punishment. Indeed, Allah is
ever Exalted in Might, and Wise.
(Sahih International)

Of course, virtuous violence theory is a theory of human motivation for

violence, not divine motivation. But if gods are idealizations of human
beings and models for conduct, then the behavior of a society’s gods toward
humans represents an important aspect of that culture’s moral ideals for
human interaction. Gods’ morality is a model for human morality,
motivating analogous violence.

Explanations of accidents, misfortune, and

suffering
Throughout history in most cultures, most people have attributed most
misfortune, suffering, and death to the sociomorally motivated actions of
either living humans acting supernaturally (i.e., sorcerers and witches) or
the sociomorally motivated actions of immaterial supernatural beings (i.e.,
those whom we social scientists call “deities,” “spirits,” and “ancestors”).
When things go wrong (an accident, a natural disaster, a disease or death),
people infer that someone has done something wrong: either the unfortunate
or dead person is suffering as a punishment for what he did wrong, or he is
the more or less innocent victim of a (supernaturally perpetrated) crime. Or
else he is a member of a CS group whose members are collectively
responsible for any of its members’ transgressions of relationships with
supernatural beings. In short, most people in most cultures at most times
have experienced most of their setbacks, failures, illnesses, injuries, and
deaths as morally motivated violence intended to regulate their social
relationships with supernatural beings or human beings acting
supernaturally.
 This is relevant to virtuous violence theory because people understand
supernatural beings to be motivated by the same morals – albeit sometimes
more perfect or extreme – that move humans. So the motives people
attribute to such beings provide unique evidence about the attributors’ own
motives. Ironically, people also model their own motives on the ideal
motives attributed to ideal supernatural beings. Hence, informants’
statements about the morality and motives of ideal beings are declarations
about the informants’ own prescriptive morality, while their statements
about the social-relational motives of all supernatural beings are reflections
of the informants’ implicit perceptions of their own and others’ social-
relational motives. The crucial fact for us here is that this shows that,
extrapolating from their introspection and intuitive folk social psychology,
people expect social beings to violently regulate their social relationships.
That is, people think it is natural, almost inevitable, that social beings,
whether human or superhuman, are morally motivated to harm or kill their
relational partners when their partners transgress a vital relationship. People
feel that it is deeply intrinsic to the nature of social beings that they regulate
their relationships violently. It’s virtually inevitable: to participate in a
social relationship is to be the potential victim of moral violence, and to be
prone to inflict it. The gods do it, the ancestors do it, witches do it, sorcerers
do it, and even the mountains and rivers do it: everybody regulates their
relationships violently.

Trial by ordeal and combat

Gods and other supernatural authorities kill humans to express, exhibit, and
establish their supremacy, and, of course, to punish failure to obey their
will. In addition, gods and supernatural beings can be invoked to adjudicate
the social relationships of ordinary mortals. They do this by maiming or
killing the person who is in the wrong. Thus, death settles the conflict
between the human parties, while providing a dramatic demonstration of the
moral authority of the gods, carried out through the edicts of their human
delegates on earth. Especially when accusations cannot be refuted by
reliable oaths supporting the accused’s character, nor can the accusations be
sustained by solid material evidence, judicial ordeal or combat provides an
indisputable verdict: the wounded or dead person was morally culpable, and
hence, more or less incidentally, deserved to die. From a practical point of
view, the torture, maiming, or combat is morally necessary and sensible,
since it establishes guilt or innocence. A priori, if a person who undergoes a
trial by combat or an ordeal does not suffer or die, he is innocent, and if he
is injured or dies, it is all well and good because the suffering or death is
deserved – God has ordained it.
In medieval Europe, ancient India, and elsewhere, courts of law often
determined the accused’s guilt or innocence by ordeal (Bartlett, 1986; Hara,
2009; Kerr et al., 1992). “The Christian supporters of ordeal in the Middle
Ages believed that God would sustain the righteous and put down the
wicked if requested under the proper circumstances” (Bloomfield, 1969:
553).

For 400 years the most sophisticated persons in Europe decided

difficult criminal cases by asking the defendant to thrust his arm into a
cauldron of boiling water and fish out a ring. If his arm was unharmed,
he was exonerated. If not, he was convicted.
(Leeson, 2012: 1)

Another ordeal was carrying a red-hot iron (weighing one to three pounds,
depending on the crime) nine paces, and days later the accused’s hands
were examined to see if they were burned. Alternatively, authorities
sometimes ordained that suspects walk on hot plowshares. In either case,
defendants whose burns showed them to be guilty were mutilated or
executed. Bishops and priests blessed the proceedings and equipment, and
clerics typically were the ones who examined the hands or feet three days
after the event to determine whether there were suppurating burns, and
hence guilt. The other common European ordeal was lowering the accused
into a deep pool of water; those who floated were guilty, while those who
sank were innocent (and were pulled out before they drowned). Courts used
these ordeals to adjudicate cases of murder, arson, robbery, disputed
property ownership, adultery, disputed paternity, religious heresy, treason,
and, especially in seventeenth-century Europe and America, witchcraft
(Bartlett, 1986; Leeson, 2012).
People believed that God adjudicated the ordeal: the outcome was
divinely ordained, and hence the result silenced any further dispute (Hyams,
1981). In important respects, early medieval European judicial ordeal was a
way of obtaining communal consensus about guilt where a small
community would otherwise be divided (Brown, 1975: Hyams, 1981; see
discussion of the issue in Bartlett, 1986). In other words, ordeals sustained
CS solidarity that would otherwise be breached by dispute. By the time of
Charlemagne (reigned 768–814), however, judicial ordeal became an
instrument of royal authority, imposed and required by rulers and
administered exclusively by their appointed officials (Bartlett, 1986: 36–42;
Langbein, 2006; Lea, 1870; Peters, 1985; Ruthven, 1978). Ordeal was “an
exercise of power, yet represented submission to that power as submission
to the deity” because the outcome showed God’s will (Bartlett, 1986: 36;
Hyams, 1981). Bishops and priests had key roles in administering ordeals –
and were exempt from trial by ordeal. (Jews were also exempt, because the
accused in a trial by ordeal ordinarily had to perform a vigil in church and
take communion before the ordeal (Bartlett, 1986: 54–5)).
Many other cultures, particularly in Africa but also around the
Mediterranean, also used judicial ordeals (Roberts, 1965; see also
references in Bartlett, 1986: 2, note 4). In India, a god or other divine being
not only determined the outcome of a fire or floating ordeal but was
invoked as a witness (Hara, 2009). In Africa, people such as the Azande of
South Sudan administered strychnine poison to accused witches or
adulterers (Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Roberts, 1965; Singer and Ryle, 1981).
The poison, benge, was a judicial being or entity to whom the person
administering the benge addressed a request to kill the recipient if he or she
were guilty, but let the suspect live if innocent of the accusation. Analysis
of a sample of world cultures shows that ordeals are closely associated with
social stratification, with political integration (i.e., chiefs and kings), with
hierarchically organized judicial authority, with religions oriented toward
high gods, and with child socialization emphasizing obedience (Roberts,
1965). In other words, judicial ordeal is an exercise of human authority in
the name of divine authority – implementing a metarelational model.
Ancient Greeks and medieval Europeans (especially Germanic peoples)
also resolved wars, disputes, and accusations of moral transgressions by
judicial combat, which was regarded as virtually equivalent to trial by
ordeal (Armstrong, 1950; Bloomfield, 1969; Medieval Sourcebook; Ziegler,
2004). Among the Homeric Greeks,
 trial by battle is an appeal to the judgment of the gods, a form of
ordeal. It is a form of ordeal befitting nobles… All disputes between
nobles are disputes ultimately of honour, and what is intended to be
decided by judicial combat is who is the better man.
(Armstrong, 1950: 74)

Likewise in medieval Europe, kings or nobles presiding over a dispute

could dictate that judicial combat determine the will of God when there was
no other valid way to determine guilt or truth (Bloch, 1977; Bloomfield,
1969: 550; Hyams, 1981). The Normans brought to England the practice of
trial by battle, as well as the principle (if only a principle) that only the king
or those he licensed could order it (Hyams, 1981: 111–21; Leeson, 2011).
Indeed, it was thought to be “essential to baronial dignity” to hold a royal
grant authorizing the baron to order an ordeal or trial by combat (Hyams,
1981: 113). Staging ordeals was an important prerogative of major
churches, as well. By the middle of the thirteenth century, trial by battle
became rare in English criminal trials, being largely restricted to civil cases
such as land ownership disputes; however, for some time trial by battle
continued to be used to resolve criminal cases in Scotland (Hyams, 1981:
124). Like a sport or game, the rules and concrete conditions of judicial
combat were EM while the outcome made the victor socially superior in an
AR relationship to the loser (see Bloomfield, 1969: 551).
Trial by combat redresses disputed transgressions of any RM while at the
same time reasserting the authority of the human rulers acting on behalf of
divine authority. That is, in all of these cultures, divinities are fourth parties
adjudicating the relationship between the parties to the case, and with
human third-party kings, nobles, and ecclesiastics overseeing the ordeal or
combat. So, the right to invoke trial by ordeal or combat was an expression,
display, and performance of royal authority, and, when administered by a
noble, was also an expression, display, and performance of the royal
backing for the noble’s authority. The participants’ prayers in the church
and then their vindication or conviction expressed their respective
relationships with God, as He adjudicated their relationship with the other
parties. Church blessing, supervision, and above all the church’s
examination and certification of the result of an ordeal – was the accused
burned or miraculously preserved? – asserted and enhanced the authority of
the church, and perhaps to some degree of the particular churchman
involved. The outcome evinces God’s ruling in the case, demonstrating his
authority over all human relationships.1

Metarelational aspects of authority-ranking

violence
The AR relation of supreme and often lesser authorities with their
subordinates typically extends to regulation of aspects of many of the
subordinates’ social relationships with others. In other words, the AR
relationship is the pivot of a metarelational model in which transgression of
a subordinate’s relationship with another constitutes a transgression of the
subordinate’s AR relationship with the superior. We see this when a parent
intervenes to control a child’s interactions with playmates or neighbors,
when a playground supervisor comes over to make sure kids take turns,
when a military court punishes an officer for adultery, or when God damns
a person to hell for committing a sin such as worshipping another god or
coveting a neighbor’s ox or donkey. The very idea of “the state” and
“crime” is that the state assumes jurisdiction over the social relationships of
subjects and, in particular, reserves to itself the exclusive right to use
violence to enforce relationships. That is, citizen subjects of a state cannot
violently punish transgressions of their own or third parties’ relationships:
only the state may do that. Looked at from the other way around, the
authority’s motive for punishment (violent or not) is the subject’s
transgression of a relationship with a third party. In effect, the state
authority is the guarantor of certain aspects of certain of its subordinates’
relationships. This third-party enforcement is a moral and legal obligation
of the authority.
Conversely, authority also entails responsibility to stand up for and
protect subordinates. A threat or injury to my children is an attack on me,
and, if necessary, I will resort to violence to protect my children. The same
metarelational model operates at the level of the state, which may use
violence to protect its citizens – for example, against piracy or kidnapping
by terrorists. The metarelational moral motive may be emotionally
experienced by authorities as a feeling that harm to those they are
protecting is an affront to their own dignity and honor. Harming the
authority’s subordinate is a challenge to and offense against the authority
itself. So, when members of Al-Qaeda flew airliners into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the US government proclaimed moral outrage and
claimed the right and obligation to strike back at Al-Qaeda. Indeed,
according to official pronouncements, the United States invaded
Afghanistan and is still at war with the Taliban because the Taliban
protected Al-Qaeda: an apparent metarelational model operating at the
international level.
Acts of punitive and protective violence are warnings to others. When an
authority violently protects or violently punishes a subordinate, an
important part of the authority’s motivation is to warn others of the
consequences of harming one of its subordinates or violating its edicts
about relationships among or with subordinates. The authority is acting pre-
emptively to preserve or enhance its moral reputation so as to prospectively
preserve and enhance relationships with fourth parties who observe or learn
of its actions. Indeed, apparently irrational, hotheaded violence that yields a
reputation for extreme, excessive, reckless rage may be extremely effective
in persuading others not to transgress against the hothead (Frank, 1988;
Hirshleifer, 1987; Nesse, 2001; Schelling, 1960). Thus, the authority’s
moral motivation for violence may be the product of a RM between itself
and a subordinate, a metarelational model involving three social persons in
three relationships, or a more complex metarelational model involving four
or more persons in several present and future relationships.

High rank does not always confer authority to violently sustain and
enforce the AR relationship, but across cultures and historical epochs it
often does. In innumerable societies, political and religious authorities and
judiciaries have imposed corporal and capital punishments on traitors,
heretics, rebels, and criminals. “Crimes” are defined as violations of the
will and edict of the ruler, or as affronts to the gods themselves, and are
punished by imprisonment, torture, and execution. In all kinds of
premodern and early modern societies, it was legitimate and sometimes
common for chiefs to execute witches or sorcerers who were blamed for
deaths and other misfortunes (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1937).
The moral motivations for violence grow out of the dyadic relationship
between the perpetrator and the victim; but also, and sometimes even more
strongly, out of metarelational models linking the relationship between
perpetrator and victim to their relationships with third-party nobles,
ecclesiastics, and deities; and, in turn, they grow out of those first, second,
and third parties’ relationships with fourth parties such as the king, and to
an important degree with other subjects of the nobles, congregants of the
church, and worshippers of God. So, for example, a schoolmaster may hit a
pupil to sustain their relationship, but at the same time the schoolmaster is
hitting the pupil in obedience to the headmaster, who expects the
schoolmaster to properly control and motivate his pupils so that the
headmaster will satisfy the pupils’ parents and remain in the good graces of
the bishop.
One final caveat: even when a person is universally regarded as a
legitimate superior in a legitimate relationship, it is not always clear to the
superior, his subordinates, or others just when and to what extent he is using
violence to enforce the relationship as such – which all regard as morally
valid – and when he is merely taking advantage of the opportunity the role
affords him to use violence instrumentally to exploit his subordinates, or
simply to enjoy his coercive control over them, or even to sadistically make
them fear him. In other words, legitimate authorities can abuse their
superior position and exert amoral power. However, the empirical difficulty
in discriminating moral from amoral motives and assessing their relative
influence on action should not lead us to falsely assume that all violence is
amorally instrumental. Duly constituted authorities often dutifully mete out
proper violence to regulate their legitimate relationships with subordinates,
acting from deeply moral AR motives. Such morally motivated AR
violence is common, and should not be overlooked, discounted, or
disregarded. The available evidence suggests that morally motivated
violence is much more common than purely instrumental, amoral, coercive
violence.

1 Implementing another complex metarelational model, female disputants

and others who were not knights often selected champions to do battle for
them; sometimes both sides were represented by knightly champions.
5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and
solidarity
Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved – but only sidewise,
in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time. Finally
Tom said:
“I can lick you!”
“I’d like to see you try it.”
“Well, I can do it.”
“No you can’t, either.”
“Yes I can.”
“No you can’t.”
“I can.”
“You can’t.”
“Can!”
“Can’t!” … .
“Well, you said you’d do it – why don’t you do it?”
“By jingo! for two cents I will do it.”
The new boy took two broad coppers out of his pocket and held them
out with derision. Tom struck them to the ground. In an instant both
boys were rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like cats;
and for the space of a minute they tugged and tore at each other’s hair
and clothes, punched and scratched each other’s nose, and covered
themselves with dust and glory. Presently the confusion took form, and
through the fog of battle Tom appeared, seated astride the new boy,
and pounding him with his fists. “Holler ’nuff!” said he.
 The boy only struggled to free himself. He was crying – mainly from
rage.
“Holler ’nuff!” – and the pounding went on.
At last the stranger got out a smothered “’Nuff!” and Tom let him up
and said:
“Now that’ll learn you. Better look out who you’re fooling with next
time.”
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A number of widespread practices consist of culturally organized violence:

the relationship between the participants consists of violent acts directed at
each other. The violence itself is typically regulated by EM, while the result
created is AR of victors over vanquished. The first-person relationship
constituted by the violence also extends to the participants’ relationships
with second persons such as fans and admirers, as well as these second
persons’ relationships with third parties, such as supporters of the opponent.
That is, the allies, teammates, family, coaches, peers, or fans of the
combatants are communally identified with them, so that the combatant’s
victory is shared by them all.
For example, analyzing how feuding mediates honor around the
Mediterranean and in the Middle East, Black-Michaud (1975) found that
like a sports contest, equality is the default initial position of the
competitors, but the outcome of the confrontation determines their relative
AR ranking. “Feud constitutes not only a relationship between equals, but
also – paradoxically – a means of affirming authority in the absence of an
institutionalized power structure… The party in a feud which has inflicted
more deaths than it has received is ‘winning’” (Black-Michaud, 1975: 24–
5). He goes on to say that

the reason for indulging in feuding relations is not so much the desire
to inflict a loss on a given [Cyrenaican lineage] section, as to use this
victory to enhance individual and group prestige within the home
community and in the eyes of the world. The prestige thus acquired is
the foremost ingredient of leadership in a situation in which egalitarian
ideals and a lack of opportunity for economic differentiation prevail.
 (Black-Michaud, 1975: 26–7)

Whereas in the last chapter we observed that high status confers the right or
obligation to magisterial violence, in the cultural contexts we explore here,
heroic violence in warrior combat establishes high status. The moral arrows
go in opposite directions. Magisterial violence is the moral prerogative of
high rank, whereas victory in warrior combat raises rank. Warriors gain
respect, deference, admiration, and fame by skillfully, fearlessly inflicting
violence. A warrior’s rank is determined by how well he fights: the better
his violence and the more harm he inflicts, the higher he rises. Combatants
rise in AR status especially by defeating their opponents, but even deft and
determined ferocity in defeat earns others’ respect. Thus, violence
constitutes AR relationships that are vital to the participants, their allies,
and their admirers.
Fighting for respect and inclusive solidarity is crucial to Indo-European
warrior societies; Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and Hispanic societies;
premodern northern European and East Asian societies; pastoral societies in
many parts of the world; the US South; contemporary urban gangs; and
many other social systems. It can be traced back thousands of years.

Orthodox Hinduism, in fact, makes a special place for the warrior, the
(Kshatriya) caste; the famous Bhagavad-Gita’s central concern is to
justify a battle, even against kinsmen, as part of the ordained karma of
that particular station.
(Collins, 1974: 428)

Meanwhile, early Greeks, particularly aristocrats, were highly focused on

eris, conflict, or competition to establish and reinforce honor.

In the Homeric poems competition can be socially integrative because

it creates, or at least affirms, hierarchies of prowess and so of honor
and social standing: in war, when one hero kills his opponent, or when
one community defeats another, or when warriors on the same side
compete in doing service to the army as a whole; in speaking
persuasively in council; or in athletic games and other contests.
 (Thalmann, 2004: 366)

Likewise among British football hooligans today, men gain prestige by

proving themselves as fighters (Dunning et al., 1986).

Correlatively, there is a tendency for such males to enjoy fighting and

to regard openly aggressive behaviour in certain contexts as both
appropriate and desirable. They also view it as a means of gaining
status and prestige. As a result, their identities tend to be centered
around what are, relative to the standards that are dominant in Britain
today, openly aggressive forms of macho masculinity. Many males of
this kind also have a high emotional investment in the reputation of
their families, their communities and, where they are into the “football
action”, their “ends” or “crews” [hooligan gangs], as aggressive and
tough.
(Dunning et al., 1986: 176)

In these warrior cultures, subcultures, and practices, violent combat is not

merely morally tolerable – it is the ultimate virtue. The only thing more
noble than bravely defending oneself and one’s primary CS group is
fiercely attacking and defeating rivals. In these systems of social relations
the moral focus is on fearless bravado, skill, and victory in battle: the
courageous warrior is the paragon of virtue. In more regulated, generally
non-lethal forms of combat, this is the ethos of martial arts and contact
sports.
Defeating another man raises the winner’s status and lowers the loser’s:
combat establishes relative rank in an AR relationship. So men seek combat
to raise their AR status in the within-group hierarchy while raising their
group’s status in between-group hierarchies. More ignominious than defeat
is cowardice: refusal to fight or fleeing from battle not only lowers the
status of the coward, but makes him an outcast, an object of derision.
Bravely going into combat with courageous joy preserves the fighter’s CS
relationships with his peers, family, neighbors, and community: even if he
loses or is killed, he preserves his honor, and the honor of his family. For
the honor of each is the honor of all in the CS group: the patrilineal family,
the gang, the community, the army, or the nation. The man who backs down
not only lowers his own status, but he also dishonors his CS group,
lowering their status vis-à-vis other groups. Such cowardice disintegrates
the coward’s CS relationship with his primary honor group while it tends to
dissolve his honor group’s CS relationship with the larger community.
Teammates, coaches, family, friends, lovers, peers, fans, rivals,
opponents, enemies, and wise arbiters of morality approve of such violence,
and admire, praise, foster, and encourage it. Inflicting violence well wins
the praise of others – but it does more. It shapes the combatants’
relationships with their teammates, coaches, family, friends, lovers, peers,
fans, rivals, opponents, and enemies. Each combatant is morally motivated
not only to vanquish his opponent but also to enhance his relationships with
others. The more wonderfully violent he is, the more others esteem him,
identify with him, imitate him, wish to associate with him, and offer him
opportunities for fruitful new relationships. Victory or defeat determine the
relative rank of the combatants, but also determine the quality, intensity, and
number of their relationships with many others who care about their violent
performance. A warrior may fight vigorously not simply to defeat his
opponent, but to win the love of his lady, the envy of his peers, the gratitude
of those he rescues, or the approval of his lord.

Knighthood in medieval Europe

Medieval Europeans honored knights for their prowess in battle: the greater
the valor, the greater the honor (Brown, 2011; Kaeuper, 1999). A knight’s
honor depended on his demonstrating unflinching courage. But the essence
of honor was killing: “knighthood was defined by violence” (Brown, 2011:
258). The more and the worthier were the opponents he killed, the more
honorable the knight. By defeating other knights or by showing greater
prowess in killing, knights rose in status and won the “worshyppe” of all.
Medieval morality was based on honor won in battle, and there was no
greater merit than that of the supreme killer. Knights tirelessly competed for
honor. “In the end, fine feats of arms are their own justification, especially
when performed in the service of love” (Brown, 2011: 272). The more of
his own and especially others’ blood a knight spilt, the greater the honor. To
be covered in blood was heroic, and chivalric literature ceaselessly relishes
the gore (Kaeuper, 1999: 147–56).
 Clearly, the personal capacity to beat another man through the
accepted method of knightly battle – in fact, the actual physical
process of knocking another knight off his horse and, if required,
hacking him down to the point of submission or death – appears time
and again as something like the ultimate human quality; it operates in
men as a gift of God, it gives meaning to life, reveals the presence of
other desired qualities, wins the love of the most desirable women,
determines status and worth, and binds the best males together in a
fellowship of the elect.
(Kaeuper, 1999: 143)

Medieval lords organized tournaments to provide men the opportunity to

show off prowess in battle, quite often by killing opponents. In between
tournaments, knights commonly roamed about in search of glory, simply
challenging and fighting any strange knight they encountered. Defeated
knights often refused to ask for mercy, but if a knight survived an
encounter, he gave honor to the one who defeated him, just as martial arts
fighters do today. Honor also required loyalty to superiors and inferiors,
including keeping one’s word – another aspect of AR (Kaeuper, 1999: 185–
8). Furthermore, “when a king declared war, all manner of typical knightly
behavior – plundering, pillaging, capturing, ransoming, killing, and raping –
became ipso facto legitimate” (Brown, 2011: 282).
Although honor through victory is the AR core of knightly chivalry,
sometimes the blood mutually shed in combat also binds men in CS
relationships. After fighting fiercely for several hours, two knights might
each tear his own shirt to bind the other’s wounds, express their undying
love, kiss, swear to always stay together, and, later in life, ask to be buried
in the other’s tomb (Kaeuper, 1999: 215–19).

Gang and criminal cultures

Tio: It’s a myth that most of the violence is gang-related because a lot
of the violence is interpersonal conflict. Guys get into it for the most
pettiest reasons out here… So it’s all about respect and disrespect. Not
 being accepted in the overall society, a lot of people feel ostracized, so
what they do? They try to dominate their surroundings.
(The Interrupters, documentary film (James, 2011))

Contemporary youth street-gang members often orient to a morality of

violent confrontation, esteeming aggressive confrontation and resolute
refusal to be cowed by others’ threats (Horowitz and Schwartz, 1974). In
these cultures, maintaining one’s reputation and honor are crucial.

Tio: I really understand why it’s not easy for people to back down for
one reason. Because you’ve been taught all your life … in the
community where I grew up in, you know, like, you know you got to
stand up. No matter what happens. Death before dishonor.
(The Interrupters, documentary film (James, 2011))

Even when violence is gang-related, it is inherently interpersonal. Often the

battles are over gang status:

It all started in high school. They [the offender’s gang] were all jocks,
and we [the victim’s gang] were just ordinary people. They were all
older than us and were in the 12th grade [ages 17–18]. We were only
9th graders [ages 13–14]. What started it all was because we knocked
them down [in status] at school. We just took over, and they didn’t like
that. That’s what started it all. The day it happened, we were going to a
party. It was me, Patrick, Allen, Marc, and two other of my friends. We
were getting ready to leave; we were in front of Marc’s house. All of a
sudden the AOS, they just started shooting at us, killing two and
wounding one.
(Valdez et al., 2009: 297; see also Katz, 1988: 117ff.; Papachristos,
2009)

In addition to combat over the status of the gang vis-à-vis other gangs,
individuals also kill over personal status:
 We were in the neighborhood hanging out. T-Man was there, and then
this guy showed up and started talking shit, saying he was a big time
member of the adult prison gang. T-Man told him, “You’re nobody”
and shit, and then he kicked his ass in front of everybody. He told him
to split, and the man didn’t want to leave. He was with his girlfriend.
T-Man told him to leave again, but he didn’t want to. Then T-Man just
took out a gun, and he just shot him with a gauge [shotgun].
(Valdez et al., 2009: 298)

On the street, extreme, “excessive” responses to affronts to honor are

essential to preserving or elevating one’s AR status: Jacobs and Wright
(2006: 42) argue that ranking is based on accumulated reputation and that
“bringing someone down for what he did to you” raises your peers’ esteem
for you. Reflexively, some readers may feel that violence of this sort isn’t
moral at all, but the violence earns the praise, admiration, and respect of
gang members’ peers. Within these cultural contexts, violence in response
to affronts to honor and to elevate status is virtuous.
Gangs are unforgiving of conflicting CS loyalties that compete with the
CS solidarity of the gang. A gang member may be killed for his CS
disloyalty in choosing his relationship with his girlfriend over his gang
membership:

He was a homeboy, he wanted to get out. He told us that he wanted to

get out because of his chick [girlfriend]. We told him, all right, well,
we are going to have to roll you out because you don’t dis [disrespect]
a homeboy for a ho [girl]. We were all drunk, and he was dissing us for
just to go with his chick. So they kicked his ass. He was just laying
there, then they just cracked his head open with a rock. They killed
him.
(Valdez et al., 2009: 298)

Likewise, gangs maintain a CS identity with their “turf” and the violent
defense of their territory.
 INTERVIEWER: What kind of things does the gang have to do to defend
its turf?
GANG MEMBER: Kill. That’s all it is, kill.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your most recent turf defense, what
happened, a guy came in?
GANG MEMBER: A guy came in, he had the wrong colors on, he got to
move out. He got his head split open with a sledgehammer, he got
two ribs broken, he got his face torn up.

(Decker, 1996b: 259; see also Katz, 1988; Papachristos, 2009)

In interviews with 160 male gang members between 14 and 25 years old in
San Antonio, Texas, 82% said they had fired a gun in a gang-related fight
(Valdez et al., 2009). Many reported attacking members of other gangs who
trespassed in their gang’s territory, or being attacked for appearing in
another gang’s territory. In other words, protective CS motivates gang
members to shoot others who impinge on their territorial integrity.
Violent confrontation is still a cardinal virtue in the Mafia of Calabria,
Italy. Honor accrues to the man who is

capable of revenging by his own force any sort of offense done to his
own personality and capable equally of dealing out offense to an
enemy. Such behavior, be it defensive or aggressive, was not only
justified but encouraged and even idealized by the society … even if it
risked a frontal clash with the authority of the state… [The ideal was
that people would say of a man] ‘He was truly valiant and nobody
could face up to him.’ ‘Usually he was not violent but on the occasions
when he was forced to it, he stunned people and astonished his
enemies. It happened six or seven times and people still talk about it as
if it were a legend.’ … . The word ‘honorable’ denoted little more than
an affirmation of superior force… An honorific act was, in the last
analysis, an extremely successful act of aggression, and it made no
difference if it was in response to a previous act or was an autonomous
initiative of the aggressor… All means were good … robbery with
violence, devastation, kidnapping and slaughter. Aggression became
the accredited form of action and the booty the most immediate proof
of victorious aggression… Taking a life, especially killing a fearful
 enemy, was honorific in the highest degree. ‘X is an exceptional man;
he “has” five killings.’ ‘Y is a man of respect; he has “stubbed out”
four Christians.’ These sort of phrases recur in mafia conversation.
Among the mafiosi of the Plain of Gioia Tauro the act of homicide, if
carried out in a competition for supremacy of any sort whatever,
indicated (and still does, for these attitudes persist in the flourishing
mafia of today) courage and the capacity to impose oneself as a man. It
brought an automatic opening of a line of credit for the killer. The
more awesome and potent the victim, the more worthy and meritorious
the killer… The honorific dimension of murder, as an expression of the
arrogance and capacity for revenge of the killer, wrapped in an aureole
of glory every act of homicide.
(Arlachi, 1983: 111–13)

Fighting among and alongside the gods

Gods of the earliest civilizations, as well as those of smaller-scale societies,
often fought, wounded, dismembered, raped, and killed each other (Trigger,
2003: 437). In Norse religion, the cosmos begins with the killing of the
proto-giant Ymir, continues with the battles between the gods and the frost-
giants, and ends with the final battle of Ragnarök, in which the gods and
men will fight together against the frost giants (Dumézil, 1959; Lindow,
2002). Odin himself gave one eye for the magical mead that gave him all
wisdom; he also hanged himself from the World Tree and was pierced by a
spear, giving him further wisdom. Norse human male fame and status were
based on prowess in raiding and fighting. Men who fell in battle, killed
themselves rather than surrender, or hanged themselves at home were
thereby eligible to become the einherjar selected by Odin to feast forever
with the great gods in Valhöll (Batey et al., 1994). The greatest of the
einherjar hoped to sit at Odin’s own table and eat with him. In Valhöll the
einherjar, paragons of Norse society, perpetually fight.

All the einherjar in Odin’s fields

Hack each other each day.
They choose slaughter and ride from the field
Later sit reconciled together.
(Vafthrúdnismál 41, quoted in Lindow, 2002: 104)
What would be more glorious than an eternity of hacking and slaughter?
Moreover, the einherjar will join the gods in the final battle of Ragnarök. In
some Norse myths the goddess Freyja divides fallen warriors with Odin;
those she selects join her in Fólkvangr, where they, too, fight every day in
the eternal combat called hjadningavíg and feast every night until the end of
time.

Sports
Combat for status and solidarity constitutes AR and CS relationships. At the
same time, such combat is often governed by EM frameworks such that the
combat is only legitimate and the outcome only valid if the combatants are
evenly matched, have equal opportunities, and face the same constraints.
This is especially true of, and defines, what we call sports. In many cultures
throughout history, people have fought under controlled EM rules (Ingle,
2004). Today, many people engage in or are fans of boxing, martial arts, ice
hockey, football, rugby, and lacrosse. Playing these games means hitting
and hurting opponents, who in turn hit and hurt you. The harder you hit, the
better you do and the more admired you are by teammates, opponents,
coaches, and fans. So long as the opponents in martial arts and contact
sports are evenly matched according to the rules of the sport, hurting others
is not only condoned – it’s praised, admired, and respected.
People who do martial arts and contact sports usually are not
“aggressive” in other contexts, but such sports demand violence in the ring
or on the field. For example, the sports columnist and writer Buzz Bissinger
(2011) wrote that if football rules are changed to reduce violence, “It will
no longer be football.” Football is violence. Players say, “[I]t’s like a way to
test yourself against someone else and see what you have to get better
with.” Violence is not an unfortunate side effect, it’s the point. Players say,
“I kinda like it,” “I love the feeling,” “[I]t feels good, like a train wreck,”
and “[I]t makes you play harder” (Quebedeaux, 2012).

Q:How do you view or feel when tackling an opponent?

A: I feel really good. It’s an adrenaline, dominance thing. You’re
completely trying to dominate someone else’s will by hurting
them and crushing their spirit.
 Q: What are your intentions when hitting an opponent?
A: Trying to get the ball … injure him, take him out of the game.
Demolish him. Make him fumble … make a big play.
Another football player:
Q: How do you view or feel when tackling/hitting/etc. an opponent?
A: It is so much fun, blind siding is the best, knocking someone on
their ass. It feels good and bad at the same time.
Q: What are your intentions when hitting an opponent?
A: It’s bad to say, but it’s in everyone’s head, take them out of the
game.
Q: What do you believe your opponents intentions are?
A: Hahaha, the same as mine.
Q: Do players, to your knowledge, ever intentionally hurt/injure
another player? Why or why not?
A: Yes; all the time. It is because of the coach most of the time. They
tell you to play fair, but, if you can, hurt someone so they can’t
play the best game.

(Quebedeaux, 2012)

In short, for football players, coaches, and fans, legal violence is essential to
constituting AR relationships between opponents and competing teams. At
the same time, good violence is a vital contribution to the team, cementing
your place in the CS relationship that is the team and the school or the
community of fans. In contact sports and martial arts, good violence is
exalted – it makes you a winner and a hero. In ice hockey and baseball, too,
violence – including CS fighting to display team solidarity – is universally
understood to be intrinsic to the morality of the game (Bernstein, 2006,
2008; Munger, 2013: 21, 31ff.). For example, if a professional pitcher hits a
batter, the pitcher on the batter’s team selects a player of equal talent and
stature to hit in EM retaliation. A professional ice-hockey or baseball player
who failed to join a fight would lose honor and, indeed, “if you stayed in
the dugout you would be shunned … that would be an outrage”; in baseball,
fighting is “a way of preventing people from showing you up, from
disrespecting you – and to ensure that the other team doesn’t get to harm
your best players” (Munger, 2013: 21, 31ff.). The specific role of
professional ice-hockey “enforcers” is to intimidate opponents, punish those
who hurt your teammates, and humiliate opponents to damage their honor
(Bernstein, 2006; Munger, 2013). Violence is intrinsic to the contests of
violence that comprise contact sports and martial arts – and modern
Western sports are mild versions of the combat of earlier times in the US
Old West, and of many other cultures. There were many injuries in
American Indian lacrosse, in public faction fights for fun in nineteenth-
century Ireland, in organized fights among groups of frontier American
loggers, in Renaissance Venetian bridge fights, and in early twentieth-
century bare-knuckle boxing, to name just a few (Ingle, 2004). Violence
was considered essential and intrinsic to these practices.
In boxing, the goal is to knock down or knock out the opponent; in other
martial arts, the goal is to cause the opponent so much pain that he taps out,
conceding defeat. The winner gains status over the loser, but so long as the
loser fights hard, he is still respected. In fact, fighters respect opponents
who can and do hurt them, and also respect them for taking the pain and
carrying on.

Fighting among youths

Beyond organized sports, in many cultures it is accepted practice that “boys
will be boys,” so there is a long history of fighting for dominance in the
streets and on the playground. And boys being boys, teachers and parents
have “had to” whip them to instill obedience to their authority – where
every failure to learn or to remember one’s chores was construed as
disobedience. John Muir (2009) describes boyhood in Scotland where boys
were whipped for every failure, and it was natural and necessary for boys to
establish their relative superiority to each other by fighting. Every new boy
had to fight his way to whatever position he could reach.

All these various thrashings, however, were admirably influential in

developing not only memory but fortitude as well. For if we did not
endure our school punishments and fighting pains without flinching
and making faces, we were mocked on the playground, and public
opinion on a Scotch playground was a powerful agent in controlling
behavior; therefore we at length managed to keep our features in
smooth repose while enduring pain that would try anybody but an
American Indian. Far from feeling that we were called on to endure
 too much pain, one of our playground games was thrashing each other
with whips about two feet long made from the tough, wiry stems of a
species of polygonum fastened together in a stiff, firm braid. One of us
handing two of these whips to a companion to take his choice, we
stood up close together and thrashed each other on the legs until one
succumbed to the intolerable pain and thus lost the game.
(Muir, 2009: 36–7)

In the United States and Europe today, many studies show that bullying
often involves an admired, high-status adolescent egging others on to
combine together against the victim; especially if the others feel that their
inclusion in the group is at risk, they may be motivated to bully the victim
to ensure their own continued inclusion (Garandeau and Cillessen, 2006).
Furthermore, bullying an outsider enhances the cohesion and attitudinal
homogeneity of the group. People defer to the leader because they perceive
that others admire him. Within the group, bullying lower-status members
enhances the AR position of the bullies; the target may be someone the
leader envies, or regards as a competitor for his status position.
Even among girls, physical fighting for reputation may occur. Campbell
(1982) found that British working-class, 16-year-old girls often fought over
insults to them, or to relatives or friends. Many of the insults that provoked
fights were pejorative attributions about sexual behavior (especially
promiscuity) or direct sexual curses; others were derogatory remarks about
intelligence or delinquency, or concerned competition or jealously about
boyfriends or threats to property, or were simply taunts challenging to a
fight. Girls fought about what an informant called “pride” or, as the author
puts it, “loss of face.” Fighting, even losing, earned a girl “some level of
status” because it demonstrated courageous determination to uphold her
self-respect.

Metarelational aspects of fighting for respect and

solidarity
In these contests of violence, the social relationships that warriors,
sportsmen, and boys create and conduct through violence are not just the
relationships between the violent actors themselves. Combative violence
sustains and enhances the combatants’ relationships with their lovers, their
teammates, and their fans. The combatants are motived by loyalty and love
of glory. To fight well and especially to be victorious is to attract and excite
lovers, to be admired and envied by peers, and to evoke the gratitude of
teammates and the pride of fans. The violent victor is honored by all. To fall
to defeat, to fight poorly, and, most shamefully, to show cowardice is to
disgrace oneself, degrading the coward’s relationships with everyone.
Thus, the relationship between the combatants has moral implications for
the respective combatants’ relationships with others. For example, the
warrior is obligated to valiantly defend his fellow warriors and to achieve
victory for their sake: his relationships with his fellows depend on his
performance in battle against the enemy. He is motivated to defeat his
opponent not only to achieve superiority over him but also to honor his
loyalty to his fellow warriors and his community. His CS and AR
relationships with many others morally entail that he do his utmost to
vanquish his opponent: ardent violence against his opponent is a moral duty
to his fellows. If he fails to achieve victory, he will have failed in his duty to
his family and his community. The social systems of chivalry, honor, and
sportsmanship are all fundamentally metarelational because all of the
combatants’ relationships impel and require him to engage in violence
against his opponents. Conversely, his victory or defeat, his courage or
cowardice, is morally consequential for all of his relationships with those
for whom he is fighting: his relationships with these third parties will be
reinforced or stressed by his victory and valor or disgrace in battle.
Extending beyond that, his victory and valor or disgrace will be shared by
his team, his family, his community: their moral relationships with the
team, the family, and the community of his opponent depend on how he and
his opponent fight, and bear their pain and injuries.
These metarelational motives are moral in both the subjective and
configurational sense. First, the combatants and their reference group
subjectively experience violence as an obligation they must and should
perform, whose excellent performance creates, sustains, and enhances, or
jeopardizes, their relationships with their opponents, and with third parties.
For example, a coach ought to respect and promote to starter a player who
impressively excels in violence – the player, the coach, and observers feel
that the player deserves the starting position. Everyone feels that the
opponents in these contests of violence should be effectively and elegantly
violent. Second, the motives are metarelational in the configurational sense
that they are based on the moral implications of the quality of the violence
between combatants for their relationships with others, and for the others’
relationships with certain partners. Violence in these combative practices
constitutes and regulates the metarelational models in which it occurs.
Configurationally, for example, teammates are motivated to praise and
admire the hero of the game, while the hero’s girlfriend may feel she should
have sex with him. In turn, the teammates and fans of the valorously violent
hero can lord it over the team and fans he defeated, while the hero’s
girlfriend becomes the envied leader of her clique. The teammates, fans,
and girlfriend are entitled to their newly enhanced status: their associates
owe them respect for the hero’s valorous violence, because of their
relationship with him in conjunction with his violent triumph over their
opponents.

In heroic combat, excellence in violence is the legitimate, laudable virtue

that people resolutely strive to perfect. Disciplined, diligent dedication;
patient, persistent practice; and arduous, assiduous sedulity are essential to
perfect the valiant virtuosity of violence necessary for victory – and, failing
that, for respectably valorous defeat. In these practices, people feel they
should be violent: they intend to hurt their opponents, whom they
understand to be fully human persons morally entitled to try to hurt them in
turn. Indeed, the more skilled and determined a fighter’s opponents are to
inflict harm, the more the fighter respects and admires them. Everyone in
the subculture of heroic combat makes the same judgment: it is virtuous to
harm opponents in the prescribed manner, and merit accrues to the fighter
who harms fiercely and courageously. The warrior must be ferocious, and
the more ferocious, the more heroic. The warrior must also bravely accept
the moral entitlement of his opponent to hurt him, stoically accepting
bruises, wounds, or death without recrimination. These are practices in
which it is good to be violent.
All of this combat for respect and solidarity is subjectively moral:
participants and observers in their cultural or subcultural reference groups
feel that they should do it, indeed that they must do it. The combatants –
along with those who sustain a CS identification with them – feel shame if
the combatants fail to do their utmost to inflict violence, or if they shy away
from combat. In other words, the phenomenological experience is moral: in
these practices, a person feels that he simply must be violent, whatever the
pain, risks, and costs, and regardless of whether he personally wants to be
violent. Inflicting violence is felt to be a duty.
This combative “warrior” violence is also moral in the functional
constitutive sense we established when we characterized morality as the
regulation of social relationships (Rai and Fiske, 2011). The violence
creates AR and CS relationships: victory and defeat rank combatants and
their respective CS groups as superior and inferior. At the same time, these
combative practices consist of violence: the EM performance of the activity
is violence. That is, while the violence functions to create and enhance the
CS and AR relationships, the activity of combat consists of the reciprocal
exchange of harm, in which each side ardently aims to match the violence it
receives by returning violence in equal measure – or, if possible,
overmatching the violence it receives by inflicting greater violence.
Violence is what a person does – what he has to do – if he is a warrior, a
knight, a man of honor, a macho Crip or Blood (US gang member), a boxer
or an ice-hockey player, or even a boy on the playground in nineteenth-
century Missouri or early twentieth-century Scotland. To be a true and good
knight or mixed martial arts fighter is to be violent in the prescribed
manner. In violent and contact sports, the combatants are under the AR
control of a referee who enforces the EM rules that control admissible
violence. Even when participants break the formal rules of combat and
contact sports, or when spectators do violence, they are responding to what
they perceive as injustice; the players or fans feel they have been wronged,
so they retaliate (Mark et al., 1983).
A person may attempt to enhance his position in any relationship by
cheating – by covertly violating the moral framework of the relationship,
while appearing to abide by it or, in certain cases, flagrantly committing a
foul he thinks he can get away with. This is particularly salient in AR
relationships, where, for example, a warrior or athlete may use “dirty”
(transgressive) tactics in order to defeat an opponent. When a combatant
makes a dirty violent move in order to gain status, his motive is relational
but not moral if the combatant is aware that what he is doing violates the
moral framework of the relationship. Violent breaches of the rules of
combat are just outside the scope of our theory – they are one kind of
violence that our theory only dimly and indirectly illuminates. But, as we
will discuss later, perpetrators may be motivated to breach the explicit,
technical rules of the immediate event in order to morally regulate
relationships of greater scope.
 6 Honor and shame
In diverse cultures around the Mediterranean basin and east though Arabia,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan, there are variants of the honor and shame
complex (Schneider, 1971). In the traditional Mediterranean, honor is
synonymous with never backing down when threatened, forcing others to
back down by threatening violence, avenging insults and homicides, and, to
a somewhat lesser degree, killing rather than being killed. Honor and
dishonor are shared among brothers, fathers, and sons, who are collectively
responsible for avenging the death of any of them, and who are collectively
liable to be killed in revenge for a homicide any of them have committed
(Black-Michaud, 1975: 54). As Pitt-Rivers (1966a) points out, “The ultimate
vindication of honor lies in physical violence” (p. 29), and in the extreme
case, the final proof of superiority is that the individual is able to take the life
of another (Marvin, 1986: 125).
Variants of this complex are salient in many other cultures with roots in
this region, including much of Latin America and many societies strongly
oriented to Roman Catholicism or Islam. While there are many differences
and peculiarities of particular cultures, a number of common elements co-
occur (or co-occurred) in most of the traditional cultures of this region;
indeed, all of the following features occur together in many Mediterranean
cultures and many cultures elsewhere that have been historically influenced
by this region. These elements include:

patrilineal kinship units (often very small) characterized by strong CS

bonds;
moral obligations largely limited to kin, affines, compadres, patrons,
clients, and guests, along with distrust of all others;
atomistic male individual autonomy and freedom from – indeed,
defiance of – any constraints imposed by others except elder kinsmen;
an orientation toward reputation, insults, slander, and gossip: a group’s
honor or shame is largely a function of how the community perceives
the group – especially what other people say in public;1
the duty to provide hospitality, along with special bonds resulting from
the host–guest relationship; this ranges from “treating” others to drinks
in cafes to extravagant feasting and other kinds of generosity or
ostentatious gift giving; in some regions people receive guests in
communal men’s guest houses;
in many societies, the hosts’ obligation to harbor and protect suppliants
– even enemies – who are incorporated into the hosts’ collective honor
as long as they remain in the host’s sanctuary;
augmentation of the honorific prestige of the hosts, with some
diminution of the honorific prestige of dependent guests;
concern about the vulnerability of women, their sexual desire, and the
shamefulness of their sexuality, so that it is often required that women
be veiled, secluded, subjected to clitoridectomy or infibulation, or all of
these;2
strong requirement of premarital virginity and, especially, the
abstinence of women from sexual relations outside marriage, or any
imputation of such;
the collective dishonor to the men in the kin groups (natal or marital or
both, including father, brothers, sons, fiancé, or husband) of any woman
who violates this norm, or any woman who is reputed to have done so,
or any woman whose chastity is impugned without retaliation; typically,
once a woman is married the loss of honor focuses on the husband
north of the Mediterranean, while south and east of the Mediterranean
her purity continues to be the primary responsibility of her brothers and
father;3
in many instances, a loss of honor for the female kin of a dishonored
woman;
in some cultures (especially in the Arab and Muslim world) the ideal
that a woman’s brothers or father should kill their sister and her
paramour if she violates this norm (even if she is raped) in order to
partially restore their honor; in many cultures, abortion, infanticide, or
putting out to adoption in the event of non-marital pregnancy;
the shame of men who are dishonored and their vulnerability to gossip,
ridicule, and ostracism from all sorts of crucial social interaction,
especially the sharing of food and drink;
the extreme insult to the honor of a man that occurs when another man
impugns the virtue of his mother, his sister, or wife;
 a tendency toward acceptance of male pre- and extramarital sexual
relations, often extending to a certain admiration of sexual advances
toward women and sometimes approval of men who dishonor other
men by seducing their women.4

Many of these features appear in Andalusia (Spain) (Gilmore, 1987; Pitt-

Rivers, 1966a, 1977: 77–80, 105, 165, and passim; see also Press, 1979 for
the comparable urban norms); in Aragon (Spain) (Lison-Tolosana, 1983); in
Naples, Italy (Parsons, 1969: cf. Giovannini, 1981 on Sicily);5 among the
Sarakatsani shepherds of northwestern Greece (Campbell, 1964, 1966); in
central Greece (Friedl, 1962: 87, 104–5); among Greeks in the mountains of
Cyprus (Pitt-Rivers, 1966b); in Crete (Herzfeld, 1985); in Turkey (Delaney,
1987; Meeker, 1976); in northeastern Jordan (Antoun, 1968); among
Palestinian Arabs (Canaan, 1931; Cohen, 1965; Ginat, 1982: 177–85; 223–
4); among Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins of the western Desert of Egypt (Abu-
Lughod, 1986; Zeid, 1966, cf. Patai, 1971: 121); and among the Kbyles of
Algeria (Bourdieu, 1966; see “Outline” and Algerians), the Iqar’iyen
Berbers of Morocco (Jamous, 1981), and many other societies in this region
(see Antoun, 1968; Bates and Rassam, 1983: 213–18, 244; Patai, 1971: 19,
79, 125, 287, 299). A very similar constellation of norms and practices is
salient in Moslem and Hindu (including Sikh) communities across northern
South Asia and elsewhere (e.g., Jeffrey, 1979, especially pp. 29, 99–100;
Keifer, 1991; Lindholm, 1982; for an overview, see Mandelbaum, 1988 and
references in Jeffrey, 1979: 35–6, notes 30–1). With some modifications,
most of the essential features of this constellation were also present in the
American South (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996; Wyatt-Brown, 1982, see
especially pp. 34, 44, 50–4, 90, 112, 295, 331, 334, 337–9, 350, 368–9, 371,
373). Many of these features also occur in Latin America and in Latino
gangs in the United States, as well as in other societies. (For a good review
of honor-motivated violence in modern Western cultures, see Copes et al.,
2013.)
Honor was already at the core of Arab society before the sixth century
(Farès, 1932). All of the essential elements were present. Honor was an
attribute of a group, defined in terms of the vigorous pursuit of vengeance
against anyone who injured or insulted a man of the group, or who
fornicated with or impugned the virtue of its women. The father, brothers,
and sons of a woman were dishonored by violations of her chastity, by her
abduction, or by imputations of inchastity; they would kill the seducer,
rapist, or abductor, along with their own kinswoman (Farès, 1932: 76–81,
147). The kinsmen of a dishonored woman took collective action to avenge
themselves, or had to go into exile to hide their shame.
All of the features on our list are also prominent in a number of Moslem
societies outside the Mediterranean region, including, for example, in the
Hindu Kush of northern Pakistan, among the Swat Pukhtun (Pathan)
(Lindholm, 1982) and the nearby Kohistani (Keifer, 1991). Swat Pukhtun are
aggressively atomistic; even brothers, fathers, and sons are mutually
antagonistic. They violently defend the honor of their women, whom they
keep in strict purdah; men sometimes kill a wife who commits adultery, and
do not hesitate to attack any man who dishonors them. The honor of a group
of agnates is collective, and all assume full and equal responsibility for
violently avenging any dishonor to any of them, whether it results from
insult, injury, or homicide, or fornication or adultery with a wife, sister, or
mother (Barth, 1965: 81–6, 137).
Very similar complexes of honor and shame exist or have existed in many
other cultures without historical connections to this region. For example,
honor based on the moral commitment to fight anyone who insulted and
shamed a person or his dependants was crucial in ancient China (Lewis,
1990: 36–43). During the Warring-States period,

honor was supremely important to the aristocracy and … military

prowess was absolutely central to the idea of honor. Warfare was one of
the two great services of the state, and it was devoted to winning glory
for the self and the lineage through victory in battle. In addition, a
man’s honor could be guaranteed in daily life only if he were ready to
fight and conquer whoever slighted him. As the Mozi argued … men
demonstrated that they treasured honor and duty by fighting to the
death over a single insulting word, so the only honorable man was the
warrior.
(Lewis, 1990: 42)

Guest–host relationship
This culture area constellation can be seen as representing a very diffused
and extended form of CS among all men in the region of potential social
interaction (excluding some outsider categories, such as musicians). All such
men are potential hosts and guests, and any non-aggressive, sociable
interaction between men requires selfless generosity. Participation in this
loose and fluid network of weak CS relationships is contingent on honor –
only honorable men are included. Honor is constituted and augmented by the
many factors listed above, but the sine qua non of honor is the sexual purity
of the women associated with the basic kin group. A man cannot participate
in society if the purity of his mother, sisters, wife, and daughters is
impugned or in doubt.
In these communities the world at large is a Hobbesian war of all against
all. But in cafes, men’s houses, churches, or mosques, all men in a
community relate to each other communally, sharing food, drinks, tobacco,
and religious brotherhood. This CS relationship is most obligatory and
intense when hosts receive guests. Protection of the home is crucial to men’s
autonomous, assertive control; men’s self-identity and social status are
constituted by the inviolability of their home, their women, and their
livestock. By the same token, when a stranger/guest comes into his host’s
domain, the host incorporates the guest into his communal identity by
sharing food with him. These are complementary aspects of the same, highly
marked boundary: the boundary must be protected at all costs, but, once
inside, the other enters into the CS relationship of those who belong there.
Men are like elementary particles that electrically repel each other with great
force, unless they approach so closely that a still stronger nuclear force –
operating at much closer range – bonds them together even more tightly.
Indeed, Herzfeld (1987) suggests that the analytic term “honor” should be
replaced by the term “hospitality.”

Honor killing
Beyond restoring a family’s honor by fighting anyone who impugns the
chastity of a woman in the family, and killing anyone who fornicates with
her, in many honor cultures men may, should, or must kill the woman herself
if she has been tainted in any way. It is felt to be unfortunate and grievously
difficult to have to do this, but in some honor cultures it is felt to be morally
necessary. Nothing else fully and adequately purifies the family honor. A
woman who has had sexual relations outside marriage, has eloped, has been
alone with a man, or has been raped is irretrievably shamed – and so long as
she is alive her existence is a disgrace that deeply dishonors her parents,
siblings and cousins, or husband. Even if she did everything in her power to
resist being alone with another man, and even if she believably insists that
she has not been touched, the mere fact that her men failed to protect her,
that she could have been sexually impugned, that at any time in any way
there was no barrier between her and other men, means that she is
irretrievably shamed (Gilmore, 1967; Herzfeld, 1980; Mandelbaum, 1988).
There are no matters of degree in this: she is shamed, and the family
dishonored so long as she lives.
Consider the commensal bonds among all men in a community of
Sarakatsani shepherds in the western Greek mountains, who are an excellent
example of the Mediterranean honor complex (Campbell, 1964). There are
very strong CS bonds of solidarity among brothers and between father and
sons in a stani, or family (e.g., p. 319). Adult men in the stani make
decisions by unanimous consensus, hold their property in common, and
stand ready to support and defend each other, right or wrong. Among the
men of the stani, and to a lesser degree among other close kinsmen, there is
trust, confidence, and altruistic concern about each other’s welfare (p. 38).
The honor of the stani depends absolutely on their daughters, sisters,
mothers, and wives: if any woman has sexual relations outside marriage, the
stani is dishonored, and her father, brother, or husband must kill her, and
then her lover (pp. 169, 199–201, 303). “The worst insult that can be aimed
at a man is to use the name of his sister, or mother, in an unpleasant sexual
context” (p. 271), and “there is no more certain way of defiling the honour of
another family than by seducing one of its women” (p. 270). Sarakatsani
men spend their free time in coffee shops, buying rounds of drinks for each
other. A man without honor is ashamed to appear there, and no one is likely
to offer him a drink if he does appear (Campbell, 1964: 273, 284, 292, 296).
Only the woman’s death can restore the family honor, so some male in the
family must kill her. It is a fundamental moral necessity.

Honor violence in the United States

In early modern Europe and America, a variant of the honor-shame complex
gave rise to dueling. To avenge an insult against himself or a dependant, a
gentleman challenged the offender to a duel whose structure was very
precisely balanced EM. Andrew Jackson fought numerous duels and was
later elected president (Buell, 1904: 164). However, dueling was not a
simple dyadic interaction; duelists were restoring or sustaining their honor in
the eyes of their peers, the honor of their seconds was at stake as well, and
duels were performed for, and with various levels of involvement of, the
immediate and indirect audiences (Falk, 2004). Alexander Hamilton
abhorred dueling but he nonetheless accepted Aaron Burr’s challenge
because he knew that his capacity as a statesman would be diminished were
he to refuse (Lodge, 1904: 474). He was killed in the duel.
Today, still, some contemporary white, working-class Southern men in
small cities subscribe to a code that condones and requires violence to
maintain honor and preserve respect (Copes et al., 2013). There, as a matter
of principle, a man who is insulted or disrespected should physically attack
his opponent – or else he’s not really a man. While there are strict EM limits
to honorable fighting and a fighter should give quarter as soon as he has
clearly won, even breaking an opponent’s jaw or knocking out his teeth
“may lead to local acclaim” (Copes et al., 2013: 28). Men are proud of
fighting to defend their character – it is admirable to do so. Conversely, it is
shameful not to fight when a man or those he should protect are
disrespected. Explained one man, if he failed to fight when he should have
stood up for himself,

I’d feel guilty. I’d feel weak. I’d feel like I let myself down. I’d feel like
I let anybody else that was involved down. I’d feel like the other person
involved got the upper hand. I’d feel like I lost something. And most of
all I wouldn’t feel like a man.
(Copes et al., 2013: 12, quoting informant “Kevin”)

Fights resolve the moral status of a conflict

that’s how you figure out dominance and who’s right and who’s wrong.
(Copes et al., 2013: 15, quoting informant “Fred”)
In their book, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South
(1996), Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen detailed how rates of homicide and
violent crime are much higher in the southern states than in the northern
states, but that this discrepancy in rates of violence is particularly
pronounced for violence that occurs in response to insults to reputation and
threats to property. When questioned, southern men were more likely to
approve of violent retaliation in response to insults than northerners, and
southern women were more likely to claim that boyfriends and husbands
have a moral duty to use force to avenge an insult directed toward a
girlfriend or wife. In a famous set of experiments, Nisbett and Cohen invited
male students from northern and southern states to their lab at the University
of Michigan. Unbeknownst to the students, the key part of the experiment
actually took place in the narrow hallway outside the lab. In each
experiment, students were physically bumped shoulder to shoulder and
called an “asshole” by someone whom they thought was a stranger, but who
was actually an assistant to the researchers. Nisbett and Cohen were
interested in how the bump and insult would affect the subsequent behavior
of the northern and southern students.
What they found was that when compared to a control group of southern
students who were not bumped and insulted, southern students who were
bumped and insulted were more likely to assume that hypothetical
confrontations would end violently, and they were more dominant in their
interpersonal behavior during interviews with experimenters. Even more
interestingly, the experimenters measured cortisol and testosterone from the
participants’ saliva following the bump and insult. They found that southern
students who had been bumped and insulted showed a significant increase in
their levels of cortisol and testosterone compared to the control group of
southern students. In a final version of the experiment, following the initial
bump and insult, a new, larger confederate walked down the narrow hallway
toward the students. In what was essentially a game of “chicken,” the
southern students who had been previously bumped and insulted waited
longer before eventually getting out of the way than southern participants
who had not been bumped and insulted. No such differences were found
among northern students on any of the measures. The authors concluded that
honor norms are more prevalent in the south and may explain some of the
differences in rates of violence between the two regions.
Honor among thieves
In other cultures, violence is recognized as a morally valid way to enforce
commitments, or to establish status. This is characteristic of criminal
cultures, in particular, which share with Mediterranean honor cultures and
many pastoralist societies the necessity for self-help. There is no chief or
government third party to regulate relationships; the participants themselves
must do so. A British man serving a 26-year prison sentence, having written
an academic thesis on violence, describes how criminals, unable to turn to
authorities to enforce their commitments to criminal conspiracies, adopt a
strict moral principle of not “informing” on each other and, more generally,
not cooperating with law-enforcement personnel – a moral principle that
becomes a core of their identity. This also means that they themselves must
enforce the commitments they make to each other.

Criminals cannot draw on the facilities of the state to settle disputes

with their own kind, but must settle their differences themselves. They
can involve such sanctions as gossip, ridicule, contempt, ostracism,
monetary penalties and so for forth; but also in the criminal’s armory is
violence. He lives in a culture in which violence is a legitimate and
proper and manly sanction to invoke. This follows from the pattern of
relations in which he is enmeshed, the sort of bonds that typically bind
him to other criminals, and the kinds of sanction that necessarily
underpin the criminal’s morality.
(McVicar, 1982: 208; italics in original)

How the metarelational honor model organized the

violence of the Trojan War
The moral motivation for violence to preserve and enhance honor is a core
element in the plot of the Iliad, indicating that this metarelational
configuration was already salient 2,700 years ago. It is well worth a close
examination of the moral motives for violence that Homer recounts, because
the Iliad illustrates how fundamental and how intense these motives were in
the society he depicts, and how complex were the metarelational models that
generated moral violence. The Trojan Chryses, priest of Apollo, prays to
Apollo to get his daughter Chryseis back from Agamemnon, who has
enslaved her as a concubine. So Apollo causes a plague to descend on the
Greeks, which leads the other Greeks to persuade Agamemnon to release
Chryseis. Then Agamemnon compensates himself for his loss of Chryseis by
taking Achilles’ concubine Briseis. This offends Achilles’ honor (τιμη), so
he withdraws from the battle and refuses all offers of compensation and, for
some time, any reconciliation – until the Greeks are near defeat (Friedrich,
1977; Yamagata, 1994: 242). Friedrich shows that, like later societies in this
culture area, ancient Greek honor focused on the sexual purity of women,
such that a loss of honor was experienced by the woman’s consort as
shameful, defiling, polluting. The ancient Greek concept of honor was
closely linked to the sacred duty of hospitality and the enduring CS bond of
guest-friendship, xenia (ξενιη), created when host and guest exchanged gifts
and vows of mutual loyalty. This pair of norms forms the framework of the
Iliad, where the Trojan War has resulted from the terrible affront that Paris
commits against the honor of Menelaus and the Spartans when Paris violates
their hospitality by abducting Helen; this is ultimately avenged when the
Greeks kill the Trojan men and rape their women (Yamagata, 1994: 12, 21).
King Menelaus gave hospitality to Paris; they formed the host–guest bond
of xenia. But Paris formed a liaison with Helen and took her back to Troy.
This doubly dishonored Menelaus, since not only had his wife been in
contact with a man but also that man was his xenos; Menelaus was then
bound to avenge himself by killing Paris (Figure 6.1). The honor of a man
and his brother are one, so King Agamemnon must support Menelaus,
joining him in vengeance against Paris. So Agamemnon invoked his
patronage and other relationships to persuade his allies to join his army.
Likewise, the honor of Paris’ father Priam, king of Troy, depends on Priam’s
supporting his son, as does the honor of Priam’s other son (Paris’ half-
brother), Hector. Their allies are honor bound to fight against Menelaus,
Agamemnon, and their allies. Figure 6.2 diagrams this metarelational
configuration, for graphical simplicity leaving out Achilles and the other
allies of both sides and depicting Hector but not Priam.
Figure 6.1: The core metarelational configuration at the root of the Trojan
War

Figure 6.2: The metarelational model connecting the key relationships in

the Trojan War (leaving out relationships with Achilles)
 The moral sentiments, emotions, motives, and actions of the characters in
the Iliad – or of anyone involved in an honor metarelationship – are oriented
to a wider configuration, extending beyond the principals. We cannot
comprehend their understanding of the situation, their motives, or their aims
unless we take into account the implications of the relationships among the
principals for their relationships with everyone else in their society. As we
described in the preceding pages, crucial CS relationships consisting of
commensal conviviality and hospitality are a function of the participants’
honor. People of honor are welcome to join in feasts, and everyone will
accept their invitations. People of honor are sought after as hosts and warmly
received as visitors, where again they share food and drink. A dishonored
person is avoided, excluded, reviled, and mocked – that is, shame means the
loss of all CS relationships. No one will marry or ally themselves with
dishonored families. In addition, dishonor greatly lowers status in AR
relationships; a disgraced person is degraded. So the sentiments, emotions,
motives, and actions of the principals in the Iliad encompass the implications
of their relationships with each other for all of their CS and AR relationships
with everyone else in their communities. To simplify, we can graph each of
the principal actors’ many relationships with all others as a single
relationship with “others.” Then Figure 6.3 depicts the full metarelational
honor model that motivates the violence of the Trojan War, and all honor
violence. Well, it’s not really the full model, because it ignores the central
figure in the Iliad, Achilles. And Homer represents the heroes, women, and
gods as morally motivated to regulate relationships among the gods and
between gods and men. So the complete metarelational model of the moral
motives of those involved in the Trojan War would require a much bigger
sheet of paper. But many real human interactions are motivated by huge
configurations of recursively extended and reciprocal moral implications
among many linked relationships. Complex metarelational motives drive
violence everywhere. And, as we shall consider in Chapter 22, other
metarelational configurations keep the peace.
Figure 6.3: The “full” metarelational model of the Trojan War (leaving out
the relationships with Achilles, among the gods, and between gods and
humans)

An intriguing final dénouement of the story of the Trojan War is that it

should conclude in an honor killing. The Greeks having defeated and killed
the Trojans, Menelaus must kill Helen, and has indeed demanded that she
die by his own hand. But he cannot – she is too beautiful and he still loves
her (thanks to the final intervention of Aphrodite and Eros, apparently!).
Accordingly, the figures do not show the prescribed violence by Menelaus
against Helen.
The metarelational model that generates the Iliad is not restricted to social
relationships among humans: humans relate to the gods through kinship,
prayer and sacrifice, sex, envy, and other media (Lefkowitz, 2003). Some
gods back the Greeks, some back the Trojans, others are more neutral, and a
number of minor gods are involved in diverse ways. The gods intervene in
the battles between humans, especially by rescuing their favorites or
exhorting them to fight. Moreover, the gods’ relationships with each other
shape and are shaped by their respective relationships with their favored
humans and the humans’ relationships with each other. For example, Paris
judges Aphrodite to be more beautiful than Hera or Athena, so Aphrodite
“gives” Helen (Zeus’ daughter) to Paris, and helps the Trojans throughout –
while Hera and Athena support the Greeks because they are angry that Paris
does not rank them as more beautiful than Aphrodite. However, Paris’
seduction and abduction of Helen violates the xenia host–guest hospitality
relationship, which is backed by Zeus, who therefore determines that Troy
will eventually fall to the Greeks.
Recall that the core events actually related in the Iliad itself are motivated
by Agamemnon’s refusal to grant Chryses’ request to ransom his daughter
Chryseis, a war captive. Chryses is the priest of Apollo at a temple near
Troy, so Agamemnon’s refusal of his request is an affront to Apollo. Chryses
prays to Apollo, who, angered by Agamemnon’s disrespect of his priest
Chryses, sends a plague on the Greeks. When a seer reveals to the Greeks
why they are afflicted by the plague, Agamemnon is persuaded to return
Chryseis, but says that he is entitled to some other female captive to replace
her. Achilles says that he should wait until they capture more prisoners,
angering Agamemnon, who feels disrespected. So Agamemnon demands
that Achilles give up his beautiful war captive, Briseis. This greatly offends
the honor of Achilles, who expects an EM relationship and does not accept
Agamemnon’s assertion of an AR relationship over him. But at Athena’s
command Achilles refrains from killing Agamemnon to redeem his honor.
Instead, he refuses to join with the Greeks in fighting the Trojans, sitting out
the ensuing battles – with disastrous results for the Greeks – until the Trojans
kill his close friend Patroclus. Why has Zeus allowed the Trojans, whose
prince, Paris, has violated Zeus’ protection of the sacred xenia relationship,
to resist the Greeks for so long?

Even though Hera and Athena oppose him, Zeus is prepared to let many
of the Greeks die because he owes a favor to another divinity, Achilles’
mother, Thetis … Thetis wants Zeus to make Agamemnon and the
other Greeks realize that her son is the best fighter and the most worthy
of honor.
(Lefkowitz, 2003: 56)
Thetis has appealed to Zeus in response to the prayers of her son, Achilles,
to let the Greeks suffer until they recognize his supremacy as a warrior. Zeus
consents because Thetis once helped Zeus defeat Hera, Poseidon, and
Athena. However, when Zeus has forbidden the gods to intervene in the war,
Hera seduces Zeus so that he falls asleep, allowing his brother Poseidon to
help the Greeks. This metarelational model motivating the violence of the
Iliad is complex, indeed.
Many Greek myths portray the gods punishing humans for disrespect,
including the hubris of acting like a god. In short, the gods violently enforce
AR, killing humans who challenge them. And it is not only the person who
angers the god who suffers the god’s displeasure:

In the myths, each crime, each refusal to do what a god commands,

each failure to give due honor to a divinity, has consequences. Wrong
actions can cause problems for succeeding generations in a family, or
for a whole city or army.
(Lefkowitz, 2003: 11)

In particular, the Greeks perceived the outcome of battles as morally

ordained metarelational consequences of their parties’ relationships with the
gods: the defeated died because someone else, with whom the defeated was
communally equivalent, had transgressed an AR relationship with the gods.
The Iliad, Greek myths, and religion more generally are relevant to
virtuous violence theory in two opposite but reciprocal respects. Looking up,
Greeks perceived their gods as models for human virtue – humans modeled
themselves after the gods, paragons of honor. Among the gods, violence was
moral action motivated to constitute social relationships, particularly honor-
based status in AR relationships. What motivated the gods should motivate
humans: the honor metarelationship. Conversely, from our perspective we
recognize that the Greek gods were projections of ideals for social relations
and moral motives among human Greeks. As in most religions, Greek gods
were essentially representations of social relationships: they consisted of
little more than nodes in relationships with humans and among themselves.
They had few, if any, non-relational features, and their only actions were
social actions. Much of the gods’ action was violence motivated by honor
metarelationships, reflecting the Greeks’ experience and perception of their
own human lives. Life was about honor, a metarelationship that entailed
killing anyone who threatened one’s honor. Honor was a property of one’s
patrilineal kin group, such that each person’s honor was everyone’s honor –
their CS bonds made them all honorifically equivalent. They were
collectively responsible for upholding and enforcing their shared virtue, and,
whether punished by the gods or ostracized and ridiculed by peers, for each
of their transgressions all suffered as one across the generations. Morally
motivated to kill to sustain, enhance, and redress their most sacred
relationships, the Greeks lived in a world of virtuous violence.

Many cultures across history and society have regarded violence as

morally essential to the preservation of their most basic CS relationships –
the intense primary group relationships of the family or minimal patrilineage
– and also to the more diffuse CS relationships among men and families
throughout the community. In these contexts, killing someone who insults a
person or his women is good, right, necessary, and natural. A man must use
violence to sustain the CS relationships crucial to his life. Each man is an
autonomous, aggressively hostile, and proudly self-interested individual,
suspicious of other individuals who would injure, exploit, slander, or
humiliate him. But at the same time, every man has a strong identity as a
member of an autonomous, aggressively hostile, and proudly self-interested
patrilineage, suspicious of other communities that would injure, exploit,
slander, or humiliate his patrilineage. At the same time, the communal
guest–host bond is the complement and reflection of the agonistic relations
among all men in honor cultures: every man is potential guest and host to
every other honorable man. Nothing is more important than maintaining the
honor of the patrilineage, and violence is the morally motivated and
culturally necessary response to any affront to honor.

1 See Farès (1932: 196–202) on the vulnerability of pre-Islamic Arab honor

to public defamation by poetic satire. This dimension of honor may be
related to the intensity of the reaction of contemporary Moslem clerics to the
authors of works deemed blasphemous.
2 For example, see Giovannini (1981) for a detailed analysis of conceptions
of women in Sicily, and Gilmore (1983: 242) for specific references on this
prominent Mediterranean ideology.

3 Meeker (1976) perceptively discusses the implications of this contrast

between the disgrace of husbands among Turks and of brothers among
Arabs. He links the disgrace of the Arab agnates of a fallen woman to their
deep love for her – the very strong CS bond between brother and sister.

4 “Honor” and “hospitality” are our analytic terms. In many of the

languages and cultures of this region, there are corresponding folk concepts:
often there is a narrow term for sexual virtue or honor (e.g., the Arabic ‘ard,
Turkish namus) and its loss, along with a broader term for honorific prestige
or precedence based on hospitality, independence, pride, vigilance, virility,
and vengeance.

5 In Venice during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the sexual purity of
women was very important to the honor of their fathers and husbands, and to
the masters of slaves and servants; see Ruggiero, 1985: 17–22, 46–9.
 7 War
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate
what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be … Duty,
Honor, Country: The code which those words perpetuate embraces the
highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies
ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the
things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are
wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the
greatest act of religious training – sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of
danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker
gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage
and no brute instinct can take the place of the divine help which alone
can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the
soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is
the noblest development of mankind… Yours is the profession of arms,
the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for
victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very
obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.
General Douglas MacArthur (1962)

It is not only warrior cultures, honor cultures, or street gangs that require
men to be violent: in war, people in most cultures and subcultures deem it a
moral duty to kill the enemy – and in many cases soldiers feel that they
should kill, enslave, torture, rape, or starve enemy captives or civilians.
Philosophers and religious leaders often exhort men (and sometimes
women) to fight, extolling the noble virtues of warfare. In the twentieth
century, soldiers killed approximately 140 million people and wounded far
more; in most cases they were morally motivated to do so out of solidarity
in support of fellow soldiers, obedience to officers, military honor, or
patriotism (Leitenberg, 2006; this number includes deaths in German and
Japanese concentration camps).
 This is nothing new in human history; morally laudatory warfare has
been common and bloody since early civilizations such as Shang China,
ancient Greece, ancient Mesopotamia, Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt,
pre-colonial Yoruba and Benin, Classic Maya, and pre-conquest Aztec and
Inca (Lewis, 1990; Trigger, 2003: 240–63). All of these early civilizations
regarded war as virtuous and greatly honored their warriors.
As recently as the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century in
Europe, monarchs were motivated to fight in order to affirm their status as
monarchs and to regulate their relationships with other monarchs
(Whitman, 2012). This warfare was a legal proceeding: international law
recognized the legitimacy of property claims based on winning a battle. For
monarchs, victory was a “verdict” that validated rights to territory, and
soldiers were legally entitled to the personal property of the enemy they
killed.
In this chapter, we first focus on the moral motives of nations, and the
decision-makers and public opinion that guide them. We then consider the
moral motives of soldiers. Finally, we address the motives for war of radical
political and terrorist groups.

The motives of leaders and nations

When they start talking moral violation, it is time to get out the body
bags.
(McCauley, 2000: 39)

Nations often go to war to redress threatened AR relationships. That is,

decision-makers and public opinion are motivated to declare war to
maintain or raise the rank of their nation vis-à-vis other nations, particularly
when they feel that they have been unjustly pushed down to a low rank
among other nations. According to Lebow (2010), national honor is
competitively contested and nations are vulnerable to humiliation if they are
not violently assertive. In his terminology, “standing” is hierarchical rank in
the eyes others, and slights to a nation’s standing provoke revenge.
Analyzing the motives for starting all 94 wars that involved a dominant,
great, or rising power since 1648, Lebow found that standing motivated
58%, security 18%, revenge 10%, interest 7%, and other motives 7%.
So when a nation perceives that it has been unjustly pushed down to a
low rank among nations, it may fight its way back up. Harkavy (2000)
shows that military defeat, long-term domination, or colonial or lower racial
status often produce humiliation that motivates international or intergroup
vengeance, revolution, or withdrawal. French humiliation at their defeats in
the Napoleonic Wars, together with their loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the
Franco-Prussian War, contributed to World War I. German humiliation from
their defeat and from being blamed for World War I was a major motivation
for their instigating World War II. Arab shame and consequent vengeance
motivation after the humiliating defeats of the Six-Day War in 1967
contributed to subsequent wars and terrorism. Defeat and revenge have
been at the heart of the Hutu–Tutsi conflict and those of Northern Ireland,
Kurdistan, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and the former Yugoslavia (Harkavy
2000). These are cultures in which shame, honor, and vengeance are
especially crucial, but these motivating emotions operate to a significant
degree in all cultures.
Humiliation is humbling – disgrace and dishonor lower a nation’s
position. When threatened with loss of respect, nations fight to protect
challenges to their relative status (Dolan, 2010). A nation cannot bargain
over humiliating demands or violations of norms. Margaret Thatcher wrote
about the Falklands War,

What we were fighting for eight thousand miles away in the South
Atlantic was not only the territory and the people of the Falklands,
important though they were. We were defending our honour as a
nation, and principles of fundamental importance to the whole world –
above all, that aggressors should never succeed and that international
law should prevail over the use of force.
(Thatcher, 1993: 173, cited in Dolan, 2010: 22–3)

The British fought to hold their head high in the world. Eidelson and
Eidelson (2003) propose that groups are most disposed to intergroup
conflict when they believe that their group is cohesive, inherently superior,
and entitled to a special role and a unique destiny; when they perceive that
other groups have perpetrated humiliating injustices against them; when
they see other groups as threatening to subjugate or annihilate them; and
when they perceive outgroups as dishonest and untrustworthy (that is,
disposed to violate social relationships); and when they perceive their own
group as powerless, dependent, oppressed, and subjugated (that is, having
an illegitimately low rank). In our terms, Eidelson and Eidelson are positing
that conflict is over threats to AR entitlements among groups.
The moral motives discussed thus far are primarily about redressing
illegitimately lowered status: in other words, about redressing and
rectifying transgressions of AR hierarchy. But EM between kin groups,
communities, or nations is also a significant motivator of violence. In many
cultures when a member of one group injures or kills a member of a second
group, members of the second group are morally obligated to retaliate in
kind, matching the violence they received with violence they mete out, an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, and a life for a life
(Nivette, 2011). In this framework of moral vengeance, some communities
are in a more or less continuous state of feud (e.g., Schieffelin, 2004;
Waller, 1988). But even modern nations often retaliate in kind; consider, for
example, the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, said to be in
retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin nightclub by Libyan agents; or the
many counterstrikes by Israel and Palestinian organizations, which they say
are responses to strikes by the other side.
Similarly, McCauley (2000) shows that President G. H. W. Bush
mobilized public opinion in support of attacking Iraq by asserting that Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was a moral violation. And, in fact,among
politically unsophisticated respondents, when casualties are mentioned,
moral punitiveness – retributiveness – predicts support for both Gulf Wars
and for “punishing transgressor states,” even after controlling for other
values (Liberman, 2006, 2013, 2014). McCauley posits that competition for
resources eventually translates into intergroup conflict, but only when the
in-group perceives the out-group as guilty of a moral transgression. Indeed,
most great-power decisions to go to war have been based more on issues of
justice than on practical concerns about security (Welch, 1993). According
to Welch (1993), “justice” was an especially strong factor in the Crimean
War (especially for Russia but also Britain), a very strong factor in World
War I (especially for Britain but also for Russia and Germany), a moderate
factor in World War II (especially for Britain), and a conclusive factor in the
Falklands/Malvinas War (for both Argentina and Britain).
Sometimes EM and AR motives converge to the point where they may be
difficult to distinguish. Löwenheim and Heimann (2008) integrate a wide
interdisciplinary literature and analyze the Second Lebanon War in 2006 to
show that modern nations often wage war to take revenge, motivated by
moral outrage. The more a nation feels humiliated by a moral violation
against it, and the more the nation experiences the act as morally
outrageous, the more it seeks vengeance. Löwenheim and Heimann argue
that a vengeful retaliator aims for the satisfaction of making its enemy
suffer for the wrong they did, with little or no regard for the material or
human cost of doing so. Vengeance motivation “leads revengers to use
excessive force, to harm innocents, and to employ far more violence than
was used against them originally,” hence tending to extend and expand the
cycle of violence (pp. 686–7). Löwenheim and Heimann argue that
“revenge is about suppression and disrespect of the opponent” (p. 692), “to
enable and affirm position and status” (p. 694), and to reverse the harm-
doer’s declaration of superiority (p. 697) – in other words, vengeance aims
to restore the avenger’s legitimate AR standing by degrading the perpetrator
nation. Humiliation lowers the victim nation’s status and respect:

It exposes the humiliated party as weak, unworthy, and inferior. The

intent of revenge, in this sense, is to remove the harm-doer from the
position of domination and thereby restore the dignity robbed from the
victim.
(Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008: 696)

Löwenheim and Heimann also analyze the metarelational model that

embeds the antagonist nations in international relationships with other
nations and international organizations. They show that the more strongly
other states condemn the injury and express sympathy, solidarity, and
identification (CS) with the injured nation, the less its loss of dignity and
need for revenge. More generally, third-party moral assessments of the
original injury and of the injured nation’s response moderate that nation’s
response, as Löwenheim and Heimann show in Israel’s attack on Hizbullah
and Lebanon in retaliation for Hizbullah kidnappings of Israeli soldiers.
 If the impetus to war is motivated by AR and EM, the organization of
war between modern states is often motivated by MP.

Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50 to 90 percent

of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two
nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the
objectives we were trying to achieve.
(Robert McNamara, speaking in an interview in The Fog of War;
quoted in Blight and Lang, 2005: 114)

Proportionality is the basis of utilitarian moral reasoning that consists of

computing what’s right or wrong as a function of the costs and benefits,
probabilities and magnitudes, based on ratio value metrics of the fungible
utilities of all consequences. In short, it is the basis for making rational
moral decisions, where “rationality” does not mean selfish individual
maximization or materiality, but rather maximization of the collective good
and minimization of the harm to the evaluator’s own community. This kind
of moral reasoning – and fundamental moral motivation – is what modern
civilizations demand of their leaders, expect of their bureaucracies, and
insist on as the fundamental strategic principle for their armies. It is the
morality of doing the greatest good for the greatest number at the least cost
in lives and suffering.
In order to provide commanding generals with the basis for making
decisions about strategies for high-explosive and incendiary bombing of
Japan, Robert McNamara used data on air-crew loss rates per sortie and the
number of sorties per tour to calculate attrition rates and project the
manpower available for future bombing raids (Blight and Lang, 2005: 120–
2). When considering the plans for the initial invasion of the Japanese home
islands, Truman asked his chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, “what the price in
casualties for Kyushu [Japanese home island] would be and whether or not
that price could be paid” (Giangreco, 2003: 124). Minutes of the meeting
report that “The President reiterated that his main reason for this conference
with the Chiefs of Staff was his desire to know definitely how far we could
afford to go in the Japanese campaign” (Giangreco, 2003: 126). Initially,
Truman had been told that in the event of an invasion of Japan, “[T]he first
30 days in Kyushu should not exceed the price we have paid for Luzon”
[31,000 casualties] (Walker, 2004: 36). Later Truman was warned by former
President Hoover, and his top staff, that the invasion of Japan would likely
mean “the expenditure of 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives”
(Giangreco, 2003: 109), based on the experience of battles such as that on
Saipan, where “it cost approximately one American killed and several
wounded to exterminate seven Japanese soldiers. On this basis it might cost
us half a million American lives and many times that number wounded …
in the home islands” (Giangreco, 2003: 100). This estimate was called “the
sinister ratio” (p. 101), and was the basis for many discussions phrased in
terms of the “cost” in human lives of war operations (Giangreco, 2003: 113,
128).
Later, justifying the decision to use atomic bombs against Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Truman said that “a quarter of a million of the flower of our
young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities” (Alperovitz, 1996:
516). Truman wrote, “I asked General Marshall what it would cost in lives
… [to invade Japan]. It was his opinion that such an invasion would cost at
a minimum one quarter of a million casualties, and might cost as much as a
million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy”
(Alperovitz, 1996: 517; Giangreco, 2003: 129). Hence, the strategic moral
decision to use atom bombs against the Japanese was motivated by MP
proportionality – by a utilitarian moral calculation of the ratio of expected
benefits to expected costs, denominated in lives and wounded. It was a
matter of what the United States could “afford,” what the alternative “costs”
were, what would “economize” lives, what “price” the United States would
pay in “lives and treasure,” the number of young US soldiers the destruction
of two Japanese cities was “worth,” and “the sinister ratio.”
Likewise in the Vietnam War, American “management did not care
whether labor lived or died, only about producing a high enemy body count.
United States lives were quite secondary to primary production of enemy
deaths” (Gibson, 1986: 111). Draftees, especially, counted little in the “costs
of production” (Gibson, 1986: 121). Officers evaluated their subordinates –
awarding promotions, leaves, and even medals on the basis of their
productivity – that is, the number of deaths they produced.

Many high-level officers established “production quotas” for their

units, and systems of “debit” and “credit” to calculate exactly how
 efficiently subordinate units and middle-management personnel
performed. Different formulas were used, but the commitment to war
as a rational production process was common to all.
(Gibson, 1986: 112)

For example, in the 25th Infantry Division, the values were as follows:
enemy killed (10 points), prisoner taken (1,000 points), supplies and
weapons captured (10–200 points), and perfect CMMI inspection score
(500 points); Americans killed in action (–500 points) and Americans
wounded in action (–50 points) were deductions. In the 503rd Infantry
Division, US casualties did not figure in the scores: it was enemy killed
(200 points), prisoner taken (1,000 points), re-enlistment (100 points),
AWOL (–3 points), delinquency report (–2 points), accident (–3 points),
malaria (–5 points), narcotics (–5 points), Article 15 discipline (–1 point),
Summary Court-Martial (–2 points), Specific Court-Martial (–3 points), and
General Court-Martial (–15 points). Using this price system, each officer
was “weighed according to his war production” (Gibson, 1986: 114).
This cost-benefit scoring resulted in the fabrication of body counts, either
to justify casualties incurred or to reward officers (Gibson, 1986: 126ff.).
Moreover, soldiers killed presumed civilians, women, children, and
prisoners in order to increase their unit’s body count score; some ground
units kept accounts with strings of ears or fingers.

The moral motives that move soldiers to go to war

Of course, the warrior morality of virtuous combat that we explored in the
last chapter is a major motivator drawing men to join in warfare, but
additional motives combine with it to move men to violence in organized,
large-scale warfare. In chieftainships and feudal societies, when one’s chief
or lord goes to war, his followers or vassals must follow him; the AR
relationship requires it. Indeed, feudal vassalage is fundamentally about
allegiance in war: whether in medieval Europe or medieval Japan, the core
of fealty is the commitment to follow one’s lord into battle. This is the AR
morality of loyalty and obedience. In contrast, in modern nation states,
violent “service” in war is a patriotic duty to the motherland. Patriotism is
motivated by CS: we must all join in the fight to protect our nation,
indivisible, because it is our “land,” our collective heritage and traditions,
the place where our ancestors are buried, the country for which our
ancestors and brothers have sacrificed their sacred blood.
Among both feudal and modern soldiers, a secondary motivation to go to
war may be the EM equality motivation to match what one’s peers are
doing; a man doesn’t want his peers to exceed him in virtue. Moreover,
evenly balanced EM conscription for warfare operates as a moral
framework in modern societies, where, in many nations, either everyone (or
every man) is required to serve for a fixed term, or there is a lottery to
decide who is conscripted. Having been selected to fight by an EM
mechanism morally binds the soldier to do his duty, killing when he must,
because the equality of the obligation to serve legitimates the onus on the
person serving.
In sum, whether primarily motivated by the morality of AR or CS, and to
whatever extent co-motivated by EM, social relationships generate the
moral motives to join in war.

Killing under orders

Once in war, AR is the RM fundamental to life in militaries whose function
is to use violence to achieve whatever ends the armies are ordered to
accomplish by political leaders. In his duty as admiral, Horatio Nelson
repeatedly led his ships into battles with the intention of killing and
wounding thousands of the enemy, in full knowledge that hundreds of his
own men would die and hundreds more be horribly wounded. As a naval
officer, he was motivated to kill the enemy to defeat them, or to punish
those who resisted legitimate authority – and he felt great pride and
satisfaction when he fulfilled his duty. In 1799, after completing a British
mission to suppress a rebellion against the Sicilian king in the islands off
Naples, Nelson wrote a fellow captain that “the hanging of thirteen Jacobins
gave us great pleasure” (Nicolson, 2005: 233).
Soldiers are legally and morally bound to obey orders, including orders to
kill or face certain death – this is the final AR moral imperative of every
soldier in battle. That is, the foundational morality of organized armies
throughout history and across cultures is simply, “Kill whoever you are
ordered to kill whenever you are ordered to kill them, even if you must die
trying.” The sine qua non of military social relations is obedience to
authority, where obedience means killing on command. Men of traditional
military subcultures are deeply committed to absolute obedience, while
ordinary conscripts must be verbally indoctrinated and simultaneously
trained through incessant practice to kill, and to die if necessary, when
commanded to do so. Soldiers must not make their own private moral
decisions; they must follow orders. The duty to obey superiors is military
morality. A soldier must obey orders to kill. In classical and medieval
warfare, this duty encompassed killing civilians of defeated communities,
including women and children. In modern times, duty has been similarly
construed – for example, in World War II, strategic bombing and the
widespread shooting and rape of civilians.
When the public and the judiciary determine that other moralities should
take precedence over the military morality of obedience, people may doubt
whether killers or torturers, especially killers of civilians, truly felt
obligated to obey, regardless of other moral considerations. Such doubts
notably arose over Lieutenant William Calley and his troops’ murder of
over 500 civilians in the My Lai massacre, the murders by Nazi officers of
millions of Jews, and the torture performed by US guards at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Afghanistan. To the extent that these people believed that they
were not following orders, but rather engaging in their own brand of
sadistic violence, their actions were immoral. But to the extent that they felt
that they were legitimately following the orders and wishes of their
superiors, they were morally motivated by AR hierarchy. Whatever the
motives of these particular people in these particular instances, however,
there is no doubt whatsoever regarding the absolute conviction of military
personnel that they are obligated to kill when commanded. Killing on
command is the function and raison d’être of the military; anyone who
believes it is moral to have armies believes in that. Killing and willingly
dying on command is the highest – and unquestioned – military virtue.

Killing for your comrades

There is also an important CS morality of mutual care and sacrifice,
working together communally to achieve the mission, and putting the
preservation of the unit and the accomplishment of the mission it was
commanded to perform ahead of individual welfare or survival. This CS
ethos is vital to military efficacy, and soldiers are often much more strongly
morally motivated to fight to protect their comrades than they are by the
duty of obedience. The intense CS emotion of devotion to one’s fellow
soldiers in the unit is what makes soldiers willing to kill, take enormous
risks, suffer horribly, and die. American and German World War II soldiers
and American soldiers in later wars consistently reported that they fought
mostly because they couldn’t bear the thought of “letting down” their
buddies in the unit (Connole, 2008: 289–90; Shils and Janowitz, 1948;
Stouffer, 1949; Wong et al., 2003). Similarly, referring to his buddies in the
unit, an American soldier coming out of combat in the Iraq war said

That person means more to you than anybody. You will die if he dies.
That is why I think that we protect each other in any situation. I know
that if he dies and it was my fault, it would be worse than death to me.
(Wong et al., 2003: 10)

Another said of his buddies in the unit,

You have got to trust them more than your mother, your father, your
girlfriend, or your wife, or anybody. It becomes almost like your
guardian angel.
(Wong et al., 2003: 11)

And they know that they can, they must, trust each other – while in turn
others are trusting them with their lives.

[W]hen the artillery started raining down and [stuff] started hitting the
fan … everybody just did what we had to do. It was just looking out
for one another. We weren’t fighting for anybody else but ourselves.
We weren’t fighting for some higher-up who is somebody; we were
just fighting for each other.
(Wong et al., 2003: 12)
What this means is that on the battlefield, soldiers are killing to protect each
other – they feel intensely morally committed to do so, even if they die
looking out for each other. Each “has the back” of everyone else. The
success of military missions and the lives of soldiers and sailors depend on
their fighting fiercely for each other, with absolute trust and confidence in
each other. Hence, breaches of their CS solidarity may be severely
punished, with the sanction of their officers. For example, a Roman soldier
who stole from his fellows or a sentry who deserted his post was
immediately tried by the tribunes, and, if convicted, his fellow soldiers beat
and stoned him to death, a practice called fustuarium (Polybius (second
century BCE): Book VI, 352, Phang, 2008).

Extremist violence and terrorism

It is not just wars between modern nations that are morally motivated;
revolution, rebellion, and terrorism are, too. And make no mistake, it is a
war that rebels and terrorists believe they are fighting, and it is against
people they perceive as their enemies and oppressors. Reviewing the
literature on political violence, Rule (1988: 220) writes that the best studies
of aggressive political action, those by Muller (1979), found that “no
aggressive behavior will occur unless people doubt the moral worth of the
political regime as a whole – in other words, unless they come to view the
entire system, as opposed to specific policies, leaders, or outputs, as
illegitimate.”
Jeremy Ginges and Scott Atran have pointed out that in spite of evidence
for moral motives in decisions to go to war, most researchers have assumed
that decisions to pursue war are driven by non-moral instrumental
calculations of expected value, and this lens has been used to understand the
minds of terrorists. That is, most researchers assume that people will engage
in violent extremism if the act provides a great benefit at a relatively
smaller cost. Supporters of these theories often point to the stories suicide
bombers are told about how they will be rewarded in the next life for their
sacrifice, suggesting that suicide bombers are somehow giving their lives
out of self-interest. But in a series of brilliant studies designed to identify
the motivations for war and terror in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict (Ginges and Atran, 2009; Ginges et al., 2011), the authors
demonstrated that support for violent acts of war and terrorism is typically
driven by moral, rather than rationally instrumental, motives. In an initial
survey, Ginges and his collaborators (Ginges et al., 2007) asked Jewish
settlers on the West Bank to indicate their willingness to take actions
against Palestinians if their settlements were threatened, including non-
violent acts of protest, such as blocking roads and illegally occupying land,
as well as violent acts of aggression. In addition, the settlers were asked to
assess the effectiveness of the different strategies and the morality of the
acts. Consistent with our theory of virtuous violence, Ginges and his
collaborators found that although support for both non-violent and violent
actions was predicted by the extent to which settlers viewed the actions as
morally righteous, the perceived effectiveness of the actions only predicted
support for non-violent actions. Thus, whether or not an action would be
effective was inconsequential in determining whether a Jewish settler would
be willing to support acts of violence toward Palestinians. For violence,
only the action’s morality mattered; settlers didn’t care whether it was
effective or not.
In other experiments, Ginges and his collaborators have demonstrated
that failing to understand the moral motives underlying violent conflict and
attempting to resolve them through rational means can backfire terribly
(Ginges et al., 2007). The authors asked Jewish settlers, Palestinian
refugees, and Palestinian students to respond to possible peace deals.
(Palestinian students associated with Hamas make up the majority of
Palestinian suicide bombers, p. 7358.) Some of the deals they were asked to
consider included material incentives for reaching a peace agreement. From
a purely rational choice perspective, the addition of material incentives
should have made the deals more appealing. Instead, the authors found that
the addition of the material incentive led to greater support for war and acts
of terror and less support for peace deals among people who saw the
conflict in strongly moral terms. Indeed, a majority of Palestinian students
reported that they would feel “joy” if they heard about a suicide bomb
attack.
Could the material incentives have been perceived as an offensive bribe –
an intolerable, evil, taboo trade-off (Fiske and Tetlock, 1997)? Atran (2010:
4; also see Ginges et al., 2011) reports an exchange he had with a Muslim
extremist in Indonesia:
ATRAN: “What if a rich relative were to give a lot of money to the cause in
return for you canceling or just postponing a martyrdom action?”
EXTREMIST: “Is that a joke? I would throw the money in his face.”
ATRAN: “Why?”
EXTREMIST: “Because only in fighting and dying for a cause is there nobility
in life.”

A great deal more could be written on the multitude of moral motivations

for waging and fighting wars, but the research we have discussed is
sufficient to show that AR is the principal motivating relationship, followed
by CS and sometimes EM. The evidence of MP motivation and evaluative
criteria in establishing US war-fighting strategies through kill ratios is also
clear and unequivocal. The usual constitutive phase of waging and fighting
wars is redressing what the perpetrators experience as wrongful reduction in
their status. Humiliatingly lowered, the nation seeks to regain its rightful
place high in the hierarchy. Indeed, national honor obligates leaders and
citizens to attack those who have disrespected them – they must rise again.
For extremists and terrorists, the moral motive for war is not an effort to
raise rank within a legitimate system; rather, the system itself is seen as
wholly illegitimate, and the violence is meant to completely transform or
terminate the relationship with political powers that are seen as controlling
them through illegitimate coercive force.
The impetus to war is not limited to the dyadic relationship between the
enemies. As in warrior combat, nations and armed movements are
concerned about their reputation – how others judge them. Ranking among
nations and other groups is not merely dyadic: it is more or less linear and
transitive. The rank of a nation depends not only on the power and prestige
of that individual nation but also on the coalitions of mutual support that
enable it to face down nations with fewer, weaker supporters. Moreover, in
the international arena, nations have treaty commitments to allies, so that
they are legally and morally bound to go to war against a nation that attacks
an ally. To fail to come to the aid of an ally is not only a violation of their
treaty; it threatens the credibility of all their other treaties: allies and foes
will doubt their steadfastness. Coalitions and treaties are significant in
international relations only to the extent that participants and third parties
believe in the participants’ moral commitments to the treaties. These
metarelational moral configurations are additional major motives for
nations to go to war.1

1 In this chapter we have not explored motives for revolution and civil war,
but we suspect that they are also moral and relationship-constitutive. Every
American knows the EM moral motives, or at least the moral rhetoric,
supporting the American Revolution, and the same EM motives evidently
underlie most military struggles for independence against colonial powers.
Rule (1988) and Petersen and Zukerman (2010) make that argument,
theorizing that moral anger is the foundation for armed political violence.
Likewise, research on riots has found that political grievances and
oppression are important factors (Wilkinson, 2009), but there has been very
little participant observation or interview research on riots that might
identify the subjective motives of rioters.
8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the
gods
Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love – Isaac
– and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt
offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He
took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut
enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had
told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place
in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey
while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will
come back to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son
Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them
went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham,
“Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for
the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt
offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built
an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and
laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand
and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out
to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him.
Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from
me your son, your only son.”
Genesis 22:1–13; New International Version

For the great majority of people in nearly all cultures throughout history,
morality has been inextricably intertwined with religion. Indeed, for many
people in many cultures, morality is religion: the good is whatever the gods
command, the prophets declare, the church leaders ordain, or the ancestors
will. As the Israelites perceived their world, if God says “sacrifice your
son,” a faithful “God-fearing” person must do it without questioning; it is
sufficient that God commands it. For a religious person, there is no morality
that transcends God’s will, and, indeed, morality precisely consists of
obedience to God and communion with Him. Likewise, in many religions,
what is right is what the ancestors ordain, or what the spirits of mountains
demand.
In this chapter, we consider violence that is either relationally or
metarelationally based on relationships with supernatural deities. In
particular, we consider violence that is commanded by gods, human and
animal sacrifice meant to honor or appease the gods, and self-sacrifice
intended to create and enhance the relationship between the believer and the
gods.

Gods command violence

Even in the total absence of any possibility of punishment for disobedience,
most ordinary Westerners feel morally committed to obeying orders to harm
others, or even kill them, though few are aware of their own or most others’
disposition to obey such orders. In a famous set of experiments, Milgram
(1974) demonstrated that a variety of normal people could be induced to
commit violence if they were ordered to do so by an authority figure. In
these studies, an experimenter told participants that as part of an experiment
on learning they were to use a machine to administer electric shocks to a
person in another room whenever that person responded incorrectly. The
experimenter told them that after each error they should set the machine to
administer a higher voltage shock when they pressed it to punish the next
error. In reality, the person in the other room was an actor who was told to
cry out in pain; then, as the shocks went up, to stress that he had a heart
condition; then to plead for help and ask to stop the experiment; and
eventually to go silent as the severity of the shocks increased. Although the
participants became visibly upset at having to administer the shocks,
Milgram (1974) found that even if they believed they were administering
deadly electric shocks to another person, they would often continue to do so
if the experimenter quietly told them they “must” go on.
We have argued previously (Rai and Fiske, 2011) that the people in these
experiments were engaged in an AR relationship with the experimenter in
which they were morally required to defer to the experimenter’s legitimate
authority, even if it meant inflicting severe and potentially mortal pain on a
fellow human being. The authority of an “experimenter” is sufficient to
make many people feel they really “must” inflict severe pain and possibly
kill an entirely innocent person. And these were people in a so-called
individualistic, extraordinarily egalitarian, and unusually anti-authoritarian
culture: after all, the United States was founded on the principle of
resistance to illegitimate authority, and that principle continues to be a vital
core of the culture.
In the previous chapter, we examined obedience to the will of superior
commanders as a moral motivation for violence in war. This violence is
driven by metarelational moral motives that may have little or nothing to do
with the dyadic relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. Rather,
the perpetrators’ motives are to sustain, enhance, or repair their AR
relationships with a superior. They do violence against a third party because
the superior commands it. Where morality consists of obedience to the will
of a legitimate superior, if the superior wills a subordinate to harm or kill
others, that violence is moral. In many cultures, the core of morality is
obedience: the supreme will of a god, a prophet or religious authority, a
divinely ordained king, a military commander, or a parent must be done:
submission, fealty, discipline, and filial piety demand it. If a soldier’s
commanding officer says to bomb that village or shoot that child, the
commander and the soldier may genuinely judge that it is the soldier’s
absolute duty to follow orders, whatever his other feelings about what he
must do. Moral devotion to his duty to his superior impels him. He is
obligated to do what he is commanded to do, regardless of what he feels
about it, regardless of how difficult it is, regardless of anything but his
sense of duty. For him, morality is obedience, nothing less, nothing more.
To further investigate the metarelational models underlying violence in the
name of obedience, in this chapter we will examine actions in obedience to
God’s will. (We will consider another example of this in Chapter 14, where
we examine the metarelational moral motives of torturers.)
According to sacred texts, oral traditions, divination, and oracular
pronouncements, the gods and ancestors often command violence. Men
following these commands are morally motivated by their AR relationship
with their god(s) or ancestors. The will of the gods or ancestors cannot be
questioned, it must simply be obeyed. The Hebrew Bible and the Koran
both enjoin believers to kill their unbelieving enemies, and God himself
often destroys whole communities (Jenkins, 2010). In numerous passages
God commands men to stone brides who are not virgins; torture, poison,
and execute women who commit adultery; burn women if they become
pregnant from fornication; kill female prisoners of war who are not virgins,
along with male prisoners of war who refuse enslavement; and wipe out the
entire populations of communities whose land His followers wish to occupy
(Hartung, 2012).
In the Old Testament, Numbers 25 recounts the Lord’s orders to kill the
Israelites who have been sacrificing to the Moabite gods; the Lord then
sends a plague, killing 24,000 Israelites. Phineas brings the plague to an end
by running his spear through a miscegenous Hebrew man and his Midianite
wife, for which God praises him and bestows priesthood on him and his
descendants. God then commands Moses to kill all the Midianites. Numbers
31 recounts that after further battles in which the Hebrews kill all the
Midianite men, the Hebrew soldiers return to camp with their plunder and
captives. Moses is furious when he sees this:

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were
the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning
the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a
plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every
woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl
who has never slept with a man.”
(Numbers 31:15–18)
God also commands, and the Hebrews obediently carry out, massacres of
all Amalekite men, women, and children (1 Samuel); all the men and
women, old and young, and all the animals of Jericho (Joshua 6); and every
man, woman, and child subject of King Sihon and King Og of Bashan
(Deuteronomy 2 and 3).

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion…
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us –
he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
(Psalm 137:1, 8–9, New International Version)

Moses tells the Hebrews that they must annihilate the Canaanites, saying,

I will take vengeance on my adversaries

and repay those who hate me.
I will make my arrows drunk with blood,
while my sword devours flesh:
the blood of the slain and the captives,
the heads of the enemy leaders.
(Deuteronomy 32:41–42, New International Version)

When Joshua defeated the armies of the five kings and captured the kings,
he killed them and hung their corpses up on trees. He then overran Elgon,
Hebron, Debit, and the entire region, killing everyone in the communities
he defeated. “He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed,
just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” (Joshua 10).
These AR injunctions to violence consist of religious texts and oral
traditions that comprise prototypes for moral violence. These tales of
exemplary violence of deities and heroes – paragons of virtue – are models
for humans to emulate. These narratives define many violent practices as
morally virtuous obligations, but do they actually move people to violence?
It seems that they do.
 Medieval Christianity, with its judicial tortures, crusades, inquisitions,
and witch-burnings, is not an aberration from the main patterns, but the
pattern itself.
(Collins, 1974: 427)

Moral motives based on the Bible were the foundation for the Crusades and
the Inquisition. Beginning in Languedoc in 1233, European inquisitors
imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands for their purported heretical
beliefs, while the Crusaders massacred thousands of Jews and Muslims
(Eller, 2010: 177–9). Medieval Christian writers praised violence when it
furthered the interests of the Church or political allies (Brown, 2011: 42–7).
When violence was the fulfillment of God’s will, it was admirable.
Medieval clerics and others assumed that through bloody victories, God and
his saints violently avenged wrongs against Himself and His followers,
including revenge for injury or insult (Brown, 2011: 88–91, 156–9). In
God’s name, bishops commanded that miscreants be flayed or branded.

Individuals or groups were entitled, and sometimes even required, to

use violence to assert or protect their rights as they understood them
and to avenge insult or injury… God and his saints did so as well.
(Brown, 2011: 189)

Christian bishops and monks were either violent themselves, or they

celebrated violence carried out on their behalf by others. Christian
saints both alive and dead used violence to defend themselves, their
honor, and their followers, and to attack the enemies of God.
(Brown, 2011: 288)

In short, medieval clerics and lords judged that violence was laudable, often
required, and should be publicly displayed, enthusiastically observed, and
widely celebrated. Similarly, drawing on violent biblical narratives as
analogs, early modern and modern Europeans regarded themselves as
equivalent to the Israelites and based their relations with other “races” on
those that the Hebrew Bible prescribed. Thus, the verses quoted above from
Numbers, Samuel, Joshua, Psalm 137, and Deuteronomy may have partially
motivated and were certainly felt to justify a great many genocidal acts
against native peoples around the world (Jenkins, 2010: 97–163).
Moral violence is basic to Abrahamic religions, but it is not unique to that
religious tradition. Eller’s (2010) comprehensive review of religiously
motivated moral violence shows that it is widespread across history and
creeds. Religions commonly assert that unquestionable supreme authorities
ordain action against ultimate evils, in unqualified and unremitting pursuit
of the ultimate good (p. 79). That action may include violence, particularly
violence against those who did not accept the religion. In the Bhagavad
Gita, the human prince Arjuna asks the supreme god Krishna for
instructions.

The Supreme Lord said: I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world,
out to destroy. Even without your participation all the warriors
standing arrayed in the opposing armies shall cease to exist.
Therefore, get up and attain glory. Conquer your enemies and enjoy a
prosperous kingdom. All these (warriors) have already been destroyed
by Me. You are only an instrument, O Arjuna.
Kill Drona, Bheeshma, Jayadratha, Karna, and other great warriors
who are already killed by Me. Do not fear. You will certainly conquer
the enemies in the battle, therefore, fight!
(11.32–4; translation by Ramanand Prasad at
http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/gita.htm)

In sum, people often do violence because they believe that gods or

ancestors command it – a belief often supported by oracular consultations in
which divine beings declare their will. Speaking on behalf of the deities,
with the full authority of the gods, church authorities or prophets tell their
congregations that they must kill the enemies of the gods, of the
community, or of the nation. Furthermore, it is ultimately humans who
perceive or attribute wrath to the gods. When a prophet declares that a god
wills that we must kill, where does the prophet get that idea? Why does he
imagine that a god must will violence? Why does anyone believe that the
gods demand violence? The answer, of course, is that the human religious
leaders and their followers are projecting their own social-relational
emotions and moral motives onto the gods. Humans imagine the gods to
have the same moral emotions they themselves experience. So every
prophetic revelation or religious text ordaining violence is an expression of
the human communicator’s own moral motives.

Sacrificing animals and humans to the gods

In addition to engaging in violence at God’s command, in a great many
cultures people also experience violence as the primary way to create and
sustain relationships with deities and spirits. In Africa, China, among the
ancient Inca and Maya, in ancient Egypt, in early Mediterranean religions,
and elsewhere, ancestors and deities are or were bloodthirsty – quite
literally: they drink the blood of animals and humans sacrificed to them. In
these cultures, feeding the gods is pivotal to the AR relationship between
worshippers and their supernatural superiors. Depending on the ancestor or
deity, to plead, placate, or connect, the people aiming to create, sustain,
enhance, or redress their relationship with the supernatural being may find
it morally necessary to offer up flowers or vegetable foods, or to kill
animals or humans for the deity.
Offering up animals or humans by killing them is the core practice in
many historical religions and some local contemporary religions. The
religion of the Moose of Burkina Faso consists primarily of sacrificing
chickens and, when possible, goats, by cutting their throats so that the blood
flows over the “altar” (ApF, fieldwork). The sacrificer tosses bits of feather
or flesh onto the altar, along with beer and flavored water. After boys
butcher and roast the animal, the sacrificer tosses bits of cooked meat onto
the altar. All the while, the sacrificer is addressing the ancestors by name in
strict serial order, as well as invoking the Earth, the otiose god, and other
beings, asking for protection from misfortune, and requesting good health
and good crops. Then the assembled men of the lineage eat the meat of the
sacrificed animals and drink the libation beer together. These sacrifices
evidently feed the ancestors in a CS mode while they obeisantly propitiate
them in an AR mode. Only the head of the lineage, its eldest male, may
make sacrifices; everyone in the lineage depends on him to solicit the
protective power of the ancestors and to intercede with the ancestors when
they are ill or suffer misfortune. So these sacrifices enhance the lineage
head’s authority. At the same time the commensal consumption of the
sacrificial meat and beer constitutes and reinvigorates the congregants’
patrilineal CS relationship. Eating the sacrificial meat and drinking the
offering beer together makes one a member of the lineage, and enhances the
bonds and social identity that make them one with each other. Conversely,
making these sacrifices is a moral obligation. It is the duty of the lineage
head to revere and respect the lineage’s ancestors, maintaining his own
relationship to them. Moreover, he is morally required to protect, and speak
up and intercede for everyone in the lineage: only he can address and feed
the ancestors. So killing animals for the ancestors is both relationally and
metarelationally virtuous. Indeed, it is morally mandatory: there is no other
way to relate to the ancestors. Sacrifice is how a person relates. Revering
the ancestors is the pivot of Moose religion and the crux of Moose morality,
so sacrifice is the epitome of virtue.
These Moose practices closely resemble other sacrificial practices
throughout West Africa, in ancient Greece and China, around the world, and
throughout history. Of course, this is “violence” against animals, not
humans, so it is on the margins of the subject of this book. However,
informants indicate that the Moose formerly, though rarely, sacrificed
humans, and it is well established that human sacrifice was frequent in West
Africa (Law, 1985). The sacrifice of human victims has the same moral
motives and sustains the same social relationships and metarelational
configurations as animal sacrifice.
Likewise, “Animal and human sacrifice were central to early religious
life” in late Shang (c. 1200–1045 BCE) and West Zhou (1045–771 BCE)
China: the deities demanded 血 食 xuèshí, “blood food” (ter Haar, 2011:
258; see also Lewis, 1990: 27ff.; Wilson, 2002).

Religious activity in ancient China consisted primarily of the ritualized

slaughter of animals (and sometimes humans), presentation of the
victim to supernatural beings, and the eventual consumption of the
meat by the living. Today, meat offerings, with or without a killing
ritual, remain the dominant means by which the Chinese people
interact with the sacred realm.
(Kleeman, 1994: 185)
 Sacrifice remained the most important element of the religious
program of the state up until 1911. Sacrifice was also the primary
religious activity of the common man then as it is now. Three types of
offering – those directed to gods, ancestors, and ghosts, as delineated
by modern anthropologists – corresponded to a threefold division of
Chinese society into officials, commoners, and outcastes. Each type
involved blood-sacrifice.
(Kleeman, 1994: 188)

As among the Moose and elsewhere, sacrifice in China was a combination

of AR obeisance to superior supernatural beings and CS commensalism
among the congregants, and between sacrificers and the beings they fed
through sacrifice. In a discourse from 650 BCE, a duke reports, “I have
heard it said, ‘The gods do not partake of [the offerings of] those not of the
same strain 類; the people do not sacrifice to those not of their clan 族 ’”
(Kleeman, 1994: 191–2; bracketed clarification by Kleeman; note further
that 類, lei, means “type,” “kind,” or “category” based on similarity – that
is, CS equivalence). Indeed, the elite of ancient China forbade commoners
to sacrifice to any deity with whom they had no kinship relation. Sacrifice
in China in the Spring and Autumn Period (approximately 771 until
probably 476 BCE) constituted the crucial bond uniting kin who sacrificed
to a common ancestor, while sharing the blood of oath sacrifices was the
only way to constitute covenants of binding trust between non-kin (Lewis,
1990: 9, 13, 15).
In ancient China, the higher one’s rank, the higher the deities to whom
one could legitimately sacrifice – and feudal lords personally performed the
sacrifices, on the premise that ancestral spirits would only accept a sacrifice
made by their eldest living male descendant (Lewin, 1990: 21; as indicated
above, the Moose share this premise and practice). Sacrifice to the high
gods was the prerogative of the nobility, metarelationally reinforcing and
legitimating their authority vis-à-vis commoners (Kleeman, 1994; Lewis,
1990). At the pinnacle of the state, “the king was the sole legitimate link to
his deceased, divinized forebears, who owed their divine position to their
own previous service as chief officiants at state sacrifices” (Kleeman, 1994:
187). Thus, metarelationally, authority among humans depended on
superiors’ sacrificial relationships with deities higher than those to whom
their subordinates sacrificed. The subordinates of a sacrificer – in the
limiting case, all of the subjects of the emperor – depended on the sacrificer
to obtain the ancestors’, ghosts’, nature spirits’, and gods’ beneficent
protection.1 Two other forms of violence, warfare and hunting, also defined
noble status (Lewis, 1990: 17). Indeed, sacrifice, hunting, and warfare were
the activities proper to Chinese lords in Spring and Autumn Period China.
They were closely integrated, for example, by the necessity to make
sacrifices before initiating warfare, the conception that warfare, like
sacrifice, was a form of religious service and sacrifice to the ancestors, and
the motivation to win glory in war to maintain and enhance the glory of
one’s ancestors (Lewis, 1990: 22–6, 36).2 Zhou period rulers sometimes
sacrificed war captives; rebel leaders and assassins were cooked down into
a meat sauce consumed by the court or army (Lewis, 1990: 27–8).
Furthermore, Chinese elites ranked themselves according to their
precedence in the allocation of the meat sacrificed to the deities.

During the Chou, sacrificial meats were regularly distributed among

high members of the nobility and other officers of the state, who then
would share them with subordinates and retainers. The mere display of
such potent provender implied status.
(Kleeman, 1994: 190)

Partaking in this meat crucially mediated the relationship between lord and
master: Confucius resigned his office when the lord of Lu failed to give
Confucius his share of the meat of the solstice sacrifice (Lewis, 1990: 30).
Animals were the victims of most traditional Chinese sacrifice. However,
when a Shang ruler died, many retainers were killed to accompany him, and
some elite members of the court seem to have killed themselves to join him
(ter Haar, 2011: 259). When a Shang king built a new palace, he had whole
army units buried in the foundation. Shang also sacrificed prisoners they
captured, and indeed their wars were sanctified as hunts to obtain human
sacrificial victims (Trigger, 2003: 242, 481, 579).
 Other societies frequently sacrificed humans – sometimes in large
numbers – to constitute the same sorts of social relationships and
metarelationships that animal sacrifice constitutes. At the death of rulers
and other elites, early Mesopotamian, Aztec, Maya, Yoruba, and Hawaiian
priests and kings sacrificed many retainers or slaves (Trigger, 2003; Valeri,
1985). At the death of one’s master in ancient Japan, followers might
commit junshi suicide to accompany him (Tatai, 1983). Conversely, in
premodern Japan, a master whose follower failed him could command or
allow the follower to commit hari-kari, a form of ritual suicide, or the
follower could take the initiative to do so himself. Likewise, when a First
Dynasty Egyptian king died, Egyptians killed hundreds of servants and
numerous artisans to go along with him (Trigger, 2003: 88). The Inca
typically sacrificed 200 children for the enthronement of a king, and four
children every time he became ill (Trigger, 2003: 80). The Inca sacrificed
the most beautiful war captives and the most beautiful Inca children,
including the children of subordinate rulers; the children were feasted for a
period of time, then intoxicated, and then the sacrificers strangled them, cut
their throats, ripped out their hearts, or buried them alive (Trigger, 2003:
480). Mayans especially prized the sacrifice of a conquered king or his
close relatives; indeed, a new ruler could not take office until he had
captured high-ranking enemies for sacrifice. Aztec and Yoruba nobles and
rich merchants regularly sacrificed prisoners of war, criminals, strangers,
and children to the gods – the Yoruba especially before setting off to war,
the Aztec especially in celebrating victory with the sacrifice of royal
captives and defeated soldiers (pp. 241, 476, 478). Aztecs preferred to offer
up warriors and made war particularly to capture sacrificial victims, but
between wars they made do with foreign slaves and inauspiciously born
Aztec children. An Aztec young man had to wear his hair long until he
captured enemy soldiers for sacrifice; to reach maturity with long hair was a
perpetual humiliation (Trigger, 2003: 243). When not engaged in wars of
conquest, Aztec and other highland Mexican states engaged in
xochiyaoyotl, “flower wars,” between friendly rival states, in order to
provide both sides the opportunity to capture warriors to sacrifice (p. 244).
Hawaiian kings sacrificed humans at various life-cycle transitions
(particularly funerals), healing, and purification ceremonies, to mark the
stages of construction of canoes, houses, and temples, and as an integral
part of warfare (Valeri, 1985). Most of the victims were people who had
transgressed or rebelled against the king; chiefs were especially prized. In
preparation for sacrifice, officiants often broke the victim’s arms and legs,
tore out one or both eyes, and, apparently, mutilated his penis (Valeri, 1985:
336, 402, note 259). Sacrifice was a triumphantly terrifying AR hierarchy
display of royal authority. At the same time, sacrifice was a CS unity act of
“renewed internal cohesion” in which “the incorporation of these victims
into the god” who is “the synthesis of the land” ensured the integrity of the
kingdom and the productive fertility of the land and of the kingdom’s
women (Valeri, 1985: 348).
The Viking gods also demanded blood offerings. “Sacrifices were made
of male victims, including dogs, horses and men, to placate the gods, and
their bodies, all mixed up together, were suspended from the trees in the
sacred grove near the temple” (Batey et al.,1994: 114). In the nineteenth
century, Dahomeans and Ashanti sacrificed criminals and slaves to their
gods (Bohannan, 1967b). Likewise, the ancient Greeks sacrificed humans to
accompany their deceased husbands or masters, before going to war, on
various other occasions, and in several cults (Hughes, 1991). In addition,
there is textual and archeological evidence indicating that the Carthaginians
sacrificed infants (Smith et al., 2013; Xella et al., 2013).
In sum, all or most of the great “civilizations” of the ancient world
sacrificed humans, as did many other societies throughout history.
Sacrificing animals to ancestors, spirits, and gods was even more present
and continues today. AR relationships with these immaterial beings consist
of killing a third being, human or animal. At the same time the blood or
flesh fed to the immaterial beings and then consumed by the assembled
congregants is what forms the CS bond among them all. But the social
relationships are constituted not just by the offering and ingestion of these
substances but also by the violence itself: the killing of the animal or human
victim is necessary. It is by killing the victim at the altar that the sacrificer
makes obeisance, asks for protection, and asserts a position just below the
deity or ancestor and above the others on whose behalf he intercedes with
the gods. The killing establishes a ranking with the supernatural being at the
top, the sacrificer below, and the sacrificer’s junior dependants at the
bottom. In some cases, specific roles in the ritual or the temporal order of
distribution of the meat constitute additional ranked status relationships.
 Violent sacrifice is also fundamentally metarelational because, almost
invariably, the congregants, dependants, or subjects are only able to relate to
major ancestors, spirits, or deities through the sacrificer – he is the only one
who can make the sacrifices that constitute everyone’s relationship with the
immaterial beings on whom everyone depends. Thus, every sacrifice
operates metarelationally to mediate at least three social relationships:
between the supernatural being and the sacrificer, between the sacrificer and
his subordinate dependants, and, via those two relationships, between the
dependants and the supernatural being. Among the Moose, for anyone but
the head of the household to kill a chicken under any circumstances would
be a major sin, because it would be treating the household head as if he
were dead. Living in a Moose village in the late 1970s, whenever Fiske and
his family wished to eat chicken, he personally had to kill it. Then (just as
when sacrificing) anyone could pluck and butcher it.

Self-sacrifice to the gods

Religious pain produces states of consciousness, and cognitive-
emotional changes, that affect the identity of the individual subject and
her sense of belonging to a larger community or a more profound state
of being. More succinctly, pain strengthens the religious person’s bond
with God and with other persons. Of course, since not all pain is
voluntary or self-inflicted, one mystery of the religious life is how
unwanted suffering can become transformed into sacred pain.
(Glucklich, 2001: 6)

In Chapter 1 we noted that medieval Europeans and people in contemporary

Yap welcome their own suffering as an ideal, even an essential way to
enhance social relationships with other humans or with God. Here, we
consider another kind of religiously virtuous violence: practices of bloody
or tortuous self-sacrifice meant to honor or appease the gods. Some
Chinese, American Indians, Christians, Muslims, and others injure
themselves severely in order to create and enhance relationships with spirits
or deities. In these religious practices, violence is the medium for relating to
supernatural beings: the relationship between humans and their deities
consists of violence. To be moral is to be violent: amputating, piercing or
tearing flesh, puncturing veins, or exposing oneself to extreme heat, cold,
thirst, or hunger. This is what the gods demand; this is how a person relates
to them.
In some Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist monastic traditions, the deepest
religious devotion entails depriving oneself of comfort, food, sex, and sleep.
For example, the Buddha is said to have gone through a period of extreme
fasting and is sometimes represented as emaciated (e.g., Meisel and del
Mastro, 1975). The Abrahamic religions, the Bahá’í faith, Hinduism, and
Buddhism require fasting by all believers. In Jain religion, ideally true and
total religiosity entails starving oneself to death (Dundas, 2002; Glasenapp,
1999). In medieval Christianity, lay devotion to God also took the form of
self-starvation (Banks, 1996; Brown, 1988; Lester, 1995). Many other
religions also enjoin fasting in various contexts (Westermarck, 1908 vol. I,
pp. 292–308). Fasting generally enhances the CS between worshipper and
God: the ascetic feels that to become one with God, she must abstain from
most or all food, either in general or during certain calendrical intervals. In
most of these traditions, abstaining from sexual intercourse is also involved
and, conversely, in a great many religions, having sexual relations makes
one unfit to relate to deities for an interval of time, or until one purifies
oneself.
In many cultures, reverence, reaching out to, and demonstrating loyalty to
the recently deceased, ancestors, spirits, or gods requires more than
asceticism. One must endure terrible hardship, torture oneself, cut off one’s
own body parts to offer up, or make a sacrifice of one’s own life. Such
practices abound. Hindus traditionally praised self-sacrifice to the gods as
an act of high devotion (Westermarck, 1908: vol. II, 244). Some religions,
such as that of the Anatolian and Greek goddess Cybele, promoted
castration (Hales, 2002; Ringrose, 2003; Stevenson, 1995). In ecstatic
worship, followers of the north Syrian goddess Atargatis lashed themselves
and each other, wounded themselves with knives, and castrated themselves
(Lightfoot, 2002). Castrated eunuchs seem to have been prominent in early
Christianity and monks of some monastic orders were also castrated
(Stevenson, 2002). Here the purpose was to effect permanent celibacy,
bringing the eunuch irrevocably and unfailingly close to God. In Russia
from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, male and
female devotees of Skoptsky often had their genitalia cut off and female
devotees were mastectomized (Engelstein, 1999).

China
In Chinese Buddhism there is a tradition of religious self-immolation (both
burning and drowning) and also of amputating fingers and more (Benn,
2007). More broadly,

The self-infliction of violence was an indispensable element in the

construction of Chinese culture. It can be discovered in a variety of
sources, including not only canonical literature and official history but
also edicts, poetry, local gazetteers, novels, illustrations, drama, and
even children’s books. All of these sources demonstrate the
pervasiveness of violence in how performers of these practices
negotiated social relations, defined or redefined the nature of authority,
and imagined human agency in relation to the cosmos.
(Yu, 2012a: 461)

Descriptions of state sacrifices, blood oaths, and the self-maiming

practices of filial piety and female chastity are often imbued with a
sympathetic understanding between the human world and cosmic
agencies [such as gods, ancestors, ghosts, and geographically
identified spirits]. People expected gods (or Heaven) to intercede when
they were in trouble, and by performing extreme forms of sacrifice
they appealed for help.
(Yu, 2012a: 462)

From the tenth through the seventeenth century, it was relatively common
in China for people to slice off a piece of their own flesh and boil it to make
a broth to nourish and heal an ailing parent, uncle, or parent-in-law (gegu,
“filial slicing”; Yu, 2012a, 2012b). “Nourishing the parents with [the flesh
of the child] which came from them was a form of communion” (Yu,
2012a: 472). Local gazetteers report thousands of cases, highlighting the
moral power of filial slicing devotion to evoke the sympathy of deities so
they would heal the elder kinsperson. Sometimes literati highlighted
metarelational implications of gegu to shame elites who, by contrast, were
morally lax. Or, deploying another metarelational entailment, “local
government officials legitimated their own mandate to govern their districts
by rewarding performers of filial slicing, demonstrating how the virtue of
performers directly reflected their own governance” (Yu, 2012a: 469).
In another example of self-harm to regulate relationships, Chinese
eleventh- to seventeenth-century gazetteers eulogized girls who mutilated
themselves to resist rape, and widows who mutilated themselves or
committed suicide to resist remarriage (Yu, 2012a, 2012b). Such acts of
shouzie consisted of “preserving moral fidelity” by branding one’s face with
a word or cutting off one’s nose, ears, or fingers; such devotional self-
mutilation was highly esteemed as an ideal of virtue. State-sponsored
shrines and monumental arches commemorated such women’s fierce
preservation of their chastity.
Chinese rulers and high nobles were responsible for the welfare of their
subjects, and they metarelationally depended on their relationships with
deities, ghosts, and ancestors to maintain their power to rule over and
protect their subjects. Rulers and nobles conducted their relationships with
these beings through animal and human sacrifice, and, if necessary, self-
sacrifice. In China since the Shang Dynasty (c. 1550–1045 BCE), to bring
rain in a terrible drought, an official should expose himself to the sun until
he died (ter Haar, 2012: 251, 259). Originally, the Shan Dynasty King Tang
is said to have ended a great drought by attempting to self-immolate, but
before he could set himself on fire, Heaven sent the rains. In other droughts,
rulers and subsequently officials and Buddhist clerics exposed themselves
naked to the sun for days on end or set themselves on fire to bring rain (Yu,
2012a, 2012b).
In this Chinese relational framework, Yu (2102a: 463) demonstrates that
each of these acts of self-inflicted violence “reinforces traditional
relationships and produces order” – moral order. Self-violence was admired,
honored, and memorialized not just because of the devotion it evinced and
the self-control required but essentially because of its transcendent
intensification of social relationships with divine beings. Self-violence
moved deities, ghosts, and ancestors to come to the aid of the self-sacrificer.
Awed by the power of self-violence to elicit supportive divine intervention,
humans revered the self-sacrificer. Thus, these Chinese self-harming
practices morally created and enhanced dyadic relationships between
human and supernatural beings, while also creating and enhancing triadic
metarelational moral configurations.

American Indians
Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs frequently pierced their own tongues, penes,
and earlobes to draw blood – often large quantities – to offer to the
ancestors (Joyce et al., 1991; Trigger, 2003: 481). In aboriginal North
America, self-violence was also widespread, and in some tribes an invariant
rite of passage that raised the status of a youth, making him a man and a
member of the community. This often consisted of excruciatingly painful,
prolonged self-torture in order to form or revive an AR relationship with a
guiding spirit who, as an AR superior, would bestow powers on the self-
sacrificing follower, guide him, and support him. The first episode of self-
torture was to discover or attract one’s guardian spirit, whose nature and
identity was unknown before the ordeal, but would appear in a vision after
extensive suffering. So in many American Indian cultures, boys or youths
frequently fasted or went without water in quest of visions of their personal
spirit guardian (Benedict, 1922). To get in touch with their guardian spirits,
men in many American Indian cultures of the Great Plains, in particular, fed
the sun with bits of their bodies, using a blade to pry loose a disk of their
own flesh as an offering (Benedict, 1922).
In order to envision their personal guardian spirit, Native American men
of the northern Great Plains also inflicted extreme pain on themselves in the
Sun Dance ritual, in which they had others insert sinews through the
muscles of their back and later tore themselves loose by rupturing the
muscles. The first time they did this was to identify and connect with a
personal guardian spirit; subsequently, they did it to contact their guardian
and receive a communication from him. Here is a Crow text exemplifying
the social relationship between supplicant and the sun: “Medicine Crow
fasted and prayed for four days. He cut off a finger joint and offered it to the
Sun. ‘Sun, look at me. I am poor. I wish to own horses. Make me wealthy.
That is why I give you my little finger’” (Lowie, 1919: 117; see also Lowie,
1922: 342). Note that “poor” is not an MP situation; the horses would not
be used to make money, nor sold; “poor” means lacking in status.
In answer to his self-sacrifice, Medicine Crow, like other Plains Indians,
hoped for (and in this instance received) a vision that guided and instructed
him, giving him special “powers”: ritual knowledge and often (as in this
case) authority to establish and lead a ritual society.
The Sun Dance was a focal ritual of Plains Indian cultures and remains so
in modern times. Traditionally, a man vowed to stage a dance in connection
with plans to avenge a death, lead a hunt or ask for abundant buffalo herds,
seek shamanistic power, or heal others (Jorgensen, 1972). The performance
of the Sun Dance benefited the entire community, and participants were
greatly respected for dancing. They danced for three days and nights
without water or food; when a dancer collapsed it was expected that he was
likely to be receiving his vision.
In many tribes, men also performed solitary rituals with similar
sociomoral aims. A Cheyenne man would go out early in the day with a
helper to a lonely place on the prairie, where they would consecrate pins
and a knife.

He is then tied to the pole by means of wooden pins driven through the
flesh. All day long, after he is left alone again, he must walk back and
forth on the sunward side of the pole, praying constantly, and fixing
his eyes on the sun, trying to tear the pins loose from the torn flesh. At
night the helper returns, and pieces of the torn skin are held toward the
sun and sky and the four directions and buried. That night he sleeps on
the prairie and gets his power.
(Benedict, 1922: 5)

Seeking guiding visions, the Dakota performed similar rituals, sometimes

hanging by cords for days, or passing a knife through their body and
waiting silently for the vision. The Dakota, Mandan-Hidatsa, Assiniboine,
and Gross-Ventre also cut off finger joints and lacerated themselves for the
same purpose.
In addition to simply establishing a relationship with a guardian spirit
while proving themselves men, men of the Great Plains constituted,
redressed, or regulated many other relationships through vision quest
torture.

Everywhere, even in those tribes where every man was expected to

fast once in his life specifically for an individual guardian, the vision
was sought also by the same means on continually recurring occasions
– that is in mourning; as an instrument of revenge on one’s enemies;
on account of a vow made in sickness or danger for oneself or one’s
relative; on initiation into certain societies; and as a preliminary to a
war party. On all these occasions, the seeker ordinarily received his
power or commands directly, without specifically acquiring a guardian
spirit.
(Benedict, 1922: 12)

Interestingly, among the Blackfoot, it was important to own medicine

bundles based on visions, but it mattered little whether one had these
visions oneself, or purchased them from another:

The visions themselves could be bought and sold. Every man went out
at least once in his life seeking a vision on his own account. Many
failed, so the Blackfoot repeatedly assert. But whether he met with
success or failure, he must also buy other men’s visions for his social
prestige. They were the basis of the tribal economic system; the greater
proportion of Blackfoot capital was invested in these readily salable
commodities. Investment in them, as Dr. Wissler puts it, was
equivalent to money in the savings-bank… In telling his story he
makes absolutely no distinction in the use of the first person between
those visions he has bought and those he has fasted for … what he has
really bought being the songs, the taboos, the “power,” and the right of
performing the ceremony that goes with it.
(Benedict, 1922: 17)

To a lesser degree, the Crow, Arapaho, Hidatsa, and Winnebago also bought
and sold “the blessings of the spirit,” and in many tribes the vision or the
medicine bundle based on the vision was inherited (p. 18). Hence, as in
other contexts in other cultures, MP relationships can be a means to
establish or enhance AR relationships.
In these practices, like people in a number of other cultures, American
Indians sacrificed their own bodies in order to establish an AR relationship
with a deity whom they expected to guide and protect them all their lives. In
the Sun Dance they simultaneously suffered for the welfare of the entire
community, enhancing CS bonds.

Christian monastic asceticism

As the preaching of Jesus Christ spread in the first centuries after his death,
men seeking to become one with God imposed on themselves an asceticism
that was often agonizing. By around 200 BCE, a variety of hermits and
ascetic communities had formed in the eastern Mediterranean region,
particularly in Egypt and Syria (Hamman, 1977). Like modern monasteries,
the ascetic communities, most of which were exclusively male, were
cenobitic – members ate, slept, worked, and prayed together in a CS
community. They characteristically were celibate and often abstained from
meat and wine, or fasted (Rousseau, 1985). In Greek and Syriac (the
language of the earliest Christian communities in Syria and Mesopotamia),
the first texts that describe a person dedicated exclusively to the religious
life (monachos in Greek and îhîdâyâ in Syriac) depict them as celibate
ascetics (Guillaumont, 1979: 218–22). They modeled their cenobitism on
the lives of the Apostles. Early Syriac ascetics were “single ones”: they
gave up their relations with their families, single-mindedly severed
themselves from worldly interests, and committed themselves to Jesus. The
concept and the practice were based on an idea of oneness or unity:
undivided focus on God, in order to unite in CS communion with God. In
particular, by the second century in Syria, baptism – which was closely
associated with cenobitism – was seen as a means of becoming one with
and in Christ (Winkler, 1982). Baptism dissolved the separations and
distinctions among individuals, unifying and reintegrating persons into their
original totality. Uniting with others in a cebobitic community was both a
means and a result of this union with God. The sex and the food that these
early monks gave up were not evils in themselves, but only relative to their
single-minded dedication to God (Guillaumont, 1979: 222).
 Consecrating oneself to Christ and entering the Covenant through
baptism, converts were exhorted in a language of military struggle or
athletic combat to prepare for conflict; they will be joined in Christ but
separated from the rest of the world. These early ascetics sought union with
Christ and often referred to themselves as bridegrooms of Christ. Many of
the first Syrian ascetics were probably initially wanderers, without the
architectural or institutionalized structures of later monasteries. But their
conception of themselves as communally united in Christ bound them
together as strongly as in the more tangible monasteries. Writing in France
early in the fifth century, Cassian reported on the Egyptian monastic
tradition where he had studied: he wrote that “the ultimate end of monastic
life is the Kingdom of God, that is, contemplative union with God in
prayer” (paraphrased by Veilleux, 1986: 304). Augustine’s (354–430 CE)
precept for the monastic community was that it must form a single heart,
extending a common soul to God. This requires both celibacy and fasting;
Chapter 5 of his Rules begins, “Subdue the flash by fasting and abstinence
from food and drink as much as your health permits” (Augustine, 1961).
This self-deprivation was often agonizing to sustain, but motivated by their
religious devotion, many sought this ascetic life and many actually
managed to sustain it.

Christian and Muslim self-flagellation

Christians and Muslims have sometimes gone beyond ascetic suffering:
some believers inflict pain and injury on themselves to connect in CS
relationships in which their suffering makes them become one with their
God (with sometimes also an element of AR devotion), while also bonding
with others who suffer in the same manner – and perhaps gaining in AR
status when other worshippers hold them in awe (Glucklich, 2001). As we
noted in Chapter 1, religious mortification of the flesh was a central practice
in medieval Christianity.

Practically all the holy women of the later Middle Ages, nuns as well
as Beguines and laywomen, practiced the self-infliction of pain and
welcomed divinely inflicted suffering. Men were equally zealous, with
extreme cases such as Heinrich Suso, who carved a cross in his own
flesh.
 (Cohen, 2010: 27)

Self-destructive religious violence … include[s] fasting or denying

oneself particular foods, sleep deprivation, isolation or silence,
enforced celibacy, hitting, cutting, scarring, piercing, burning,
whipping, castration or amputation of body parts, holding awkward or
painful poses, carrying weights, ingesting drugs or poisons, drawing
the blood, and subjecting oneself to beating or torture and ultimately
suicide or presenting oneself for execution.
(Eller, 2010: 118).

Such practices became institutionalized and routinized:

When religion becomes an important administrative and ceremonial

adjunct to the state, as well as the basis for community organization,
then the influence of ascetic cruelty becomes coercive. Not only is the
ascetic individual rewarded with high status (and certain opportunities
for power and wealth), but asceticism becomes a mark of membership
in the community, and is enforced upon everyone by external authority.
(Collins, 1974: 435)

The icon of Christianity is the crucified Christ; many Christians wear a

cross, the instrument of excruciatingly painful, slow execution. For
Christians, the violence that Christ endured, his self-sacrifice, is considered
the greatest act of virtue in all creation. His horrific pain is the crux of
Christianity: God’s sending his son to be sacrificed and Christ’s redemption
of humanity through his suffering on the cross define Christian virtue (for
the history of this idea, see Fulton, 2002). To emulate Christ’s suffering is to
share it, and to partake in his virtue. So Christians have long celebrated the
suffering of martyrs and saints, whose torture and execution make them
paragons of virtue (Korsten, 2009). The greater their pain and suffering, the
greater their virtue – and the more intense the CS relationship they create
with Christ. In effect, Christians look up to saints because they nobly
suffered for Christ: metarelationally, they are elevated in an AR relationship
with other Christians by their extraordinary sacrifice to sustain their CS
relationship with God while refusing to subordinate themselves in an AR
relationship to the lay authorities who tortured them. For example, the very
popular thirteenth-century English South English Legendary consists
largely of narratives of beating, torture by molten metals or ovens, and
death – for example, by decapitation (Crachiolo, 2004). The readers
evidently revered and relished the extreme and prolonged pain, the
gruesomely graphic depiction of which is the essence of such hagiography.
This focus on the virtues of suffering continued for centuries; Gallonio’s
Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, first published in 1591 and
subsequently very popular across Europe, was widely reprinted and
translated. Furthermore, it is through the suffering of the martyrs and indeed
all Christians that the Church wins its glorious victory not just in this
historical world, but ultimately and transcendentally (Korsten, 2009). “The
infliction of pain and the violation of life is not just the order of the day, but
is needed in order to produce that world and propel it towards its end,”
salvation (Korsten, 2009: 400).
But self-sacrifice was not limited to saints. Early in the second
millennium CE, monks in monastic orders such as the Franciscans and
Dominicans began scourging themselves; this practice gradually spread to
lay Christians (Eller, 2010: 126–9). Painful practices became integrated into
everyday religiosity in the late Middle Ages. In early modern England, pain
was “a form of imitatio Christi, a key ingredient of Christian identity, and a
source of mystical insight and transformation” (van Dijkhuizen, 2009: 207).
Even in nineteenth-century New Mexico, one extreme self-mortifying
brotherhood used a great variety of self-torture; initiation into the Brothers
of the Blood included having the emblem of the brotherhood carved into
one’s back (Eller, 2010: 127).
Worshipping through flagellating oneself is also prominent in Islam.
During Muharram, Muslims fast for one or more days, and Shias in
particular commemorate the death of Muhammad’s grandson Husain ibn
Ali in the succession battle at Karbala in 680 CE (Chelkowski, 2010;
Pinault, 1992). Shias identify themselves with Hussain as the legitimate heir
of the Prophet, while Sunnis identify themselves with the lineage of Yazid,
the ruler who ordered the killing of Hussain and his followers. Shia men
(especially in public processions or mosques) and women (in groups
gathered out of sight in a household) share Hussain’s suffering and exhibit
their devotion to him and his people by matam, beating their chests in
synchrony with each other, often to the point of causing significant
bruising. In India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, men also
flagellate themselves by zanier kea matam with chains, some of which
incorporate knives or razors. They experience and display the pain and
bloodshed they inflict on themselves

as a symbolic demonstration of love for Hussain with the purpose of

earning rewards in Paradise; it indicates remorse at the community’s
inability to prevent Hussain’s martyrdom and places men among those
martyred with Hussain. Zanjir ka matam expresses at the collective
level the courage to endure persecution and at the personal level the
“desire to demonstrate physically the willingness to suffer the kind of
wounds which they would have incurred had they fought at Karbala.”
(Schubel, 1993: 93, quotation [corrected by ApF] in text by Abou
Zahab, 2008: 108–9)

Thus, this self-mortification is an act of CS empathy and compassion for

Hussain and his followers and has also now become an act of making the
flagellants all one together in CS by their shared pain, injury, and scars –
marking Shia identity and at the same time marking Pakistani Punjabis and
others who perform it as “true” Muslims, more Muslim than Arab Muslims
(Chelkowski, 2010).
In sum, across many cultures people show their devotion to spirits or
gods by causing themselves serious pain or harm. Self-torture and self-
wounding are acts of devotion to deities or spirits, who are moved to care
for humans who so sacrifice themselves. Secondarily, those who wound
themselves together, or in the same way, become one with each other
through the blood they shed in common and the common modifications and
markings they make to or on their bodies. People conceive of and create CS
relationships by consubstantiation: making their bodies alike (Fiske, 2004;
Fiske and Schubert, 2012). Social selves are indexed in the physical bodies,
so that when their bodies become the same, participants become bonded as
one social person, each equivalent to all. The blood that people shed, the
wounds and scars that people share, connect them to each other. In the
Christian tradition, furthermore, the wounds that people inflict on
themselves make their bodies resemble the crucified body of Christ, and
hence indexically connect their selves to Him. In Muharram, Shias’
wounding themselves make their bodies like the body of the martyred
Hussain, thereby becoming one with him in pain and suffering. Other self-
injurious and self-mortifying practices function like blood sacrifices of
animals or humans: the pain and blood are offered up to deities and spirits,
effecting experientially “direct” corporeal connections with them.
There is always a more or less instrumental facet of sacrifice: it is aimed
at obtaining the worshipper’s or others’ good fortune and relief from
suffering or danger. But sacrifice seeks welfare by constituting a social
relationship between the sacrificer and the recipient of the sacrifice.
Moreover, more fundamentally, regardless of the material or practical
outcome, sacrifice is a pious duty. Subjectively, killing the animal or human
victim or harming oneself are reverentially virtuous acts. The
phenomenology of sacrifice is devotional – obeisant devotion to the
supernatural being. The perpetrator is morally motivated and morally
obligated to harm or kill because in many religious traditions sacrificial
violence is the only way to constitute the most fundamental, essential,
necessary, and sacred relationships between humans and their ancestors,
spirits, and deities.

Theoretical elaboration
BERNARD SHAW: “Governor, If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,
would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that
I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see
any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and
more effective ways to deal with violent crime.”

(exchange between CNN’s Bernard Shaw and Democratic candidate

Michael Dukakis during the second presidential debate prior to the
1988 election)

When Dukakis unemotionally and without hesitation stated that he would

be opposed to the death penalty even for a man who raped and killed his
wife, his poll numbers plummeted overnight. On the one hand, this is just
yet another example of support for morally motivated violence. Capital
punishment’s lack of deterrent effect is inconsequential to those who think
that a killer deserves to be killed in retribution. On the other hand, Dukakis’
response and the consequences that followed reveal important aspects of the
nature of beliefs, theories, and claims. Perhaps Dukakis should have
responded by saying that although he’s committed to the moral principle
that we should not kill anyone, no matter what, there are always going to be
easy cases and difficult cases. Defending the thesis that killing criminals is
wrong, no matter what their crime, is easier when the crime is robbing a
bank, or even killing a stranger in the heat of an argument. It’s much more
difficult when the crime is violating and murdering the person in the world
who is closest to you, the person you should have protected. Many people
intuitively feel that the death penalty must be warranted when someone has
killed a person they love. But for Dukakis, being opposed to the death
penalty in all cases means being opposed to it in all cases, no matter how
horrible or vile. Part of having a clearly defined position or theory means
putting aside your intuitions and feelings sometimes, and committing
yourself to a theory that captures not only the easy cases but also the
difficult cases that have the same logical structure.
We have reached the midway point of the book, having characterized the
moral motives and relationship-constitutive phases of defense, punishment,
vengeance, fighting for respect and solidarity, violence ordered by and
committed by authorities, honor violence, violence in war, and violent
sacrifice. In presenting virtuous violence theory to colleagues, we have
found that these are relatively easy cases to accept as morally motivated. In
the second half of the book, we examine violent practices that were more
difficult for our colleagues to accept as morally motivated, including
torture, homicide, suicide, ethnic violence, intimate partner violence, rape,
bodily mutilation, violence in mourning, and robbery. So before we move
on to those topics, let us elaborate on virtuous violence theory to address
questions and concerns that may be starting to come up in the reader’s
mind. In Chapter 9, we more fully explain our definition of moral
psychology and what it includes, how people determine what is moral and
what is immoral, and how people cognitively process moral motives for
violence. In Chapter 10, we consider other approaches to explaining
motives for violence, showing how virtuous violence theory complements
and deepens these theories.

1 The Old Testament also depicts struggles over the right to offer sacrifices,
with all that this right implied for AR relationships among humans
(Friedman, 1997).

2 A moral framework for battle that resonates with nineteenth- and

twentieth-century American motivational ideologies; cf. Marvin and Ingle,
1999.
9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries,
what guides it, and how is it computed?

Defining the moral space

Virtuous violence theory is based on a scientific model of moral
psychology, and in the same sense that the scientific concept of mass is not
identical to the folk concept of weight, virtuous violence theory does not
encompass everything that is entailed by the Western folk model of
“moral,” nor is it limited to just what the everyday, folk concept denotes.
Indeed, it could not do so because the folk model is different in every
culture, and varies from person to person within any culture. In every
culture that has a word that more or less translates as “moral,” the term has
a unique scope, unique presuppositions, and unique implications. And not
every culture does have one word, or a set of synonyms, that neatly
corresponds to the English moral. So to understand human “moral”
psychology, we need to formulate a construct that aptly captures a natural
kind in the world, even if no vernacular language does so precisely.
However, virtuous violence theory is intended to capture much of what is
meant in lay terms by the English “moral” and congruent terms in other
languages, while still maintaining the advantages of a theoretically derived,
deductively coherent enterprise. If virtuous violence theory encompasses a
broad domain of important psychosocial phenomena that can be clearly and
simply explained in terms of morally motivated relationship regulation, it is
a good theory, regardless of whether the phenomena that it encompasses
correspond precisely to the fuzzy and contentious folk domain of “moral”
as any particular person in any particular culture uses that term, or
something more or less corresponding to it. The scientific concept of force
does not map exactly onto the (polysemic and fuzzy) folk concept of
“force” in any culture, but it is nonetheless an invaluable concept – indeed,
much better for describing and explaining physics than the folk concept.
There are no vernacular terms at all for “Higgs boson,” “carbon ring,”
“insular cortex,” “sexual selection,” “analog magnitude system,” “Nash
equilibrium,” or “plate tectonics” – but science wouldn’t get very far if it
didn’t construct valid technical terms for these important entities. To
understand the world, we need technical terms that cut nature at its joints.
We have defined morality as the intentions, motivations, evaluations, and
conjoined emotions that operate to realize ideal models of social
relationships in a culturally meaningful manner. This definition seems to us
to be a valid description of a natural kind in the world. But, of course, our
definition doesn’t precisely match the vernacular usage of the word “moral”
in everyday English discourse, academic discourse, or research methods.
Rather, we arrived at this understanding from a social-functional
perspective and with reference to the theory of natural selection.
Homo sapiens engages in extraordinarily cooperative and complex social
relationships (Fiske, 1991). These relationships permit humans to adapt to
an exceptionally diverse range of ecosystems, and indeed to create whole
new ecosystems. Unlike the great majority of mammals, people’s fitness
and psychological well-being are deeply dependent on the nature and
quality of their social relationships. But sustaining these relationships is
challenging because cooperation frequently requires the cooperators to
exercise sufficient self-control to forgo immediate selfish satisfactions,
make sometimes arduous efforts to contribute, and inhibit temptations to
cheat (Fiske, 2002, 2010; Frank, 1988; Joyce, 2007). To sustain adaptive
social relationships, the cooperator must consistently control hunger, thirst,
pain, the need to regulate her temperature, exhaustion, sleepiness, sexual
desires, and fear, while exerting herself to do what must be done for the
sake of the relationship. The selfish benefits of defection (food, sex, rest,
safety, and comfortable ambient temperature) are certain and immediately
present, while the benefits of cooperation, though much greater, are often
far in the future, distributed over long intervals, and uncertain. And the
nonsocial selfish needs are experienced as very intense because they are
deeply embedded in the basic mechanisms of the brain by hundreds of
millions of years of years of natural selection on mostly solitary organisms.
To counteract and overcome these basic asocial organic needs in order to
enable people to sustain the adaptive social relationships that humans
specifically need, human social-relational motives must often be even more
intense than motives for individual well-being and survival (Fiske, 2002,
2010; Rai and Fiske, 2011). People subjectively experience these motives to
constitute social relationships as sociomoral emotions such as love,
belonging, awe, pride, the need for equality, or the desire for
proportionality. Other sociomoral motives are experienced as anger,
outrage, moral disgust, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and loneliness. The core
thesis of virtuous violence theory is that any and all of these and other
emotionally experienced moral motives sometimes impel people to regulate
their social relationships violently.
The moral motives people experience depend on which of the RMs they
employ and the local cultural preos that govern the implementation of the
models. When people regulate their relationships through actions that
accord with RMs and cultural preos, they are acting morally; when they
regulate relationships through actions that violate RMs and cultural preos,
they are acting immorally. Both types of acts regulate relationships, but
whether the regulation is moral or immoral depends on the RMs and
cultural preos that participants and observers are using.

Distinguishing between moral and immoral

relationship regulation
Preos are the cultural prototypes, paragons, practices, precedents,
paradigms, proscriptions, precepts, proverbs, and principles that guide
people in implementing the universal, innate models. The structure of the
RMs is abstract: it doesn’t specify which model should be applied to
coordinate any specific aspect of a particular interaction in a given situation
with whom, how, when, where, and with respect to what entities. Use of the
models differs across cultures and people use different models in different
situations. Combining one of the four RMs with the culturally appropriate
preos determines a complete RM to generate, interpret, evaluate, and
coordinate some aspect of a social interaction. Hence, whether any behavior
is moral, immoral, or non-moral depends on whether it regulates
relationships according to the cultural preos people are using.
Suppose a guy loves a girl, and does everything to make her happy. He
attentively figures out what pleases her, gives her thoughtful gifts, listens
with concern, sensitively responds to her moods, cheers her up when she’s
down, takes care of her when she’s ill, apologizes and makes amends when
he offends her, and puts aside his work and other obligations when she
needs him. He gently initiates sex, pleasing her, and she invites him to
continue. In our terms, he regulates the relationship. Suppose her parents
are fully aware of the relationship and they, too, consent to all this. It is all
morally laudatory. He’s 25 and she’s 25. Or suppose she’s 19. OK. Or she’s
17 years and 364 days old – not quite legal in many US states, but legal in
Canada and some US states. Hmm? If she’s 11 and they’re American, his
actions are clearly immoral – the same actions, with the same relationship-
regulatory intent, that would be morally commendable if she were 25. If
she’s 7, what he’s doing is evil – in most cultures. But in some cultures men
or boys marry very young girls, and it’s pretty much up to the husband
when and how he treats her sexually. The cutoff between virtuous and
immoral ages, and the perceived rights of the man as a function of his
relationship with the girl, vary greatly across history and culture. The age of
consent in Asian nations varies from 13 to 21, in Europe from 13 to 18, and
so forth – but in some jurisdictions it depends on how close in age the
participants are, or whether they are of the same gender. Likewise, the
kinship relations that separate moral from immoral sex or marriage vary
greatly from culture to culture and across history in any one culture. In
some cultures, the man’s actions would be immoral if she were his father’s
brother’s daughter – they’d be “siblings” – while in other cultures she
would be the ideal bride to court. In a number of cultures, incestuous sexual
relations that would be totally immoral under ordinary circumstances are
expectable and tolerable, even laughable, when they occur on special
occasions – such as a funeral. In some cultures, such as among traditional
Hindu, sexual relationships with a widow are immoral, regardless of the
participants’ feelings. Yet, among the Moose of Burkina Faso, a widow
must marry a brother of her late husband or one of his sons by another wife,
while in other cultures marrying your late husband’s son would be incest. In
a monogamous culture, a person may marry and have sex with only one
partner at a time, while in most cultures, either men or women hope to have
multiple spouses at the same time, and have sex with any of them – and
others esteem a man who has scores of spouses, like a West African chief.
In some cultures at some points in history, men having sex with men was or
is immoral, while in other cultures it’s only morally degrading for the
person who is penetrated – the penetrator is esteemed for his conquest.
It’s not that sex is moral or immoral, per se: it’s whether the cultural
implementations of the basic RMs prescribe or proscribe sex between
people in the specific type of relationship in question.
Even the most disinterested, reasonable, intelligent, well-trained people
from the same segment of the same community in the same culture often
disagree about how to apply the most carefully crafted, propositionally
articulated laws to particular events or practices. Cultural preos are usually
much less clear than laws: indeed, they are often quite ill-specified and
ambiguous. Like laws, there are typically many different preos that could be
applied to any given situation. Not everyone is reasonable and intelligent.
People rarely have much, if any, explicit training in applying most preos.
No one is ever really disinterested if he is participating in a relationship as
perpetrator or victim, or engaged in any relationship with either. So there is
always both latitude and ambiguity about how to apply preos to implement
any RM. This means that morality consists of intentions, motives, emotions,
and judgments about realizing RMs according to the cultural preos as the
perceiver interprets and applies the preos to the situation.
The more cultural consensus there is about the preos for implementing a
RM in a given situation, and the more closely the person’s intentions
correspond with that consensus, the more his or her actions will appear
moral to observers. The difference between moral and immoral motives
from the perpetrator’s perspective is in whether the action is intended to
realize a RM in a way that the perpetrator perceives to be congruent with
the relevant cultural preos, or whether, on the contrary, the action is
inconsistent with those preos. In the examples above, all of the romantic
actions regulate the relationship, but whether they are perceived by
participants and observers as wonderful or evil depends on whether the
actions fit the operative cultural preos as construed by participants and
observers.
In a number of African cultures, if a man wants to have sex with a
women to whom he is not married, he should give her money. That’s the
morally correct, polite, and proper thing to do (Swidler and Watkins, 2007;
ApF field notes). But in the West, paying someone for sex is immoral – if
it’s an explicit and direct quid pro quo. However, buying a woman an
expensive bouquet, taking her to an elegant restaurant, getting good seats at
a pricey show, and flattering her might do the trick (so to speak). Whether
the man pays money directly, or to purchase things for the woman, or pays
nothing at all but is simply nice to her without placing her in the awkward
position of saying “no” after he’s shown her such a good time, he’s trying to
regulate the relationship. What’s moral to observers is either paying
directly, paying indirectly, or just being nice, depending on the preos of the
particular culture; and what’s moral in the perpetrator’s motives depends on
his interpretation of the preos. There’s nothing about the features of the act,
as such, that gives the act its moral quality. It is moral in the eyes of an
evaluator if she perceives it to be congruent with the cultural preos
(regardless of whether the comparison is intuitive and unreflective, or
explicitly analyzed and articulated).
Violence is morally motivated when the perpetrator intends the violence
to regulate a relationship in a manner that is congruent with the cultural
preos as the perpetrator perceives them. Suppose a child intentionally
throws his father’s watch off a boat. The father, who is holding a rod,
regulates the relationship: he punishes the child by applying the rod he’s
holding to the child’s posterior once with the force of 1 N, which is barely
perceptible, and perhaps less than the force of the rod if it were merely
resting on the child. Not worth mentioning; certainly the prerogative of the
father in nearly any culture. What about striking the child’s posterior four
times with a force of 4 N: this makes a slight impression but is not exactly
painful. Fathers ought to regulate their relationships with their sons: it’s
their moral duty. What about 16 blows with a force of 16 N each? In many
cultures, perhaps in the low range of what a father or schoolmaster would
be expected to do to correct a minor infraction, and would be esteemed and
praised for doing – he’s being the perfect father. Now 64 blows of 64 N
each might be harsh but in some cultures, perhaps proper punishment for a
boy destroying his father’s good watch. But if the father strikes the
delinquent boy with 256 blows of 256 N, or 1,024 blows of 1,024 N, the
punishment has gone too far – it’s cruel and unusual. It’s all a matter of
degree. And, of course, the morality of the punishment depends on whether
the son is 14, 4, or 2 years old, or 6 months old. In each case the father is
regulating the relationship. But at the low end of severity and the upper end
of the boy’s age, he’s not seen as being sufficiently strict – a loving and
responsible parent might be expected not to spare the rod and spoil the
child. At the high end of severity and the low end of the boy’s age, the
father is committing child abuse, or murder. At any level of violence,
however, he may be aiming to regulate the relationship, and in the
mechanical form of the actions themselves there’s no qualitative difference
between the moral and the immoral levels of violence. Of course, the preos
for parental discipline aren’t specified in newtons, and don’t specifically
mention one’s grandfather’s rose-gold pocket watch inscribed with his
personal motto. So how is a morally motivated father to know how hard to
cane his child, especially if he forgot to bring along his force gauge?
Cultures differ in their approval of men having sex with young women or
girls of a given age, depending on their kinship relation, and in their norms
about whipping children. Every culture has standards for how old a girl
should be before she has sex, and every culture has standards for the
amount of force a parent may and should apply in punishing children for
transgressions of varying severity. Informants from a culture feel that an act
is moral when it’s calibrated to the preos for the relationship; that is, when
it’s congruent with the cultural precedents, practices, prototypes, paradigms,
precepts, principles, proscriptions, and prescriptions for implementing the
relationship. The congruence of any act or practice with the preos of a given
culture or subculture is always more or less ambiguous, especially at the
margins. Within a community there is often a fair degree of consensus about
the morality of particular acts, but not necessarily unanimity – differences
in perception and perspective are ubiquitous.
What this means is that in any given instance in any given culture, any
given person may feel that any given action to regulate a relationship is
more or less moral, depending on the perceiver’s perception of the degree
of congruence between the action and those cultural preos that they
perceived to be relevant. In a given culture, a father aiming to regulate his
relationship with his son may strike him too lightly, too hard, or just right.
When it’s just right, it’s perceived as moral. But it’s all relationship
regulation, whether it’s too light, too hard, or just right.
To regulate a relationship with a deity, people in many cultures fast, as,
for example, during Lent or Ramadan. In some cultures under certain
circumstances, such as among mature Jain men, it is virtuous to abstain
from all food, and consequently die. In most religions, that would not be the
right moral choice, and, indeed, it would be improper to fast at all if it
imperiled one’s health. The precedents and prescriptions of each religion
specify who should fast, how much, and when. But however much or little
the devotee fasts, it’s all aimed at regulating her relationship with a deity –
even if she does it more, or less, than the preos of her culture specify, as
she, or her sister, or experts variously interpret the preos.
What these examples demonstrate is that from an objective perspective
independent of the culture or of the actor’s intentions and perceptions, there
is no qualitative, typological, categorical, or morphological difference
between relationship regulation that is moral and relationship regulation
that is immoral. The morality or immorality of the relationship-regulation
motivation just depends on whether and how closely the actor intends her
action to correspond to the preos she perceives to be relevant, in
conjunction with the cultural validity of her perception of how the preos
apply to the situation. As we show throughout this book, violent
relationship-regulatory actions that in one culture or in one historical epoch
are moral may be immoral in another culture or in another historical epoch.
The acts are the same; what makes them moral or immoral are the cultural
preos that people implement in order to compare the act with an ideal RM.
At any point in any culture, whether relationship-regulatory violence is
moral or immoral, and to what degree, depends on whether and how
precisely the form and intensity of the violence is congruent with the preos
people apply in evaluating it. Moral relationship-regulatory violence does
not differ in kind from immoral relationship-regulatory violence: the same
violent relationship-regulatory act may be moral in one culture and immoral
in another, or even within one culture may be deemed moral or immoral
depending on which preos people use when they evaluate the violence, how
they weigh alternative preos, and how they apply them to particular
circumstances and acts.
The social relationships that people want to constitute generally are the
relationships that are culturally prescribed, ideally prototypical, or
traditionally precedent – that is, the relationships that conform to the local
cultural preos. When people try to constitute the social relationships that are
culturally prescribed for them, in accordance with prevailing preos, their
relationship-regulation motives are, by definition, moral. When they try to
create relationships that are discordant with culturally prescribed
relationships – that conflict with the preos for it – their relationship-
regulation motives are immoral. So “moral motives” are motives to
constitute culturally prescribed relationships in a culturally prescribed
manner. When people try to regulate a culturally prescribed relationship
through culturally prescribed violence, their motives for the violence are
moral.

What are the cultural preos delimiting violence?

The fact that people sometimes are morally motivated to violently regulate
their relationships does not imply that they believe that they are free to do
any kind of violence to regulate any relationship. While violence regulates
relationships, relationship preos also regulate violence. This “regulation”
may consist of traditional practices, activities that people perform without
complexly articulated “reasons” but nonetheless a strong sense of tradition.
One feels that, according to tradition, one must do this just as it has always
been done, that doing this is crucial to being a certain kind of person, and
that it would be somehow terrible not to do it just so. In an intermediate
form, this culturally informed social-relational “regulation” of violence may
be articulated in discourse about the violence, its proper forms, and some
reasons for doing violence and for certain people doing it in certain ways in
certain circumstances. At the other pole of this dimension, violence may be
fully rationalized, in the Weberian sense that there are legitimately
established, propositionally formulated, written rules duly disseminated to
the proper perpetrators, such as police and penal personnel. For instance, in
South Sudan, the Nuer violently defended themselves against insult or theft,
redressing any wrong by retaliating:

The club and the spear are the sanctions of rights.

Nuer are at once prepared to fight if they are wronged or insulted,
unless kinship, or great disparity in age, restrains them.
It is the knowledge that a Nuer is brave and will stand up against
aggression and enforce his rights by club and spear that ensures respect
for person and property.
(Evans-Pritchard, 1940: 169–71)

The Nuer are very quick to regulate their relationships violently, but they
don’t employ just any random, impulsive violence to do so. When Nuer
men of the same village or camp fight, they limit themselves to clubs (and
stop before they kill). In contrast, men disputing with men from different
Nuer villages, or raiding them, use spears, but do not spear women or
children. However, fighting against foreigners, Nuer men do spear old
women and children, or club them to death and throw their bodies on the
burning huts (Evans-Pritchard, 1940: 128, 151–2). These rules regulating
Nuer violence are not written, orally compiled, or systematically integrated
– except by the ethnographers. Similarly, across cultures, most of the
“rules” regulating the implementation of RMs are not explicitly articulated
most of the time, and not even verbally taught to children – children learn
them though observation, imitation, play, and incremental participation in
community practices. Most preos are not propositionally formulated and
many are not explicitly articulated.
Nevertheless, more explicit preos do exist, especially in modern literate
cultures. For example, in just wars, when legitimately commanded to do so,
soldiers are morally obligated to kill the enemy – but not with poison gas,
and not after the enemy has surrendered. The 53-page NATO Rules of
Engagement Manual MC 362–1 governs how much force and what kind of
force may be used when and how and against whom under what
circumstances. You’re supposed to keep those rules in mind when deciding
whether to pull the trigger. Similarly, US soldiers carry a Rules of
Engagement Card that tells them what force they may use in what
circumstances against whom. For example, in the 1991 Desert Storm
operation, soldiers carried a card with text including the following:

A. Do not engage anyone who has surrendered, is out of battle due to

sickness or wounds, is shipwrecked, or is an aircrew member
descending by parachute from a disabled aircraft.
B. Avoid harming civilians unless necessary to save US lives. Do not
fire into civilian populated areas or buildings which are not
defended or being used for military purposes.
C. Hospitals, churches, shrines, schools, museums, national
monuments, and other historical or cultural sites will not be
engaged except in self defense.
D. Hospitals will be given special protection. Do not engage hospitals
unless the enemy uses the hospital to commit acts harmful to US
forces, and then only after giving a warning and allowing a
 reasonable time to expire before engaging, if the tactical situation
permits.
E. Booby traps may be used to protect friendly positions or to impede
the progress of enemy forces. They may not be used on civilian
personal property. They will be recovered and destroyed when the
military necessity for their use no longer exists.

In short, violence is moral when it’s done right, but immoral and illegal
when it violates the rules of engagement. Similarly, in American football, a
linebacker is revered for decking the quarterback and even breaking his
bones with a fair hit – but not with brass knuckles, and not after the whistle
blows. To illustrate the precision with which violence is regulated, consider
the core of the National Football League rules concerning player contact,
which runs 5,366 words (www.nfl.com/rulebook). It includes text such as
the following:

Article 2: Illegal Crackback Block.

It is an Illegal Crackback Block if a defensive player is contacted
below the waist within an area five yards on either side of the line of
scrimmage, including within close-line play, by an offensive player
who is moving toward the position from which the ball was snapped,
and:
1) The offensive player was aligned more than two yards outside
an offensive tackle (flexed) when the ball was snapped; or
2) The offensive player was in a backfield position when the ball
was snapped and moved to a position more than two yards
outside an offensive tackle.

Note 1: If there is a broken play, significantly changing the original

direction, the crackback block is legal. When the change in direction is
the result of a designed play (reverse), the restriction remains in effect.

Again, the quartermaster or bo’s’n on a nineteenth-century military ship

was legally obliged and morally motivated to enforce discipline by flogging
a disobedient sailor – but he should inflict precisely the number of lashes
the captain commanded, no more and no less. In initiation ceremonies in
which boys achieve manhood and are admired for their stoic courage when
their penes are cut while they remain imperturbable, the circumciser should
cut quickly with a sharp blade – not saw slowly with a dull rusty one. Police
may and must use force to apprehend and control a suspect – but not
“excessive” force. Duelists win honor when they bravely face their
opponents in a fair contest; so when one is supposed to be dueling with
swords, it would be ruinously dishonorable to kill one’s opponent with a
shotgun. But in some feuding cultures, it’s quite proper for a group of men
to ambush and kill a lone, unarmed enemy. Regardless of the degree of
articulate explication in these cases, the preos that guide legitimate violence
are, indeed, guidelines that people rely on to specify when and how to
implement morally motivated violence.

Going beyond the culturally prescribed limits to

violence
People sometimes overdo violence. Morally motivated to violently regulate
relationships, people may go too far, being excessively violent: they may do
harm beyond what the cultural preos allow. A man discovering his lover
having sex with another man might be culturally condoned for hitting him,
but, in fact, he kills him. Or he might be culturally condoned for killing him
on the spot, but instead he tortures him to death over two weeks. Sometimes
violence is morally motivated but not quite justified with respect to local
precedents, prototypes, precepts, or prescriptions. A boxer receives an
illegal punch; he should wait and let the referee call a foul, but instead he
strikes back with a retaliatory illegal punch. Fighter planes from hostile
nations who are not at war nevertheless play chicken, threatening each
other, testing the limits, and then one pilot overreacts, stretching the rules of
engagement past what others would consider reasonable under the
circumstances: he fires a missile shooting down the other plane. Here the
motives are moral, the intent is to regulate a relationship, but an impartial
hearing of the case would convict the perpetrator. We can describe such
events with phrases such as “got too emotional,” “was carried away by his
emotions,” “the strain was too much,” “the situation got the better of him,”
“things got out of hand,” “he used poor judgment,” or “he lost his head.”
But whether we characterize the action as “loss of self-control,”
“impulsive,” or “automatic,” – or just say, as the distinguished personality
psychologist Donald Fiske used to put it, “he was a damn fool” – however
we characterize the action, the motives are the same ones we’ve been
exploring throughout the book: moral, and aimed at regulating social
relationships. These are just cases where moral motives were
misimplemented: the action had the same motives and intentions as in all
virtuous violence. The perpetrators experienced the motives as moral
emotions and felt they had to do what they did, or they just did it without
quite knowing how it happened, but by the consensual standards of their
community they didn’t get it quite right. Anglo-American jurisprudence
often uses a legal fiction, “the reasonable person.” A reasonable person gets
the cultural preos right, doing just the right amount of the right kind of
violence in the right circumstances. Real humans with moral motives don’t
always manage to get their violence right on the mark.
In short, there is good violence and bad violence. Violence of the “right”
kind perpetrated in the “right” way in the “right” situations against the
“right” people is morally good, legitimately regulating properly specified
social relationships. The “wrong” kind of violence, or violence perpetrated
in the “wrong” way, in the “wrong” situations, or against the “wrong”
people not only fails to constitute those same relationships, but it also
transgresses them. What is right or wrong violence depends on the cultural
implementations of the RMs (Fiske, 2000; Rai and Fiske, 2011, 2012).

Is morally motivated violence rational and

deliberative or emotional and impulsive?
Our core purpose in this book is to show that violence is morally motivated
to make relationships right. That is, our theory concerns the impetus and
aim of violence. We are less concerned with the complex and varied
processes that lead from motivation to action. However, we do need to
consider the basic parameters of these processes insofar as they affect
whether and when people ultimately perpetrate violence, rather than
regulating their relationships non-violently.
Humans have many relatively simple cognitive heuristics that evoke
responses tuned to very specific aspects of immediate experience. Some of
these impulsive heuristics are phylogenetically old cognitive systems whose
function is to directly maximize survival and reproduction in the short run:
flight from danger, grabbing food when hungry, copulating when the right
opportunity arises with a promising partner, going to sleep when exhausted.
But to make social relationships work, humans have also evolved relatively
simple social-relational cognitive heuristics that evoke emotional responses
tuned to very specific aspects of immediate experience of relationships. A
crying baby evokes intense emotions that motivate kin caretaking, great
prowess evokes awe, and a generous favor or gift evokes gratitude (Simão
and Seibt, 2014). Likewise, an insulting blow evokes outrage that motivates
vengeance. Thus, there are fast and simple heuristics for grabbing selfish,
non-social benefits, for sustaining social relationships by benefiting others,
and for regulating relationships by harming others. Receiving a kiss from an
attractive person “automatically” makes you feel close, while observing the
kiss “automatically” makes your partner jealous – and in some cultures,
motivates him or her to respond violently.
These adaptive moral motives are typically generated by mental
processes that the actor cannot access or analyze – people often experience
adaptive motives as evaluative attitudes, moral sentiments, or pure,
inarticulable emotions. On the other hand, sometimes people do use their
explicit knowledge and general reasoning to work out what will keep them
safe and will secure relational benefits for them. Particularly when people
are facing moral conflicts based on competing relationships or ideologically
contentious issues, some moral stances are privately or discursively
deduced as more or less logically reasoned arguments. Moreover, it is
crucial for us to recognize that even if moral motives – including those for
violence – are experienced as emotions intrinsic to the apperceived
situation, this emotional experience does not preclude self-control or
planning how best to achieve the motivated goals. A person emotionally set
on violently regulating a relationship may act on this intention immediately,
or pursue it patiently, carefully, and methodically, with tactical wisdom and
foresight. In short, emotions may generate immediate responses, or keep
people focused on a goal that takes years of planning and preparation to
achieve.
To a remarkable extent, moral emotions work rapidly, without conscious
reflection, through processes that are inaccessible to introspection and
hence can’t be verbally articulated (Haidt, 2001). People often know what’s
right; they know what they must do, without necessarily knowing quite
why. But without declarative knowledge of why something is right or
morally necessary, without introspective awareness of why they are
motivated to act morally, people often are able to reflect on and articulate
the implications and consequences of their actions in a deliberative fashion.
To think about how to do what is morally required, people do not need to
know why they feel and know what they must do. And people often have
multiple interacting and sometimes conflicting moral motives, together with
many non-moral motives. So they often have to figure out how to balance,
reconcile, or combine their motives. Some of the processes by which people
do this involve conscious reflection, and some involve discussion with
others.
The greater the retrospective and prospective temporal scope of people’s
thinking, the more social relationships they take into account, the more
ways of regulating the relationship they incorporate in their thinking, and
the more moral aspects they consider and integrate, the more relationally
reflective it is. The other end of this dimension is relationally impulsive
action. If a relationally reflective act defers, redirects, or overcomes
competing, non-socially selfish impulses or social-relational impulsivity, we
say that a person has taken the bigger social picture into account, and acted
reflectively. Reflectivity is not the same as the construct of “rationality” in
economic theory, however. Relational reflectivity has nothing directly to do
with material, economic, or practical benefits; has nothing directly to do
with fitness; and is not equivalent to a focus on self-interest. Reflectivity
consists of decision-making, but it may be reflective without being based on
explicit and stable preferences, it need not be logically or consequentially
consistent with other action, and it need not maximize utility. Of course,
social relationships have huge impacts on material, economic, and practical
outcomes, and, of course, greatly affect survival and reproductive success,
so our sociomoral emotions and motives have been shaped by fitness
considerations. But the axiom of selfish instrumentalism operates at the
ultimate level of natural selection, where human fitness depends on trusting,
cooperative social relationships. We have evolved many adaptive
psychological mechanisms for effectively constituting those essential social
relationships. Some of these relational adaptations typically operate quickly
and with little reflective articulation, but we are also capable of reasoning,
careful planning, and strategic control to pursue the same relational ends.
 The crucial point here is that both relationally impulsive and relationally
reflective cognitive processes and the actions they generate are morally
motivated; what differs is their social-relational scope. What this means is
that morally motivated violence may be relationally impulsive, relationally
reflective, or somewhere in between. So if you provocatively deny me my
fair share of the game we hunted, provoking me to attack you, it’s the
unfairness that is the proximate motivation. I may attack you impulsively,
attending only to your specific insult, or my decision to attack you may be
relationally reflective, taking into account your long history of denying me
and others our fair share, and fully considering how impressed others will
be when I stand up to you. I may spear you immediately, or I may carefully
consider how to redress the relationship; thinking it through, I may decide
that I’d better ambush and kill you later, perhaps years later, at just the right
opportunity, when you are not expecting it, are alone, or ill, or unarmed.
Either way, the motivation is moral, intending to constitute one or more
relationships.
Many situational, personality, and neurochemical factors may affect how
impulsively or reflectively a person acts when he is morally motivated to
regulate relationships. These factors have been extensively studied in many
contexts, but we need not review them here because they are more or less
orthogonal to the moral motives and relational aims of violence. However,
focusing only on the immediate regulation of one relationship may make a
person either more or less prone to violence than taking a long-run and
relationally comprehensive perspective. A broad and deep perspective may
strengthen the motivation for violence when a person considers all the
relationships that will be created, enhanced, protected, rectified, terminated,
or mourned, and how significantly they will be regulated. Or greater
reflection may diminish a person’s net motivation to regulate her
relationships violently. Suppose that violence makes the immediately salient
relationship right, right now, but has delayed deleterious effects on other
linked relationships to which a person is not attending. For example, a
person has been insulted by an interlocutor, so to restore his honor with that
interlocutor and onlookers, he needs to retaliate violently – but violent
retaliation is illegal. Under those conditions, anything that promotes
reflectivity will deter violence, while anything that narrows a person’s focus
will promote violence. Take alcohol, for example. Alcohol doesn’t “make”
a person violent, and, indeed, in some cultures intoxicated people are
exceptionally affectionate. But if the pharmacological effects of intoxication
or the cultural scripts for drunken comportment focus a person’s attention
on the immediate relational present, then, when violence regulates this
relationship now, alcohol may make people prone to violence – regardless
of the long-term consequences for all of the perpetrator’s other
relationships, which he isn’t regarding.
 10 The prevailing wisdom
Virtuous violence theory posits that most violence is morally motivated, but
that claim does not imply that people have no other motives pushing toward
or against violence. People typically have many simultaneous motives
pushing and pulling in divergent directions. In some cultures and some
contexts where violence is highly restricted and rarely occurs, to perform a
morally required killing may require the strengthening of moral and non-
moral violence motives and the weakening of moral and non-moral peace
motives. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at sadistic, rationalist,
impulsive or self-regulatory, dehumanization, and moral-disengagement
accounts of violence and how they complement virtuous violence theory, if
at all.

Are most killers sadists and psychopaths?

In his book, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy Baumeister
(1997) examines newspapers, myths, stories, movies, and the accounts of
perpetrators and victims to detail what he refers to as “the myth of pure
evil.” According to Baumeister, most people have a folk theory of evil in
which perpetrators are sadists who commit violence because they are
biologically or dispositionally inclined to gain intrinsic pleasure from
causing suffering through intentional harm to purely innocent victims, or, at
the very least, they are psychopaths who have no sense of empathy toward
those who suffer and feel no remorse for their actions as a result.
Psychopathy is not the same as sadism, but it is the most relevant
psychological disorder in regard to the belief that violence is perpetrated by
“crazy” people. Psychopathy is defined largely in terms of the lack of social
motives and moral emotions (Millon et al., 1998; Patrick, 2005), so
presumably the violence that psychopaths commit is not often morally
motivated, and is truly immoral. So if most acts of violence are perpetrated
by psychopaths, it would disprove our thesis that most violence is morally
motivated.
 Like all or nearly all personality disorders, psychopathy (antisocial
personality disorder) is a continuous variable, not a discrete taxonomic
category. Yet we have found no studies that correlate psychopathy as a
continuous variable with the probability or frequency of perpetrating
violence, criminal or non-criminal. Rather, studies of prison populations use
conventional cutoffs on the standard scales; anyone scoring above this
cutoff is assessed as a psychopath for the purposes of the study. All
personality-disorder dimensions are difficult to measure, but psychopathy
assessment is especially difficult. Data are based on interviews in which the
interviewer asks the respondent questions about his or her life and scores
the answers for presence or absence of characteristic behaviors. But
prisoners may have many reasons to lie to researchers, and psychopaths are
inveterate liars, so it is problematic to rely on their own accounts of their
lives to diagnose them. With these caveats, we can consider the available
evidence.
Psychopaths evidently commit only a small fraction of all criminal
violence. In a sample of 125 Canadians convicted of homicide, 27% scored
as psychopaths with the recommended cutoff on a standard scale
(Woodworth and Porter, 2002; see also Haritos-Fatouros, 1995). However,
in a broad stratified sample of 496 prisoners in England and Wales
convicted of many offenses, violent and non-violent, Coid et al. (2009b)
found that only 7.7% of men and 1.9% of women scored above the standard
cutoff for psychopathy, and among all prisoners there was no correlation
between psychopathy and any particular type of crime; psychopathy scores
were not specifically associated with violent crimes. In a study of 416
German prisoners, 7% were categorized as psychopaths; just 8.8% of the
217 convicted of violent offenses were categorized as psychopaths (Ullrich
et al., 2003). In an Iranian stratified sample of 351 prisoners, just 12% of
violent offenders met the usual criterion of psychopathy; percentages of
psychopaths among those convicted of other types of crime were the same
or higher (Assadi et al., 2006). Given that the prevalence of psychopathy in
the general population is estimated (with great uncertainty) at less than 1%
(Coid et al., 2009a), it is clear that psychopaths commit far more than their
share of violent crimes, but most crimes are not committed by psychopaths,
nor do psychopaths perpetrate most violence of other kinds. Two cohort
studies confirm this. In Finland from 1984 to 1991, 97% of 1,037 homicides
were “solved,” and the court required a psychiatric evaluation by a neutral
expert if it deemed that there was any possibility that the crime had been
affected by a mental disorder, so 70% of the accused were examined. Men
with antisocial personality disorder committed 11% of all homicides
committed by men; women with antisocial personality disorder committed
13% of all homicides committed by women (Eronen et al., 1996). Men and
women with all personality disorders combined committed 34% and 36% of
homicides, respectively; alcoholics committed a similar proportion. More
generally, mental disorders of all kinds together account for only a small
minority of crimes. In a national cohort of all Danes, the 2.2% of men who
were ever hospitalized for a mental disorder committed 10% of all violent
crimes by males for which convictions were registered; for the 2.6% of
women ever hospitalized, it was 16% of all violent crimes (Brennan et al.,
2000).
Although Baumeister (1997) does not completely dismiss sadistic
pleasure or psychopathy as a motive for violence, like us he notes that any
evidence for it is quite rare, and that although it shows up quite commonly
in victims’ accounts of violence, it is almost always absent in perpetrators’
accounts. Erasing this and other gaps between victim and perpetrator
perceptions of violence is a key to reconciliation. According to Staub
(2006), the first step toward reconciliation in the wake of the Rwandan
genocide was to help victims recognize that their perpetrators were not
motivated by incomprehensible evil, and to help victims understand the
factors that led to the perpetrators’ violence against them. Thus, although
the belief that most violence can be attributed to sadism and psychopathy is
widespread, it simply isn’t the case, and may even hinder approaches to
prevent and recover from violence.

Are killers rational?

When explaining why people are motivated to do violence, some scholars
have focused on the instrumental value of violence purely as a means to
amoral ends. Killing the other heir to the crown may be necessary in order
to become king. Such rational-choice and realistic conflict models of
violence assume that when the costs of engaging in violence are low and the
benefits are high relative to other, non-violent, courses of action, people
will be more likely to engage in violence (Felson, 1993, 2004). For
example, it has been found that fighting is more likely to break out among
siblings when the likelihood of parental intervention is greater, because
younger, weaker siblings are more likely to fight with older siblings when
there is a high likelihood of parents stopping the fight and punishing the
older sibling. Essentially, when the costs of conflict are lowered by the
potential for parental intervention, younger siblings are more willing to
fight their older siblings (Felson, 1983; Felson and Russo, 1988).
Many rationalist models of violence, particularly those that are more
economically oriented, are completely agnostic as to how the utilities are
calculated or as to the specific sorts of values that underlie the utilities of
different courses of action. At their most abstract limit, these theories are
not even psychological, as they need only assume that actors pursue their
preferences. In that sense, rationalist theories of violence are completely
compatible with virtuous violence theory, and moral motives can be
construed as simply one major kind of utility that informs moral action. But
in order for rationalist theories to make any predictions or explain any data,
they have had to make assumptions about what the relevant costs and
benefits are and how they are calculated. That is, they have to identify
people’s “preferences.” Historically, these models have limited their scope
to material, quantifiable resources that can be monetized, and they have
assumed that people must reflectively weigh costs, benefits, and
probabilities in their decision-making. As a result, they can explain why
violence increases as its material utility becomes more positive, but, as we
saw in our discussion of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and extremist
violence, they fail to adequately explain why people engage in violence
under conditions where, by any measure of practical or material individual
benefit, its utility is clearly negative, and why people are unwilling to
engage in rational trade-offs of material for moral goods. As Baumeister
puts it,

Only a minority of human violence can be understood as rational,

instrumental behavior aimed at securing or protecting material
rewards. The pragmatic futility of most violence has been widely
recognized. Wars harm both sides, most crimes yield little financial
gain, terrorism and assassination almost never bring about the desired
political changes, most rapes fail to bring sexual pleasure, torture
 rarely elicits accurate or useful information, and most murderers soon
regret their actions as pointless and self-defeating.
(Baumeister et al., 1996: 5)

Without an understanding of the moral motives that drive violence,

rationalist models of violence are forced to assume that perpetrators of
violence are motivated by the belief that their actions will result in material
rewards. Yet, in fact, in most cases, it is obvious to all parties that there is
no material utility to the perpetrator’s actions. Rather, the perpetrator is
violent because he feels he must be.

Are killers impulsive?

Imagine if instead of violence, this book was about sex, and in it we argued
that people have a basic, biological urge to fornicate, and that the only
reason they restrain themselves from having sex with anyone and everyone
is because of their sense of self-control, which enables them to regulate
their emotions. Imagine that we then supported our theory by citing
evidence that when people are drunk, they have more sex because their
sense of self-control, and specifically their ability to regulate their
emotions, has been impaired. If this was our theory of sex – that it’s a basic,
incomprehensible urge, normally held in check by our sense of self-control,
and that people engage in sex when their sense of self-control is
compromised – wouldn’t you feel that we had missed something crucial
about the nature of sex? Wouldn’t it seem odd that nowhere in our theory
had we discussed “chemistry,” desire, or love? That nowhere had we
accounted for how sex grows out of social relationships, or why people
don’t want to have sex with their siblings or parents? Wouldn’t it seem that,
in fact, we hadn’t provided a theory of the motives for sex at all; but, rather,
we had provided a theory of the conditions under which competing motives
to abstain from sex break down.
We think that this is exactly what has occurred in self-regulatory theories
of violence. Self-regulatory theories of violence focus on the role that self-
control plays in suppressing our violent impulses, and how violence occurs
when those self-control mechanisms fail to control irrational flare-ups. A
woman may feel that slapping her partner is morally wrong, but when she is
stressed from work she loses her temper and takes it out on him. Self-
regulatory models of violence posit that people commonly have violent
impulses in response to aversive stimuli that impel them to engage in
violence (Finkel, 2007), but most of the time people’s moral sensibilities
continually act to control and suppress these impulses to keep them from
committing violence. When people are strongly stressed, threatened,
distracted, or otherwise “depleted,” their moral sense fails them and they
give in to their violent impulses (Dollard et al., 1939; Finkel et al., 2009).
For example, DeWall et al. (2007) asked participants to resist a temptation,
such as eating an appetizing treat. Afterwards, participants who had to resist
a temptation were more aggressive in their behavior and more likely to
endorse retaliating with violence in a bar fight following an insult than
participants who had not been asked to resist a temptation. The authors
hypothesized that the effort involved in resisting the temptation weakened
participants’ self-control, and, thus, they were less able to resist temptations
to respond with aggression to a provocation.
Thus, self-regulatory theories have reliably found that endorsement of
violence goes up when self-control is weakened, but they take it for granted
that it is endorsement of violence in response to transgression. People are
not simply lashing out at anyone for anything. Just as in our sex example,
self-regulatory theories provide little insight into why people wish to
engage in violence in the first place. They are presented as theories of
violence, but, actually, they are theories of the conditions under which
peaceful, non-violent motives break down. This inability to capture the
proximate motives for engaging in violence makes self-regulatory models
inherently incomplete. In addition, whereas rationalist models that assume
that people reflectively weigh costs and benefits prior to engaging in
violence fail to explain impulsive acts of violence, self-regulatory models
that assume violence is the result of impulsive urges to lash out fail to
explain carefully planned, methodical violence that is pursued over months,
years, and generations. As discussed in Chapter 9, virtuous violence theory
can explain both relationally reflective and relationally impulsive forms of
violence.

Are killers mistaken?

For moral psychologists who assume that a core feature of our moral
psychology is a prohibition against intentional harm (Gray et al., 2012;
Hauser, 2006; Mikhail, 2007; Turiel, 1983), violence must be explained
away as a mistake or error: it is incorrect moral reasoning. From this
perspective, people engage in violence when they are “morally disengaged”
or when they have “dehumanized” the victim of violence. In the case of
moral disengagement, the perpetrator reframes the situation so that he no
longer has to adhere to his moral obligations, and in the case of
dehumanization, which is seen as one route to moral disengagement,
violence is thought to increase when we perceive potential victims as non-
human or less than fully human beings because they lack fully human
mental capacities (Haslam, 2006). According to this approach, such a
breakdown in social cognition reduces our compassion and empathy for
victims, enabling us to be aggressive against them without remorse. It is
less immoral to kick an animal than a fellow human being, and kicking a
rock isn’t even morally relevant (or violent) at all.
We do think that there are some conditions where people will be
motivated to reframe a situation to enable them to act in ways that they
would otherwise feel are immoral, or to deny the presence of some moral
emotions or mental capacities in those they wish to punish, as suggested by
Baumeister’s (1997) findings that villains are perceived as intrinsically evil.
But the difficulty is in how these constructs are realized in practice.
Consider the following statements taken from Bandura et al.’s (1996)
moral-disengagement scale, one of the most widely used scales on topics of
disengagement and dehumanization.

It’s all right to fight to protect your friends.

It’s all right to fight when your group’s honor is threatened.
It’s all right to fight when someone badmouths your family.
It’s all right to lie to keep your friends out of trouble.

Ask yourself: does being willing to lie or fight to protect and defend your
friends, family, or group indicate that you are morally disengaged or
morally engaged?
In fact, endorsing these items is scored as evidence for moral
disengagement. Aquino et al. (2007) used scores on these four items alone
to argue that moral disengagement facilitates support for violence, as
indexed by desires to violently attack the terrorists who orchestrated the
9/11 attacks. In other words, support for fighting to protect your friends
predicted support for fighting terrorists who attacked America. But the
authors drew the conclusion that it was a lack of moral motives that
facilitated support for violence. From this perspective, “moral
disengagement” refers specifically to a prescriptive morality of non-
violence, and so any reasons for engaging in violence are immoral by
definition. Thus, the evidence that disengagement researchers use to argue
that violence is facilitated by the absence of genuine moral motives is
evidence that, by our definition, actually demonstrates the presence of
moral motives.
Waytz and Epley (2012) measured individual differences in
dehumanization and found that when people dehumanized suspected
terrorists they were more likely to endorse harming them. However, the
dehumanization measure, also adapted from Bandura et al. (1996), appears
to capture punitiveness more than the lack of human mental capacities. The
four-item measure from the original scale includes the following: “Some
people deserve to be treated like animals,” “It’s okay to treat badly someone
who behaved like a ‘worm,’” “Someone who is obnoxious does not deserve
to be treated like a human being,” and “Some people have to be treated
roughly because they lack feelings that can be hurt.” The last item captures
what is intended by dehumanization, but the other three confound
punitiveness with the use of animal and non-human terminology. In other
words, expressing support for treating suspected terrorists badly predicted
support for harsh torture techniques. Rather than evidence for
dehumanization, this is evidence for moral motives to engage in punitive
violence following transgression. Even more interesting from a
relationship-regulation perspective, the authors found that punitiveness
increased in the presence of a friend, suggesting that participants’ social
relationships reinforced their moral motives for violence.
One study that does seem to capture the construct of dehumanization with
a valid measure is that by Leidner et al. (2013), who found that Palestinians
who believed that Israelis lacked the capacity to feel compassion were more
likely to agree that the only way to restore justice in the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict was for Israelis to be punished and suffer. However, participants’
judgments of Israeli capacities for compassion did not predict participants’
support for suicide bombing attacks. In a second study, Israelis living in
Jerusalem were asked what emotions Palestinians were capable of,
including “disgust, shame, anger, pain, suffering, hope, admiration,
fascination, and surprise” (p. 187), and similar results were found –
perceiving that Palestinians lacked capacities for emotions predicted
support for punishment and suffering abstractly, but not for concrete violent
actions. More generally, in large surveys of Israeli settlers, Jeremy Ginges
has found little correlation between perceptions of human qualities in the
outgroup, such as capacities for self-awareness and moral emotions, and
support for and willingness to participate in violence (Ginges, personal
communication1).
We, the authors, would define moral disengagement as any effort to
reframe a situation so that we no longer conceptualize our responsibilities
and obligations in moral terms, and therefore cease to see ourselves as
constrained by moral rules. We would define dehumanization as any case
where we remove human mental capacities and emotions from people that
we previously viewed as having those qualities in order to enable violence
against them that is motivated by non-moral reasons. If violence is morally
motivated, the violence is intended to regulate a relationship with a fully
moral partner, against whom the perpetrator intends to inflict pain, injury, or
death. There is no point in punishing or seeking revenge against a rock,
tree, computer, automobile, snail, or turtle with no capacity for moral
sentiments or reasoning, because they can’t transgress relationships.
But this is not at all how moral disengagement and dehumanization are
defined in the literature, where behaviors such as fighting and lying are
categorized as immoral a priori. Disengagement frameworks presuppose
that moral motives must be peaceful, while dehumanization is measured by
willingness to punish. This makes no sense. In cases of retributive violence,
where a person wants to see someone suffer for what he has done, imbuing
the person with the ability to think or intend is often crucial for seeing him
as guilty for what he has done (Leslie et al., 2006), while imbuing the
person with the capacity for experiencing pain and suffering may be
crucially necessary in order for his punishment to have any moral meaning.
In cases of retributive punishment, morally motivated perpetrators want
their victim to feel pain, shame, humiliation, disgrace, or the fear and horror
of dying precisely because the victim was capable of thinking, intending,
and planning his actions. In these cases, perpetrators are not morally
disengaged; they are morally engaged. Victims are not dehumanized; they
are humanized.
Like self-regulatory theories, theories of moral disengagement and
dehumanization are actually theories about the breakdown of peaceful, non-
violent motives, rather than theories of the motives for violence, per se.
They either implicitly or explicitly view violence as reflecting a breakdown
or a mistake in correct moral functioning; these theorists never seem to
consider that perpetrators could ever regard violence as morally necessary
and legitimate. But as we have documented throughout the book, in many
instances perpetrators of violence do not want to commit violence; rather,
they feel they must engage in violence in order to do what is right and be
good moral actors. In actuality, perpetrators often do see their victims as
fully human beings deserving of moral consideration, and that is why those
victims are deserving of violence.
Virtuous violence theory does not deny that people have moral motives to
restrain from violence. Rather, it is precisely these powerful moral motives
to restrain from violence that demonstrate that perpetrators of violence have
even more powerful moral motives to engage in violence. Virtuous violence
theory has the potential to refine theories of moral disengagement and
dehumanization by considering cases where violence is morally motivated,
and it may complement these theories by focusing on the moral motives for
engaging in violence, rather than restricting consideration to the moral
motives that restrain violence.

Western people (and people in many other cultures) tend to believe that
only evil actors do violence, and that good people do not hurt others on
purpose. This line of thinking has colored Western scientific theories of
violence. We have shown that there are moral and non-moral motives for
abstaining from violence, and there are many moral and sometimes also
non-moral motives for engaging in violence. Most of the time, people have
multiple motives, sometimes acting in concert and sometimes in
competition, and in the medium- to long-term dynamics of social
interaction, the motives that initially moved a person to initiate a course of
action may be supplemented or supplanted by new motives that sustain,
redirect, or block the original design. However, previous theories have
focused only on rational, material motives to engage in or to abstain from
violence, or moral motives to abstain from violence. They have not gotten
to the heart of most violence, which is morally motivated in the eyes of the
perpetrator; that is, it is aimed to constitute or regulate important social
relationships, and is typically fully condoned by the perpetrator’s primary
group. As Table 10.1 indicates, virtuous violence theory is the only theory
that posits moral mechanisms for committing violence.

Table 10.1 Explanations for committing and not committing violence

Non-moral
Moral mechanisms
mechanisms

For not Self-regulation: Rational weighing

committing functioning conscience or of costs and
violence internalization of norms benefits
Empathy, compassion Fear of punishment

For Virtuous violence theory Failure to self-

committing regulate
violence Psychopathology
Dehumanization
Moral
disengagement
Rational weighing
of costs and
benefits

The table represents the focus of each theory, showing that virtuous
violence theory fills an otherwise empty cell.

More generally, we would argue that the ultimate, motivating aims of

most rational or “instrumental” action are, in fact, social relational: except
under the most extreme circumstances – and often even then – people’s
goals are mostly to constitute their social relationships. People seek money,
land, material resources, and goods primarily to impress others in order to
enhance their status in AR relationships, or to share in CS relationships, or
to give in EM relationships, or to transact in MP relationships. Nearly
always, under normal conditions, people optimally promote their long-term
(and often short-term) individual self-interest by optimally regulating their
social relationships – typically by mutualistic cooperation. Rationality is
calculative reasoning about how best to do something, and what people are
usually trying to do when they make rational calculations is to properly
regulate their social relationships. Likewise, when people act impulsively,
their most common and strongest impulses are to regulate their
relationships. When people act emotionally, the most compelling emotions
are usually relationship-regulating emotions: anger, shame, love, awe, and
so forth. When people exercise self-control to regulate their actions, they
almost always do so to preserve, protect, or enhance their social
relationships (Fiske, 2002, 2010). Because social relationships are the
adaptively most significant and the psychologically most compelling
matters for human beings, self-interested, instrumental, rational, material,
impulsive, emotional, reactive, or self-controlled behavior is generally all
about how people manage their social relationships. They are about how
people achieve social-relational ends. We cannot understand these
relationship-regulating strategies until we recognize the social-relational
motives that drive them and the relationship-regulating aims they seek to
fulfill.
Approaches that focus on material costs and benefits, self-regulatory
mechanisms, perceptions of humanness, or moral framing help us
understand some factors that sometimes facilitate or inhibit morally
motivated violence under restricted conditions. Virtuous violence theory
does not immediately explain why young men are especially likely to
engage in warrior violence, contact sports, rape, and torture, while women
are equally or more likely to injure themselves in bereavement violence or
engage in self-harm and suicide. Meanwhile, people are more likely to be
perpetrators or victims of violence when they are drunk. As we mentioned
earlier, intoxication almost certainly shortens potential perpetrators’
temporal horizons and the scope of the social-relational repercussions that
people take into account, reducing their consideration of the full breadth of
the medium- to long-term social-relational consequences of violence.
Finally, whereas virtuous violence theory aims to explain perpetrators’
propensities to engage in violence, theories of dehumanization and
disengagement may explain why third parties often turn a blind eye to
violence committed against people who seem different or distant, or are
simply anonymous, as in our tacit acceptance of sweatshops, mass violence,
and starvation abroad. Our hope is that at a minimum virtuous violence
theory complements existing theories by providing a valid new explanation
of important motives that contribute to a great many kinds of violence
across histories and cultures.

1 Another prominent measure of dehumanization is Bastian and Haslam’s

(2010) scale, wherein rating a person as superficial, cold, unsophisticated,
and lacking in self-restraint is scored as dehumanization, while rating the
person as open-minded, warm, cultured, and rational is scored as
humanization. In our view, this measure seems to capture general positive
and negative appraisal as much as dehumanization per se. Although Bastian
et al. (2013) attempt to control for this possibility, other studies do not
(Greitemeyer and McLatchie, 2011). More broadly, dehumanization has
been linked to alleviating guilt (Castano and Giner-Sorolla, 2006), reducing
willingness to forgive (Tam et al., 2007), and reduced willingness to help
(Cuddy et al., 2007), but we found only a few studies linking
dehumanization to condoning violence by others, only one study linking
dehumanization to endorsing hypothetical engagement in violence by
participants themselves (Viki et al., 2013), and no studies demonstrating
that dehumanization leads people to actually engage in aggressive behavior.
 11 Intimate partner violence
When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God
delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice
among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you
may take her as your wife. Bring her into your home and have her
shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was
wearing when captured. After she has lived in your house and
mourned her father and mother for a full month, then you may go to
her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. If you are not
pleased with her, let her go wherever she wishes. You must not sell her
or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her.
Deuteronomy 21:10–14; New International Version

In a great many historical societies, including classical Greece, a person

taken captive by force may be obliged to become a dependent subordinate
in an AR relationship with his or her captor; everyone in the culture
construed this relationship as entirely legitimate, and it had full moral and
legal validity. In many historical cultures, many women captured in warfare
or raids were married by their captors, with more or less full status as wives
(except that they had no kin to support them in conflicts with their husband,
or to return to if they had to leave their marriage; e.g., for Africa, see
Kopytoff and Miers, 1977; Robertson and Klein, 1983). In many such
societies, the predominant form of marriage was that lineage elders gave
their daughter to a husband chosen by the elders, who typically did not
consult the bride about her preferences, so marriage did not involve the
bride’s choice in any case. (In some cultures, the groom was not necessarily
consulted, either.) In social systems where everyone was a subordinate
dependant of someone who exercised control and ownership over them but
also looked out for and protected them, the AR relationships between
master or husband and wife, concubine, or slave were similar in many
respects (Kopytoff, 1988). Likewise, in many historical African, Asian, and
other societies, male dependants, whether born into the family, purchased,
adopted, or captured, related to their elders and chiefs in similar ways,
although in general slaves had lower status and were stigmatized.
Even in the great many societies that do not employ violence to obtain
brides and do not have legal slavery, violence is one of the mechanisms that
spouses use to regulate their relationships with each other. Intimacy entails
exposure, trust, and commitment – which means great vulnerability. Deep
CS relationships entail intense moral emotions: rapturous love when the
partners are one, but ferocious rage when one partner threatens to end or
betray the relationship. Likewise, strong AR relationships entail total
loyalty. So whether bound by CS or AR, spouses and lovers are often
intensely committed and deeply dependent on each other – and often
violently regulate their relationship. When a person discovers his or her
partner has a sexual relationship with another person, or shows indications
of intending to engage in such a relationship, the cuckolded person may kill
his partner or her lover. From the point of view of the killer, and in many
traditional cultures and a few modern ones, this is what the unfaithful
partner deserves (Black, 1998: 36). When a subordinate spouse fails to
perform her duties properly, her master may feel that he is fully entitled to
beat her, and that, indeed, the future of the relationship depends on his
meting out proper punishment. In a number of cultures, men’s honor
depends on their control of and dominance over “their” women, so men are
entitled and expected to use violence to control and dominate (Vandello and
Cohen, 2003, 2008). In these cultural and relational frameworks, violence
redresses relational transgressions, while preserving third parties’ respect
for the perpetrator (or victim).
The more intimate, multifaceted, and prolonged the relationship, the
greater the chances and the more frequent the occasions that the partners
will intentionally or even quite inadvertently betray the other’s trust. To
love is to depend on the other. To love is to be vulnerable. To love is to
idealize. Humans, being the imperfect, sometimes inadequately empathic
creatures they are, very often failing to adequately appreciate the other’s
perspective, sometimes fail each other. They offend each other. Offended,
they retaliate – verbally, materially, or violently. They curse, they throw
plates, they poke, punch, burn, beat, stab, or shoot. This violence cannot be
explained by the personalities of the individual perpetrators; on the
contrary, the data “suggest that the roots of the violent behavior lie with the
couples’ ‘relationship’ rather than in individuals” (Goodyear-Smith and
Laidlaw, 1999: 293–4).

Intimate partner violence is widespread

Some men are known to ethnographers to beat their wives in 84% of the
world’s cultures; in 19% of societies, virtually all men beat their wives
(Levinson, 1989: 31). In 47% of cultures, some men sometimes beat their
wives so severely as to permanently injure or kill them. In a sample of 32
non-state societies, 90% of ethnographies reported the moral acceptance
and presence of wife beating (Rosenfeld and Messner, 1991; for a brief
review and some examples, see Black, 1998: 29). It isn’t only men who
start attacks: Western husbands and wives both initiate violence against
each other, though their motives are not always the same (Goodyear-Smith
and Laidlaw, 1999). Domestic violence is often immediately reciprocated
and escalates, sometimes ending in homicide. Many Americans in the
1970s regarded violence as a normal part of marriage (Goodyear-Smith and
Laidlaw, 1999; Straus et al., 1980). It was just part of what it meant to be
married, or, indeed, to be a romantic couple. And in many traditional and
modern cultures throughout history, to be married naturally means that
when your partner “hurts” you, you hurt them back. A 1990s New Zealand
questionnaire study of 21-year-olds in partnerships found that 37% of
women and 21% of men reported perpetrating physical violence on their
partner in the previous year; 19% of women and 6% of men reported
kicking, hitting, biting, hitting with a weapon, or using or threatening to use
a knife or gun (reviewed in Goodyear-Smith and Laidlaw, 1999).
Correspondingly, 34% of men and 27% of women in the study reported
being victims of partner physical abuse in the past year. Replicating these
results, interviews in another New Zealand study found that nearly half of
men and a quarter of women reported that a partner had physically
assaulted them, or attempted or threatened violence in the past year
(reviewed in Goodyear-Smith and Laidlaw, 1999). One-third to one-half of
women in lesbian relationships reported receiving physical abuse in the past
year (reviewed in Goodyear-Smith and Laidlaw, 1999). Violence is
common in marriage, domesticity, and romance because for many people
violence isn’t detached from or inconsistent with intimacy – it is intrinsic to
the everyday regulation of the relationship.
Intimate partner violence is morally motivated to
regulate relationships
Reviewing the literature on intimate partner violence, Flynn and Graham
(2010) found the following reported motivations: the perpetrator’s partner
had cheated on the perpetrator or was suspected of doing so (in different
studies, 7–46% of instances), the partner didn’t care about the perpetrator,
the perpetrators were afraid their partner was going to leave them, or the
partner did attempt to leave. Other motives included lack of full
commitment and, conversely, objecting to a mistress. Less common motives
included “general provocation, starting an argument, lying, disrespect and
insensitivity, and sexual refusal” (Flynn and Graham, 2010: 244). In some
studies perpetrators reported being violent to punish for an infraction, or,
notably, to prove their love or show affection!
The partners in a relationship are likely to develop a joint moral
framework, so that when the perpetrator feels that his or her partner
deserves a beating for a perceived transgression, the victim often more or
less concurs. Peers and family may see it the same way, too. When intimate
partners are violent, both the perpetrators and the recipients of the abuse
often feel that the partner who is punished had it coming. In an anonymous
internet survey of people who had formerly been in abusive relationships,
half of both abused men and abused women indicated that a reason for
remaining with their abusive partner was that “I thought the abuse was my
fault” (Eckstein, 2011). Two-fifths of both men and women felt that “It was
not his/her fault he/she hurt me.” Three-fourths of both men and women felt
“I would have been a failure if I left the relationship,” and three-fifths
stayed because they “did not want to appear weak.” These are the factors
that survivors of abuse reported using in their own decisions – their
explanations to others usually differed.
Physical abuse is profoundly, fundamentally morally wrong – to us. So
it’s hard to conceive of the perpetrators feeling morally motivated to do
such violence. Yet, the evidence indicates that many abusers are morally
motivated: they feel entitled, even obligated, to do 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.
 In other cases, violence is a mutually agreed-upon way to relate. Some
couples consensually engage in sexual practices in which at least one
partner hurts the other, often when the victim is bound or restrained with
special-purpose apparatus. BDSM – bondage and dominance or
sadomasochism – is not rare or aberrant (Richters et al., 2008; Weinberg,
1995). The evidence suggests that such practices are not pathological per se
but are a way of conducting mutually meaningful, mutually rewarding AR
relationships, sometimes with an element of EM, if the participants switch
(the term for role turn-taking in these relationships), and perhaps sometimes
the bondage enhances CS bonding. When both parties freely choose to
engage in BDSM, it certainly meets the criterion of virtuous violence
intended to constitute a relationship.
 12 Rape
In this chapter we consider moral motives for rape. We must emphasize
again that our focus is on the perpetrator’s motives, not the victim’s
experience or perception of the act, and not our own moral values. From the
victim’s perspective (and the reader’s, and our own), the rapist is the
epitome of evil – it seems that his actions could not possibly be morally
motivated. But as we have already learned, perpetrators do not see
themselves the way that victims do, and, as we will demonstrate in this
chapter, by our definition, many rapists’ actions are morally motivated to
regulate relationships.
It might seem obvious that most rapes are primarily instrumental acts in
which the perpetrator just uses the victim like an object for simple sexual
satisfaction, and this is sometimes more or less how the perpetrator
perceives his action. But more often, forcing someone to be a sex partner
against her will is unequivocally meant as the enforcement of AR hierarchy.
The rapist controls the victim, making her obey his will, in order to assert
his superior AR position, especially when he feels his superiority has been
challenged. A man may rape because he feels entitled to demand sex from
his partner. He may rape because he feels that his victim has demeaned
herself by her “provocative” dress, behavior, or unaccompanied presence in
an inappropriate locale – so, since she’s “asking for it,” he’s entitled to give
it. Likewise, a man may rape because his attitude is that women in general
are “whores” and “sluts” who are “asking for it” and deserve what their
immoral status evokes. Other men rape to avenge either the victim’s affront
to the rapist’s dignity, or to collectively avenge offenses committed by
women, where women are all equivalent. These men feel that they have
been humiliated by a woman or women, and avenge their humiliation by
degrading the humiliator or any other woman who serves as a substitute.
Gang rapes are often motivated by the metarelational desire – the “need” –
to belong: raping together is an act of consubstantial assimilation,
connecting the rapists in a CS relationship through their body fluids like
blood brothers (on consubstantial assimilation, see Fiske, 2004; Fiske and
Schubert, 2012).
There are important individual differences in whether men find sexual
aggression arousing and appealing, and in whether men perceive sexual
relations as fundamentally about AR. It is not clear whether these
differences reflect genetic and unsystematic, environmental-experiential
variation as such, or subcultural and social-class differences in norms.
Sexually aggressive men have a comparatively high explicit need for power
and more strongly tend to explicitly associate the concept of power with the
concept of sex (Chapleau and Oswald, 2010). Using statistical analyses of
mediation, Chapleau and Oswald found that explicit belief that sex is a
means of asserting dominance1 leads to acceptance of norms that rape is
morally legitimate. This then leads to the participants’ stating that they
would likely rape an acquaintance, and this, in turn, was highly correlated
with self-report of having been sexually coercive in the past. In short, the
more men think of sex as constituting a superior position in AR, the more
likely they are to believe that sexual coercion is morally legitimate, and
hence the more they rape.
Among New York City male college students, subliminally priming
power activates associations with words indirectly linked to sex – but only
among men who score high on a scale measuring how attracted and aroused
they are by the idea of rape and forcing a woman to do something sexual
she does not want to do, and how likely they rate themselves to do such
things (Bargh et al., 1995).2 Men who did not report being attracted to
sexual force did not associate power with sexuality. In a second sample,
among men scoring high on the same Attractiveness of Sexual Aggression
scale, men who were primed with power words by completing anagrams
reported that they found a female confederate more “attractive” than those
primed with neutral words. (It is not clear whether the items on the
attractiveness scale were explicitly sexual.) This study did not investigate
whether men whose thoughts about power led to thinking about sex felt
morally entitled to force women, such as subordinates, to have sex. But it
suggests that for sexually aggressive men, thinking about power aroused
sexual thoughts.
Rape is usually embedded in and grows out of the vicissitudes of a
relationship. People committing assault or rape usually have a prior
relationship with the victim (Vera Institute, 1977). Most such rapists rape to
redress a relationship that they perceive the victim to have transgressed by
refusing to defer to their wishes – wishes that must be granted, because
women are subordinates who should obey. If a man perceives that women
are chattels who must do his bidding, and in particular that in a romantic
relationship or marriage, men have the right to sex whenever they want it,
then it simply doesn’t matter what the woman’s wishes are. In many
countries and many US states until recently, the law did not recognize the
possibility that a man could “rape” his wife because it was her duty to have
sex with him whenever he demanded it; if he had to use violence when she
illegitimately refused or resisted, so be it (Clinton-Sherrod and Walters,
2011; Hasday, 2000). Moreover, people often construe AR relationships as
coming down to will. When one is dominant, one’s will prevails, and to
assert one’s will over another is to dominate them, to be superior. If so, then
a man may perceive that a woman’s refusal to have sex is an assertion of
her will over the man’s will, challenging the man’s dominance. In a contest
of wills, he feels that for him to give in and allow the other’s will to triumph
is to accept humiliating subordination. He – and his peers – think that a man
who “allows” “his” woman to refuse him is “pussywhipped”. According to
their culturally shaped morality, he must impose his will on women or else
he’s less than a man; he’s “henpecked” – reduced to a position below
women in the pecking order.
Many studies have shown that rapists are angry at women for perceived
transgressions and that rapists are motivated by a “need” to assert power
over women (Lisak and Roth, 1988). A study of southeastern US college
men found that men who reported that they had sexually assaulted, raped,
or attempted to rape a woman

perceive themselves as having been more often hurt by women, as

having been deceived, betrayed, and manipulated. They appear to be
more attuned to power dynamics between men and women; more often
feel put down, belittled, ridiculed, and mothered by women; and more
often feel the need to assert themselves because of this.
(Lisak and Roth, 1988: 800)
In this study, feelings of anger resulting from perceptions that women had
“hurt” them – that is, done something morally wrong against the man –
predicted self-reported sexual aggression. In other words, men sexually
assault women to punish them – to get revenge for other women’s
transgressions against them. These perceived transgressions consist
primarily of violations of what the perpetrator perceives of as his rightful
position of superiority over women.
In interviews with 114 men convicted of rape or attempted rape in
Virginia, many rapists reported that they raped for revenge or to punish,
typically treating all women as collectively responsible for one or more
specific woman’s alleged transgressions against the rapist (Scully and
Marolla, 1985). Revenge rapists were angry at women for violating the
rapist’s moral code; they raped the “transgressor” or any other woman to
“get even” (Scully and Marolla, 1985; see also Hale, 1997). Some men
were metarelationally motivated: they had raped a woman to “get even”
with the woman’s partner for a perceived transgression against the rapist, or
as redirected “punishment” against an unrelated third party (Scully and
Marolla, 1985). One man raped and murdered five strangers; he explained,

I wanted to take my anger and frustration out on a stranger, to be in

control, to do what I wanted to do. I wanted to use and abuse someone
as I felt used and abused. I was killing my girlfriend. During the rapes
and murders, I would think about my girlfriend. I hated the victims
because they probably messed men over. I hated women because they
were deceitful and I was getting revenge for what happened to me.
(Scully and Marolla, 1985: 257)

Other rapists whom Scully and Marolla interviewed reported the perception
that a woman at a bar, hitchhiking, or walking alone at night is offering
herself up for sex, so if she subsequently refuses to have sex, forcible sex is
justified. Many rapes – perhaps most – were acts of domination “to put
women in their place.”

For example, one multiple rapist believed his actions were related to
the feeling that women thought they were better than he was. [The
rapist said] ‘Rape was a feeling of total dominance. Before the rapes, I
 would always get a feeling of power and anger. I would degrade
women so I could feel there was a person of less worth than me’.
(Scully and Marolla, 1985: 256)

In other words, “I may be treated as if I’m at the bottom of the heap, but I
can show them – I’m pushing women down below me!” For one such man,
“With rape, I felt totally in charge. I’m bashful, timid. When a woman
wanted to give in normal sex, I was intimidated. In the rapes, I was totally
in command, she totally submissive” (Scully and Marolla, 1985: 259).
Questionnaire responses of 132 incarcerated rapists in the US Deep South
indicated that their primary motives for rape, in order of the frequency of
respondents’ first choices, were revenge/punishment, control/power, and
anger (where anger may express a response to perceived violation; Hale,
1997). In interviews with 15 southeastern US college men who reported 22
events in which they had used force to have sex with women against the
woman’s will, hardly any reported doubts or remorse (Lisak and Roth,
1988). Consistent with a number of earlier studies, compared to controls, on
the Anger-Hurt scale these rapists exhibited more feelings of anger toward
women, reporting that they felt betrayed, deceived, or manipulated by
women. On an Underlying Power scale, compared to controls, these college
rapists reported higher perceptions that women put them down, belittled
them, and made them feel “inadequate,” while, on a Dominance in Sex
scale, they indicated that dominance is a greater motive in sexual relations.
A large survey with careful representative sampling of regions in seven
Asian countries found that 24% of men aged 18–49 reported having raped a
partner or non-partner at least once (Jewkes et al., 2013). Responding on a
4-point Likert scale with ratings of agreement or disagreement to items
indicating their reasons for rape, the great majority reported that they felt
they were entitled to rape the non-partner woman they had most recently
raped: Bangladesh 82%, Cambodia 41%, China 91%, Indonesia 77%,
Papua New Guinea 73%, and Sri Lanka 78%. The percentages of those who
reported feeling guilty for any rape they had committed were as follows:
Bangladesh 34%, Cambodia 50%, China 50%, Indonesia 76%, Papua New
Guinea 57%, and Sri Lanka 33%. In most of the samples a high percentage
of men indicated “anger and punishment” as a reason for their most recent
rape of a non-partner: Bangladesh 29%, Cambodia 40%, China 52%,
Indonesia 30%, Papua New Guinea 51%, and Sri Lanka 16%. It’s not clear
what proportion of these rape victims were close associates of the rapists,
but the percentages of men who were ever “punished by friends or family”
for any rape they had committed are generally lower than the felt guilty
rates: Bangladesh 8%, Cambodia 38%, China 35%, Indonesia 34%, Papua
New Guinea 64%, and Sri Lanka 7%. These rates of “punished by friends
or family” are similar to the percentages arrested in each sample.
Clearly, many Asian men are willing to report their own rapes; many of
them don’t feel guilty about it and weren’t sanctioned by their family or
friends; and many feel that the rapes they committed were morally
permissible. A great many Asian rapists indicate they were angry (at a
perceived transgression against them) and raped to punish (apparently the
questionnaire did not distinguish between intending to punish the victim, a
category of women, or women in general). Similar proportions of South
African men report feeling entitled to rape women and “punish” women
who “deserve” to be raped (Jewkes et al., 2011). These survey data by
themselves are consistent with moral motivations and social-relational
functions of rape, although they aren’t proof. But on the basis of their
extensive studies of rape, Jewkes et al. (2013) conclude that in many Asian
cultures and in South Africa, rape results from cultural prescriptions for
male dominance demonstrated and expressed through sexual coercion. In
other words, in these cultures, to be a man, you must have your way with
women – and a woman’s resistance is merely an opportunity to prove your
manhood.
In short, the literature is overwhelmingly clear that rapists in everyday
life are often motivated by their perception that they are redressing
women’s moral transgressions against them by putting women down – rape
asserts the rapists’ “rightful” dominance, restoring women to their proper
place below the rapist. In the minds of rapists, rape is punishment for
women’s violation of the authority of the rapist.

Rape in war
In warfare, rape is a common means of establishing or enhancing AR
relationships – between men and women, among soldiers, but especially
between the victors and the foes they defeat.

Ex-combatants reported that those who participated in rape in Sierra

Leone were seen to be more courageous, valiant and brave than their
peers. Those who committed rape were respected by their peers as “big
men” – strong and virile warriors.
(Cohen, 2013b: 26)

Raping enemy women demeans and degrades them while, metarelationally,

it humiliates the defeated men who should have protected them. Soldiers in
many cultures through the ages have perceived enemy women to be a prize
of war: “to the victor go the spoils.” In other words, to rape is to vaunt one’s
victory and display superiority.
In addition, victorious military leaders sometimes order their troops to
rape, so, subject to the military code and military honor, soldiers must do so
(Beevor, 2002; Fogel, 2000; Naimark, 1995). In some cultures, an aspect of
this is the idea that the victorious commanders should have their pick of the
women; the relative beauty of the victims marks relative status among the
rapists. For example, eastern Congolese Mai Mai militia commanders often
commanded rape; militiamen sometimes obeyed out of respect for
commanders, sometimes in fear of serious beating – apparently perceived as
legitimate – if they refused, and sometimes from both sentiments.

Women were given as a reward; soldiers were ordered to abduct

women, and these women were then “given” to soldiers, with higher
ranking officers given precedence. As one man said, “[The
commander] will have his [girl] brought first before he can ask me to
bring mine. In that case, if you refuse, it becomes an open conflict.”
The interviewer pressed the soldier saying:

Q: Do you really bring her?

R: That is exactly what I must do. You say: “Great chief, here is the girl
you asked me to bring to you.”

(Kelly, 2010: 8)
Other Mai Mai militiamen were adamant that it is evil to rape, and that
when any soldier in their militia raped, the civilian population would hold
them all responsible. Many expressed horror at rape with objects, rape of
young girls, or foreign militias raping Congolese women. Nevertheless, Mai
Mai militiamen reported that the magic they use to win their battles requires
that they have sex – it doesn’t work without sex – so that rape is necessary
for their victory over their enemies and the protection of the Congo
(Jackson, 2008). In this normative framework of warfare, perpetrators
perceived that rape, like killing, serves a higher moral good.

Gang rape
Much of the rape in warfare is gang rape, which is often more or less
explicitly intended to create or enhance group cohesion – that is, CS unity
(Cohen, 2013a). Combatants in the Sierra Leone civil war who were
abducted into insurgent armies, and, hence, initially felt frightened and
isolated among hostile strangers, developed loyalty and trust through public
gang rapes. “Interviews with fighters provide abundant detail that rape
fostered cohesion” – cohesion among former strangers that endured long
after the fighting (Cohen, 2013a: 474). Cohen found that in Sierra Leone
and across societies and settings, “rape – especially gang rape – enables
groups with forcibly recruited fighters to create bonds of loyalty and esteem
from initial circumstances of fear and mistrust” (Cohen, 2013a: 461).
Among fighters in Sierra Leone, “rape served a bonding function. Ex-
combatants reported experiencing feelings of belonging in the aftermath of
gang rape” (Cohen, 2013: 404). Furthermore, rape was not simply a CS-
constitutive act; it was a culturally admired way of raising the rapist’s
position in AR relationships:

Interviews provide ample evidence that rape was a cohesive activity…

Ex-combatants reported admiration, not disgust, for those who had
perpetrated many rapes. In interviews, they described a culture in
which those who had raped many women achieved a legendary status
among their peers – one interviewee spoke with awe about a fellow
combatant who had raped more than 200 women.
(Cohen, 2103b: 405)
 Several studies have found that men engaging in gang rape are primarily
motivated by the desire to bond with each other as “brothers,” and to
enhance status in the eyes of others in the group by humiliating the victim
(reviewed in Cohen, 2013a). In particular, fraternity gang rape

operates to glue the male group as a unified entity; it establishes

fraternal bonding and helps boys to make the transition to their vision
of a powerful manhood – in unity against women … a little like
bonding in organized-crime circles, generating a sense of family and
establishing mutual aid connections that will last a lifetime.
(Sanday, 2007: 7–8)

Male bonding is also the motivation for gang rape by street gangs. A judge
who tried many cases writes of the similarities between fraternity and
street-gang rape:

Both groups frequently engage in sexual behavior that others call gang
rape. Both call it “playing train” or “pulling train” (one man follows
after another). Both groups consider it a form of male bonding in
which the female is merely an available instrument. Both may prepare
themselves for this test of manhood by ingesting quantities of alcohol
and fortifying themselves with drugs [commensally reinforcing the CS
among them]. Both consider this acceptable, indeed normal, conduct.
Both are amazed to learn that such actions could be crimes.
(Lois G. Forer, in Foreword to Sanday, 2007: 23)

When there is danger involved, civilian gang rape may also be an exciting
adventure in “male camaraderie engendered by participating collectively in
a dangerous activity” (Scully and Marolla, 1985: 259).
As in individual rape, there is also an AR component in gang rape:

I suggest that “pulling train” is a form of sexual expression that is

defined as normal and natural (hence normative) by some men and
women… The sexual act is not concerned with sexual gratification but
with the deployment of the penis as a concrete symbol of masculine
 social power and dominance. The male sexual bonding evident in
“pulling train” is a sexual expression and display of the power of the
brotherhood to control and dominate women. The discourse associated
with acts of “pulling train” defines this form of control and domination
as part of normal male sexual expression … that sanctions the
deployment of male power in sexual aggression.
(Sanday, 2007: 40)

However, whereas the AR component of superiority of men over women,

and the focus on the woman as an object of retribution, appears to be
primary in individual rape, it appears to be a secondary motivation in gang
rapes, which are motivated primarily to create CS cohesion among the
rapists. Whereas in individual rape the woman represents a relational
partner to be retaliated against and subordinated, Sanday (2007) argues that
gang rapists typically perceive their victims as mere objects to be used. As
such, dehumanization and moral disengagement may play a greater role in
the relationships between perpetrators and victims in gang rape than in
individual rape.

Rape is repugnant to us, the authors, to you, the readers, and to those who
have been victims of rape or who care about them. But our moral judgment
of it should not blind any of us to the perpetrators’ moral motivations. Yes,
to label the motivation to rape “moral” seems horrific and bizarre, but that’s
what it truly is, both subjectively and in the objective technical sense.
Phenomenologically, many rapists feel that they are entitled to demand sex
and get it from women in general, from the partner they apperceive as
belonging to them (in a subordinate, possessive sense), or from women who
go to places, wear clothes, or act in ways that – in the rapists’ interpretation
of their subculture – signify that the women are “asking for it” and, indeed,
are morally degraded to the point where they “ought” to get what’s coming
to them. In the relational and metarelational psychologies of the
perpetrators (and often their reference groups), the rape is intended to
enhance or restore an AR hierarchy. The perpetrator feels that raping a
woman makes him dominant over her, and perhaps over women like her, or
reasserts men’s legitimate dominance over women. Or a group of men
sequentially rape a woman to create or enhance a CS relationship among
the men: mixing semen in the woman’s body makes their essence one,
connecting them in a communal bond. For these men, rape is much like
sacrificing an animal and eating it commensally, or making blood
brotherhood by mixing the bond partners’ blood in a shared cup of beer that
they both imbibe.
In prisons and some other environments, men often rape men. We were
not able to locate sources that clearly indicate the motives or relational
intentions of the perpetrators, but we imagine that when the victim is male,
too, rape may often be intended to humiliate and subordinate the victim,
establishing or reinforcing the perpetrator’s dominance in an AR
relationship. However, while we aren’t aware of extensive evidence about
the motives of adults who rape young children (family members or others),
we doubt that many child molesters are morally motivated. We don’t know
whether those who sexually abuse children ever do so to regulate their
social relationships with the child or others. While inherently coercive,
sexual abuse of children generally may not be specifically intended to hurt
them; if and when it is not intended to physically harm the victim, sexual
abuse would be outside the scope of action we intend virtuous violence
theory to explain.
Rape is often morally motivated to regulate CS and AR relationships, or
to enhance a metarelational model. However, most men today do not
perceive sex as an AR relationship. CS and AR relationships among men or
between caring men and women often motivate men not to rape, and many
metarelational moral frameworks forbid rape (Wood, 2009). Social
relationships cut both ways, generating violence but also motivating
participants to treat each other humanely. As we will discuss in Chapter 21,
we need to understand why, how, and when social relationships motivate
people to hurt others; then we can figure out how to cultivate motives for
mutual respect, care, and compassion.

1 Measured by endorsement of items stating that sex involves “control,”

“power,” “being in charge,” “submitting to the will of another,”
“persuading,” one person “should be dominant” and one person “should be
submissive,” and “sex means gaining possession of someone else’s body.”
2 This was true whether priming authority power stimuli with words such
as “authority, executive, boss, influence, rich, and control,” or priming
physical power with words such as “mighty, strong, tough, macho,
muscular, and boxer.”
 13 Making them one with us: initiation,
clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and
castration
If you love your children and want them to become just like you; if you
deeply identify with kin or age-mates and they deeply want to become one
with you; if you meet someone you want to incorporate into your group,
bond with, and become able to trust with your life; in short, if you want and
need to create the most intense and enduring CS relationships with someone
for the rest of your life, then in many cultures you must cause them
excruciating pain by cutting their genitals, terrify them and inflict degrading
suffering, or beat them horribly. That is, you must circumcise a boy, excise
a girl, initiate them, “jump them in” to the gang, or haze them into the
fraternity. Severe initiation creates life-long CS bonds of unconditional
altruism and total identity with the other initiates, with the initiators, and
with others whose bodies are marked like theirs. So in communities whose
existence totally depends on absolute, selfless loyalty, people violently
initiate their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces,
grandsons and granddaughters. Love, identification, and the moral
obligation to forge unbreakable commitment to CS bonds – they are what
motivates cutting genitals, horrific initiations, and other kinds of group-
incorporation violence. The pain itself is crucial to the formation of the CS
identity with the initiating group; indeed, the pain may be experienced as
the sacrifice of an aspect of the self for the group as a whole (Morinis,
1985).

Initiation rites
A child becomes an adult, or an outsider becomes an insider when
ritually controlled pain weakens the subject’s sense of empirical
identity and strengthens his or her sense of attachment to a highly
valued new center of identification.
 (Glucklich, 2001: 7)

In a representative world sample of 182 cultures, Schlegel and Barry (1979)

found that 46% of the societies reportedly performed initiation rites for girls
and 36% for boys. Among girls’ initiation rites, 8% involved a genital
operation, 25% inflicted only non-genital pain such as “beating, tatooing,
tooth extraction, or eating of obnoxious substances,” and none inflicted
both. Among boys’ initiation rites, 21% involved a genital operation, 32%
inflicted only non-genital pain, and 11% inflicted both. In initiation rites,
fraternity hazing, boot camp, and similar practices, people willingly inflict
pain, fear, deprivation, and loathsome experiences on others – who often
choose and willingly endure the violence. Severe initiation rites (a term we
will use here to encompass all of these painful bonding practices) form
intense CS relationships that motivate participants to risk or sacrifice their
lives for each other (for two examples of such practices, see Herdt, 1987;
Ricks, 1997). Initiates may be whipped, beaten, stung with nettles, burned,
subjected to extreme cold, doused or immersed in very cold water, forced to
ingest toxic substances or unpleasant psychoactive drugs, scarified, pierced,
tattooed, have teeth extracted, or be whipped, circumcised, subincised, or
excised (Dulaney and Fiske, 1994; Levinson, 1989: 30; Young, 1985).
Many initiation rites incorporate long periods of social deprivation, sleep
deprivation, severe food restrictions, or forced ingestion of disgusting
substances.
Initiations are often designed to be terrifying before and during the
experience. The initiates may be afraid of what they have to endure, but
they are typically proud to have reached the status of prospective inductees,
and may boast of their courage. Usually, they go willingly to be initiated, or
even eagerly request it. The initiators may be eager to perform the initiation
or may have “gut” qualms about subjecting the initiates to the fear, pain,
deprivation, and degradation. But both prospective victims and perpetrators
know it has to be done, should be done, is natural and right to do. Typically,
it is the immediate superiors, parents, uncles and aunts, or other close kin
who administer these rites, thereby reinforcing their AR relationships as
well. But the principal effect and collective function of initiation is to create
intense and enduring CS bonds. The cruelties of initiations are constitutive
of solidarity. The more important in-group loyalty is for the community, the
more severe the initiations (Collins, 1974: 436; Young, 1985). The violence,
fear, pain, degradation, and stressful isolation “produc[e] an exceptionally
strong bond among the initiates” and between them and their initiators
(Cohen, 1964; see also Bloch, 1986). Often the initiate’s status as a fully
adult male and his reputation depend on bravely facing the fear of pain of
circumcision or other initiation procedures, and, above all, stoically
enduring the pain without flinching, grimacing, or crying out (e.g., Heald,
1986). The initiate’s father and other kinsmen are proud and often gain
honor when he displays unflinching courage, or are shamed along with him
if his courage fails. Those who have been initiated are very proud that they
went through it, and they soon initiate the next cohort, inflicting the same
horrible experiences on them. For participants and their proud kin and
friends, initiation is a feat of virtue and a moral triumph.
Initiators may inflict terrific pain. Among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua
New Guinea, the initiates’ nasal septums are “pierce[d] … from the right
side with a cassowary-bone dagger … with blood cascading down their
bodies … [and] hot marsupial fat and dew water are applied to the boys’
inner forearm … [while they] struggle and shriek as large blisters form”
(Poole, 1982: 127). Many Australian Aboriginal initiations include
incisions cut so as to make permanent scars, removing an incisor, piercing
the septum, and circumcision followed by repeated subincision of the penis
at higher-stage initiations (Eller, 2010: 120–1).
Initiation violence is by no means limited to traditional cultures. In St.
Louis, as in other US cities, joining a gang typically entails “beating in,”
wherein existing members severely beat the initiate for a few minutes; he
may fight back (Decker, 1996a). Those who are not beaten in have the
alternative of wearing the gang colors while walking into the turf of an
enemy gang, inevitably resulting in violent conflict. If the initiate survives,
he’s in. Brazilian military police hit recruits with paddles and weight belts
and make them compete in races dragging cars (Linhares de Albuquerque
and Paes-Machado, 2004). American university fraternities terrify,
humiliate, and inflict pain on initiates in order to forge the CS bonds that
incorporate them into the fraternal body, and, at the same time, to display
the initiators’ superiority over the pledges they initiate (Sanday, 2007: 165–
79). High-school sports teams sometimes paddle or duct-tape those joining
the team or kick them while they sleep; initiates earn the respect from the
initiators by enduring the violence, which at the same time reinforces the
superiority of the initiators (Kirby and Wintrup, 2002; Waldron et al.,
2011).

By taking hazing it made me tough; it made me part of the team, and

because I knew if I took it as a freshman, I was gonna be able to give it
back when I was a senior… I think hazing is a way of finding status
between those who are inferior and those who are superior… The
people that did the hazing were the hot shots of the team … and since
they don’t really know you as a freshman, once you get hazed, then
you could hang out with them… After being hazed, then they’re your
friends.
(Waldron et al., 2011: 117–18)

For the previously hazed athletes, initiating someone else into the team is a
way to raise their own status on the team: “[Y]ou do it to somebody so it
brings them down in order to let yourself up” (Waldron et al., 2011: 118;
see also Kirby and Wintrup, 2002: 57). For all team members, the act of
initiation through violence elevates them above the non-initiated. As one
person commented on a blog:

The claim to belonging to a superior “elite” must have some

justification, and hazing forms part of that. It separates those who have
undergone it from the larger groups of people around them, a
separation that the former initiates of hazing see as lifting them over
those less, unhazed people.
(“jb,” posted in response to Blow, 2011; see also other comments
posted there)

Many initiation rites are long-standing traditions, but new rites immediately
emerge with the formation of new groups where everyone’s life depends on
everyone else’s totally loyalty. Young men inducted into Mai Mai militias in
the eastern Congo were scarified to mark their membership, and then beaten
in.

Q: If someone wishes to join you, what can he do?

R: That civilian must be spilt in the dust, be beaten black and blue so that he
might leave his civilian thoughts.
Q: Beat him first? How is this helpful?
R: The civilian will come out of him. You must spill him in the mud, to beat
him black and blue before he is taken care of and given his uniform as
well as a gun.
Q: Will he not be trained?
R: He will be trained after receiving a uniform and a gun. You will be shown
the field and explained things as they are. Since you have already
dropped civilian thoughts because of the flogging, you will start
saying, “Ahhhh! So it is like this!” Then you will be practicing what
you have learned.

Another soldier described his first beating, saying new recruits were
taken to the river, stripped naked, and flogged. After the beating they
were “anointed” with the river mud.
The soldier described himself as being “molded in the mud” and went
on to say, “All those sticks that you were beaten with put into you
another ideology.”
(Kelly, 2010: 7)

Nearly all of the research on truly painful initiation is ethnographic, but one
questionnaire study of a religious ritual in Mauritius found that compared to
participation in painless ritual, participation in rituals that entail extreme
and prolonged pain is associated with high levels of generosity and with
wider, more inclusive identification immediately after the experience
(Xygalatas et al., 2013). Experimental studies have also shown that the
prospect of experiencing moderate pain increases people’s generosity. In
one experiment, participants who expected pain were more willing to
donate to charity. In a second experiment using real money, participants
contributed more to a joint pool of money rather than keeping money to
themselves if they had to place their hands in freezing water for 60 seconds
in order to contribute (immersing one’s hands in ice water is quite painful).
Follow-up studies suggested that participants were more likely to donate
under these conditions because they derived a stronger sense of meaning
from charities that involved pain (Olivola and Shafir, 2013). These studies
suggest that in addition to creating bonds among initiates, it’s certainly
conceivable that suffering and observing suffering actually intensify CS
unity bonds with others who are not participating in the ritual.

Circumcision and excision

Arnold Van Gennep was one of the first ethnologists to analyze initiation
rites.

Cutting off the foreskin [among Jews] is exactly equivalent to pulling

out a tooth (in Australia, etc.), to cutting off the little finger above the
last joint (in South Africa), or cutting off the ear lobe or perforating the
ear lobe or the septum, or to tattooing, scarifying, or cutting the hair in
a particular fashion. The mutilated individual is removed from the
common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea
behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him
into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the
incorporation is permanent.
(Van Gennep, 1960/1909: 71–2)

Simple circumcision is outside the boundary of “violence” as we define it in

this book, insofar as inflicting pain or suffering as such is not the intent. As
we have just seen, however, in many male initiation rites a key intent of the
circumcisers is precisely to terrify the initiate and inflict excruciating pain.
In female genital excision, while the operations are excruciatingly
painful, evidently inflicting pain during or immediately after the surgery is
not usually the explicit aim, although in some cultures, as with male
circumcision, the stoic courage of the initiate enhances her status and her
solidarity with other women in the community (Shweder, 2002). However,
clitoral excision and infibulation are often intended to reduce sexual
pleasure, so they are “violent” if we consider deprivation of pleasure to be
suffering, which seems like a fair assessment (though there is little or no
solid evidence about which, if any, forms of such surgery actually do reduce
sexual pleasure (Shweder, 2002)). Moreover, generally the goal – and the
result – is to make sexual intercourse uncomfortable or actually painful.
Parents and elders in a number of African and other cultures have
operations performed on girls to cut or remove the clitoris, remove some or
all of the labia, or stitch the labia together. For the mother and other family
members, it is an act of responsible love, ensuring their daughter a bright
and honorable future. Traditionally and to a great extent today, all
concerned regard this as morally necessary and highly virtuous (Abusharaf,
2001; Ahlberg et al., 2000). Above all, it helps ensure female chastity,
which is the core moral value in these societies, most of which emphasize
honor and shame (McKenna and Howarth, 2009). Sometimes girls
themselves take the initiative to have the surgery performed. In most of the
cultures where it is practiced, the crux of morality is virginity before
marriage and fidelity after marriage; female genital surgery is thought to be
an essential foundation for such chastity (Slack, 1988). The surgery makes
it difficult to have intercourse, but, more fundamentally, it is intended to
prevent any experience of pleasure in sex and indeed to make sex painful,
so that excised or infibulated women no longer desire and may actively
avoid sex, minimizing shameful fornication. Violence of this sort serves the
constitutive phase of terminating immoral relationships before they have the
chance to begin, so that the woman can create other, proper, and necessary
relationships instead. Moreover, the surgery constitutes the identity of the
girl as a pure and true woman, and not as a person with genitalia that would
grow to be like those of a man (Abusharaf, 2001: 123; Atiya, 1982: 11). As
one Sudanese mother of Douroshab township put it, “circumcision is what
makes one a woman” (Abusharaf, 2001: 123). Another mother said that she
recognized the pain and danger, but she was glad to have the operation
when she had it because “I wanted to be like everybody else in my family
and my neighborhood” (Abusharaf, 2001: 134).
This surgery also raises a woman’s status, explained another woman,
telling why she had the operation done on her daughters:

I chose pharaonic circumcision for my two daughters. I thought of

their future. The woman who is circumcised behaves in a way that
forces people around her to respect her. But a woman who is not
circumcised cannot enjoy the same status. Men respect women who
have self-respect and who do not get involved in sexual relations. We
know that when a woman gets married, this background is important…
Pharaonic circumcision ensures the woman’s strong place in the
family. She is very trustworthy because she does not allow men to take
 advantage of her. She is her own person, even for the man she is
married to. This is a source of respect and I think it is more important
than how painful it is. The wound heals, but the relationships remain
strong. By preserving her reputation, a woman will become powerful
and respected by members of the community.
(Abusharaf, 2001: 131–2)

Furthermore, a person whose genitalia are not properly modified is a

disgusting, horrific freak: her bodily oddity separates her from the broadest
and most fundamental CS relationships (Shweder, 2002). When I (ApF)
was doing fieldwork in a Moose village, my daughter was a toddler, widely
loved and cared for by our friends and neighbors. They unanimously and
insistently urged us to have her clitoris excised; for them, it was obvious,
natural, and necessary. As they emphasized, a woman with an intact clitoris
would have no prospects for marriage and no one would want her as a lover
(Moose traditionally have long-term lovers outside their marriages). She
would be reviled and excluded. Our friends and neighbors repeatedly urged
us to do the right thing for her. Nevertheless, we refused.
Female genital excision is intrinsically metarelational. The intent of
excision is to prevent the woman’s seeking or engaging in sexual relations
that are culturally inconsistent with other crucial social relationships. It is
also metarelational because the genital surgery ordained by parents is
usually performed by someone else, so the metarelational model is a
composite of at least five dyadic relationships: parent–victim, operator–
victim, (obstructed) sexual partner–victim, (obstructed) sexual partner–
desired husband, and desired husband–victim. In addition, more extended
genital-excision metarelational models link the relationships between the
parents and the woman’s prospective and then actual husband. And the
excision metarelational model often incorporates the desire to protect the
honor of the family, which depends on the female victim’s chastity:
excision has moral implications for the woman’s siblings, children, aunts,
uncles, and grandparents. Moreover, the parents and the person circumcised
or excised are often motivated to have the surgery done because it is God’s
will. Many believe that it is a religious duty to obey what they believe to be
the Prophet’s command to circumcise women (El Dareer, 1983). Likewise,
for Jews, circumcision was, and for many still is, the crucial index
constituting the covenant between God and the Jews. More generally, as
traditional practices linked to Abrahamic religions, male and female genital
excision are acts of obedience to God, necessary to the AR relationship
between the parent and God, and between the victim and God (Gruenbaum,
2001). Hence, in all of these religious traditions, excision is deeply and
essentially moral. To fail to do what has been ordained would be to disobey
God, and also to risk ostracism from the congregation and isolation from
the community.

Eunuch opportunities
Powerful rulers cannot trust men who are tempted to seduce the ruler’s
wives and concubines. Furthermore, paternal love and the desire to be
succeeded by one’s son and perhaps to establish a dynasty may compete
with other loyalties; men who cannot have children do not have family ties
competing with their commitment to their masters. So, to improve their
sons’ prospects of becoming trusted courtiers and administrators, in some
societies parents have had their sons castrated. This was an expression of
the parents’ love and aspirations for their sons, and it was felt to be morally
valid because it was in the sons’ own interest – it opened important career
opportunities. It also made it more likely that the mature son would provide
amply for his parents as they grew old. Like female excision and
infibulation, castration forestalls and inhibits sexual relationships that
compete with or threaten more important relationships, allowing these other
relationships to be created and sustained. Usually, the pain of castration was
incidental, and was not the aim, but because castration was meant in part to
deprive men of sexual pleasure or desire, it seems that it, too, should be
regarded as a form of violence, like clitoral excision.
Assyrian, Byzantine, and Sung and Ming Chinese rulers and nobles
prized, purchased, and made gifts of castrated eunuchs. Eunuchs were
servants, administrators, and military leaders, sometimes becoming trusted
confidants and attaining the very highest social positions and powers
(Metamura, 1970; Ringrose, 2003; Stevenson, 1995; Tougher, 1997, 2008;
Tsai, 1996). In these cultures, foreign men captured in warfare or raiding
were often castrated and sold. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, slavers in the Sudan brought their captives through Upper Egypt,
where Coptic monks castrated many of the boys, with the approval of the
governor, to whom the slavers paid a tax (Meinardus, 1969). The slavers
then sold these eunuchs in Constantinople, where they fetched a much
higher price than intact males. Sometimes citizens of these empires were
castrated for crimes. In the Sung dynasty, the military provided a castration
service for volunteers who wished to join the palace service (Metamura,
1970: 66–7). Moreover, many poor Byzantine and Ming families castrated
young boys, and a few men castrated themselves in adulthood, in order to
become eligible to serve in royal or aristocratic courts. Self-castration was
legally prohibited by Ming law, but continued at a high rate nonetheless
(Metamura, 1970; Ringrose, 2003; Tougher, 1997; Tsai, 1996). At any point
in time in each of these empires, thousands of eunuchs were serving in
these royal courts and noble palaces. Some of them were missing only their
testicles, while others also had amputated penes.
In Byzantium, “castration of one’s children could be seen as a positive
Christian act” (Tougher, 2008: 129), and the opportunities for eunuchs
eventually became so great that

Castrated eunuchs of the twelfth century often were the offspring of

well-established families. They were highly educated and dedicated to
a life of perfect, loyal service within the aristocratic family, at court, or
in the church.
(Ringrose, 2003: 127)

Ringrose (2003: 3) notes that eunuchism would not have prevailed as a

central feature of the political center of Byzantine society for so long if it
had not been culturally condoned. The perceived merits of castration in late
Byzantium transcended the pragmatic employment and political
opportunities it enabled; it greatly facilitated – though it did not ensure –
chastity, purity, and avoidance of sin (Ringrose, 2003: 197ff.).

Established families had become accustomed to the idea of castrating

sons for careers that would support the family trajectory in the imperial
city. They had also come to accept the socially constructed gender
assigned to eunuchs. This, in turn, meant that they believed not only in
 the limitations imposed on eunuchs by society but also in the special
talents and spiritual potential that eunuchs were perceived to possess.
(Ringrose, 2003: 193)

In sum, castrators and often the eunuchs themselves intend castration to

prevent eunuchs from engaging in sexual relationships, in order to foster
other, more valued social relationships. Men without sexual desire or
genital capacity are more trustworthy followers because they cannot be
sexually tempted to betray their masters. Relationships involving sex, as
well as paternal–child relationships, interfere with or directly conflict with
other relationships, so by greatly reducing the disposition to relate sexually
and eliminating the primary medium of male sexuality, castration opened up
the possibilities for the relationships people sought to create.
There is little ethnological evidence from these cultures that castration
created identity, solidarity, loyalty, or affection among castrated men.
Although it seems as though it might have had that effect, so far as we are
aware, no evidence has come to light that it did. Perhaps the lack of CS
bonding from castration results from the fact that castration was rarely
ritualized. However, in one culture, castration does constitute significant CS
relationships. Hijras have a very highly marked CS gender identity that
makes them quite distinctive in South Asia, based on being born male but
not being sexually male adults. In South Asia for centuries hijras have
castrated boys whom they abducted or who willingly join the caste and its
social, ritual, and religious practices (Nanda, 1998; Sharma, 1989).
Apparently castration is not essential to being hijra, but it seems to facilitate
this identity, and some hijra communities perform ritual initiations whose
focus is the removal of the penis, scrotum, and testicles.1

The initiatory violence, circumcision, excision, and castration practices

described in this chapter are each morally motivated to create important
social relationships, while forestalling or terminating other relationships. In
the case of initiatory violence, initiates are elevated into a new CS
relationship with other group members through their pain, while their
relationship with outsiders lower in status is terminated. For female
circumcision especially, the violence elevates a woman’s status in the
group, without which she would have no respect. In addition, the violence
pre-emptively terminates any relationships she might have had with other
men by reducing her sexual pleasure, thus maintaining her chastity and
worthiness as a wife. Likewise, for men castrated in order to become
eunuch servants and administrators, the genital violence creates
relationships with elites and nobles by pre-emptively terminating any
relationships they might otherwise have had with their rulers’ wives and
concubines, and pre-emptively ends the eunuchs’ capacity to father sons to
whom the eunuch might be more committed than to his master.

1 Boys were castrated in middle childhood to preserve and enhance their

singing in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe, ancient Greece, the
Roman and Byzantine Empires, Ottoman Turkey, the Near East, China, and
probably classical India (Witt, 2002). This practice enhanced the family’s
social relationships with the Church and their social standing more
generally, and castration was seen as a worthwhile sacrifice in the service of
singing more glorious hymns to God. However, whereas castration is
fundamental to eunuch opportunities (i.e., the eunuch must have reduced
sexual pleasures and desires), the deleterious effects on sexual desire and
pleasure are only incidental when it is in the service of improving singing.
Hence, castration to preserve or enhance singing does not meet our
definition of violence.
 14 Torture
In Plato’s Gorgias, Polus describes the punishment for a usurper’s unjust
attempt to make himself a tyrant: the failed usurper is racked, mutilated,
and, after having had all sorts of further injuries inflicted on him, must
watch the same done to his wife and children before he has his eyes burned
out and is impaled or tarred and burned alive (Benjamin Jowett translation).
Sophocles took for granted the justice of this way of executing the man. To
Plato, such torture evidently seemed perfectly moral and perfectly natural.
That was 2,400 years ago. Now, a survey of Amnesty International’s
research files from 1997 to mid 2000 found reports of torture or ill-
treatment by agents of the state in over 150 countries (Amnesty
International, 2003). In more than 70 countries, the victims included
political prisoners, but ordinary criminals and criminal suspects had
reportedly been victims of torture or ill-treatment in over 130 countries.
People had reportedly died as a result of torture in over 80 countries. In
2011, there were plausible reports of state-inflicted torture in 101 nations
(Amnesty International, 2012). In sum, throughout modern history up to the
present day and across cultures, innumerable societies have practiced and
condoned torture to enforce state authority (Conroy, 2000; Lazreg, 2008;
Otterman, 2007; Peters, 1985). Many people have devoted a great deal of
careful thought and technical ingenuity to designing procedures and tools to
make torture as painful as possible (Donnelly and Diehl, 2011).

Motives of leaders who order torture

Leaders order torture when they perceive that the people to be tortured are
resisting and threatening the leaders’ legitimate authority. Authorities are
entitled to answers from those beneath them, so they feel justified in
torturing if the answers are not forthcoming. Authorities are entitled to
deference and loyalty, so they feel justified in torturing traitors. Indeed,
Collins (1974) posits that the aim of torture is “to enforce submission. The
cruelty is not incidental; it is the main purpose” (Collins, 1974: 420).
Likewise, Collins argues that authorities order amputation, gouging out of
eyes, castration, and other mutilations expressly to humiliate. Historically,
in the exceptionally stratified conquest societies that practiced torture and
mutilation, “these cruelties are not only deliberate, they are ceremonially
recurrent defenses of the structure of group domination” (Collins, 1974:
421).

“Making them talk” implies more than just making them talk about
something in particular. “Making them talk” is also about power, about
imposing one’s will on another. One party is absolutely powerful, the
other, coerced party, is totally powerless and defenseless.
(Crelinsten, 1995: 37)

Motives of torturers
While it is tempting to assume that torturers are psychologically disordered,
torturers do not exhibit antisocial personality characteristics. However,
training for torture often involves extensive hazing, isolation from
outsiders, shared fear, and other features of initiation such as “repetitive
drills and meaningless tasks performed in unison,” which create CS bonds
with the torturer’s military unit (Crelinsten, 1995: 47; see also Haritos-
Fatouros, 2003; Huggins et al., 2002). Conversely, the torturers often place
their victims as enemy outsiders beyond the pale of CS moral obligations or
compassion: “The exclusion of torture victims from the torturer’s moral
community goes back to the early history of torture” (Kelman, 1995: 31).
Moreover, torturers perceive their actions as moral because they perceive
their victims as evil.

A central assumption in the contemporary practice of torture … is that

the victims are guilty. The question of whether or not they are guilty
never arises… Thus, torture is designed only to punish the guilty, to
warn their accomplices, and most importantly to elicit the truth from
them.
(Kelman, 1995: 32)
Excellence in torture can be a path to advancement. In many recent South
American “security” organizations, at least, potential torturers are recruited
among boys from the lowest social classes; if they perform well, they are
selected into prestigious elite units, acquiring a superior status they could
not hope to obtain in any other way (Haritos-Fatouros, 1995: 143).
Torturers also often come from religious families that emphasize obedience
to authority, and during training, they are often brutally beaten in ways that
instill a strong sense of group solidarity and camaraderie among torture
recruits (Moio, 2007). Torturers may even develop a sense of
competitiveness with each other, such that they do not wish to let someone
else succeed in “breaking” the suspect after they have tried (Fanon, 1965).
When torture is conceived of as a “rational” MP bureaucratic practice, it
is justified on the grounds that it is speedy and efficient. Trainees are taught
that the pain they must inflict is proportional to the culpability of the victim
or the social value of the information they reveal. At the same time,
promotion is rationally based on results: a torturer’s rise through the ranks
depends on his efficacy. A Uruguayan army lieutenant and ex-torturer
explains:

I think advancement was linked to the efficiency and general

performance of the officer in different branches and details of his
military career. However, this capacity and efficiency in repressive
methods, among which I include torture, definitely demonstrates his
military capacity, and it is just this capacity which is rewarded by the
authorities either in promotion or assignment.
(Plate and Darvi, 1981: 141)

When police or security forces are overwhelmed by the number of criminals

or terrorists they have to process, and when they need information quickly
so as to pursue accomplices who will soon flee, torture is “rational”
(Huggins et al., 2002: 101–18). A Brazilian police torturer explains that the
necessity for torture comes down to “proportionality” between police
resources and crimes. And, when the policeman is a “professional,” torture
is moral when he “does his job” in what we would call a utilitarian
framework:
 Speaking like an institutional functionary, Márcio explains that
scientific rationality should guide torture: the rational torturer has “a
view of the common good” and believes that “torturing will gather
more evidence so there are greater possibilities of indemnifying the
victim {of the crime the person tortured is accused of committing}, as
well as convicting the thief or murderer…” Márcio believes that moral
and rational police who only use torture to discover evidence, are
“apparently normal [and] controlled in their torture [because they]
have limits…” The policeman needs to make sure that torture causes
just the right amount of suffering to achieve the most optimal ends.
(Huggins et al., 2002: 103–4; square brackets in original; braces
added by the present authors)

Motives of the public that approves of the use of

torture
Support for torture may also be driven in large part by a desire for
retribution against a perceived transgressor (Janoff-Bulman, 2007). In an
EM framework of getting even, people are motivated to reciprocate
violence with violence, regardless of the potential information they may
receive through torture. In a telling experiment, Carlsmith and Sood (2009)
presented participants with a fictional vignette describing “Ahmad Farid,”
an Afghani man who had been captured by the US military. Participants
were led to believe either that Farid likely had little useful information to
divulge about potential terrorist operations, or that he likely had a lot of
information to reveal. In addition, some participants were told that Farid
had been an active member in a terrorist group that had participated in
several roadside bombings, and had been involved in an attack that resulted
in the deaths of four soldiers. All participants were told that Farid was to be
interrogated, and they were asked to rate how severely he should be
interrogated on a scale that ranged from simply asking questions, all the
way to techniques that would be “aversive, degrading, painful, and in some
cases cause permanent physical or psychological scars” (p. 193). The
experimenters were interested in whether the participants’ choice of torture
levels would be swayed more by information about the likelihood of Farid
having information than by his past terrorism. The experimenters found that
although Americans tend to justify torture on utilitarian grounds, they
prescribed more severe interrogation techniques both when Farid was likely
to provide useful information and when Farid had a previous history of
terrorist acts. In fact, Farid’s previous history of terrorist acts was a slightly
better predictor of support for torture than the likelihood of his providing
useful information. The experimenters found that they could even predict
whether participants would support torture based on a single question about
Farid’s moral character. If participants thought Farid was an evil man, they
were more likely to support torturing him, even if they were explicitly told
that it was highly unlikely that he had useful information. Like support for
other forms of violent redress, such as corporal punishment or the death
penalty (Carlsmith, 2008; Carlsmith et al., 2002, 2007), this experimental
evidence shows that support for torture among the public is driven by
retributive motives, not merely the instrumental value of the information to
be gained by torture, or its deterrent effects.

In short, authorities order torture to sustain or restore their AR

relationship with the victims. The torturers themselves are typically
motivated by hierarchy: the desire to sustain and enhance AR relationships
with the torturer’s superiors, or competitive AR relationships with peers.
Torturers see torture victims as enemies existing outside the CS group, and
they are motivated by MP proportionality to acquire information for the
common good, using the most efficient means possible, particularly when
time and resources are scarce. Public approval of torture is often driven by
EM sentiments of vengeance, making the victim suffer as punishment for
the evil he is thought to have done.
 15 Homicide: he had it coming
Tio: When I was fourteen years old, this guy beat me down in the
streets. And my stepfather took his life right in front of me. And I felt,
good about it, really.
From the documentary The Interrupters (James, 2011)

“I could kill him!” people say – and sometimes do. More dryly put,
sometimes people are disposed to violently enforce relationships, and often
they are supposed to do so. The provoking injury may be limited to the
social self, but the retaliatory attack is often directed at the offender through
his or her body. That is, when people perceive that they themselves, their
CS partners, or their AR dependants have been morally “injured,” they may
be disposed to inflict bodily injuries on the offending party – or on others
whom they treat as collectively responsible for the offense. Often they want
to get even in an EM framework, avenging the wrong done to them, an eye
for an eye. This disposition is moral in every sense: the injured parties feel
themselves to be victims of a transgression that demands punishment.
Subjectively, the affront morally “requires” a violent response, and, indeed,
the offender may have intended her provocations to incite a fight. The
phenomenological experience of the offended person is that they “had to”
strike back to preserve their moral integrity.
Peers and reference groups may condone these forceful responses to
insults or infringements of social-relational rights; in nearly every culture
there are intolerable transgressions to which an offended person must strike
back violently, whatever the practical or material consequences. More
distant outside observers, especially modern educated Westerners (including
ourselves), may deplore violent retaliation, condemning what we judge to
be horrific, cruel, callous, or uncivilized cruelty. We may fail to see the
perpetrator’s perspective, incorrectly attributing the violence to the
perpetrator’s having lost self-control, being amorally impulsive, or failing
to understand that he was making the victim suffer. Socially dominant
moralities, expert philosophical doctrines, sanctified and institutionalized
religious precepts, or official legal frameworks may prohibit violent
retaliation, and punish it. But none of that implies that the retaliator’s
violence was not morally motivated. To defend vital relationships, to
redress grievous wrongs, or to terminate intolerable relationships, people
may feel morally impelled to homicide. In the eyes of the perpetrator, pain,
maiming, or death is just what the victim deserves – it is justice.

How many homicides are morally motivated?

Only a minority of murders are asocially instrumental: it is rare for murder
to be merely an expedient means to an asocial material end. Rather, most
murders are embedded in and morally motivated by social relationships.
For example, homicides and gun violence in Boston in 1995 were
described as follows:

Most of the violence was personal – respect, boy/girl, Hatfield-and-

McCoy vendetta – rather than about the drug business.
(Kennedy, 2009: 2)

The killing was overwhelmingly not about money, drugs, markets, or

anything economic. Over and over and over, it was about “beefs” –
standing vendettas between groups.
(Kennedy, 2011: 42)

The same was true of Baltimore (Kennedy, 2011: 108). Maxfield’s (1989)
statistical analysis of 195,543 homicides in 15 large US cities between 1976
and 1985 showed that 51% of homicides whose circumstances were known
grew out of arguments or other social conflicts, and 77% of killers knew
their victims. In other urbanized industrial societies, around 90% of
homicides are between people with pre-existing social ties, and in smaller-
scale societies, the proportion is even higher (Gould, 2003: 67–9). The
prevalence of violence and homicide varies enormously depending on the
type of relationship. Examining case records of all 121 homicides in
Victoria, Australia, in 1985 and 1986, Polk (1993) found that 51% occurred
in sexual, family, or friendship relationships; another 22% resulted from
male–male confrontations over honor.
 These social conflicts are quintessentially moral. In a sample of 138 New
York City arson cases, 53% were motivated by revenge (Pisani, 1982; see
also Black, 1998: 34). In Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century, a
substantial proportion of homicides resulted from “arguments over
gambling debts, girlfriends, rip-offs in drug transactions, and verbal insults
about one’s masculinity, race and family background” (Miethe and
Regoeczi, 2004: 118). The proportion of such homicides increased from
40% in the first decade of the twentieth century to 65% in 1960–77
(p. 125). Other Los Angeles homicides occurred when someone intervened
on behalf of a family member or friend, especially when the ultimate victim
then disrespects the person who is intervening (Miethe and Regoeczi, 2004:
120–1).
Daly and Wilson (1988) showed that homicides in American and other
cultures are typically retaliation for verbal or physical abuse, “escalated
show-off contests” in which honor or social rank are at stake, male conflicts
over women, jealous men’s punishments of their partners for actual or
imputed infidelity or for their partner’s leaving the relationship, and
business conflicts and debts.
Furthermore, the possession and use of guns increases the status of men
in certain American communities and subcultures. “Manhood now it’s like
gunhood. If you got a gun you the man (laughing). Ain’t no more manhood
it’s gunhood” (Wilkinson and Fagan, 1996: 81). Having a gun “boosts up”
an adolescent’s reputation as “bad.”
People confront others and threaten violence to gain AR status, and
respond with violence to maintain or gain status. What is at stake is not just
the AR relationship between the participants but also status in the eyes of
their audience and reference group – violence contests are about “face”
(Felson, 1982; Luckenbill, 1977). Sometimes a person simply makes a
request, politely or not, and the respondent perceives that to comply would
be to show deference, which they are not willing to give; then the defiance
escalates to violence. One might imagine that drug-related homicides, at
least, are purely instrumental, but, in fact, many occur when one party
“disses” the other (Miethe and Regoeczi, 2004: 124). Lundsgaarde (1977)
compiled evidence on 237 Houston homicides in 1969, finding that
virtually all were triggered by moral transgression, including many cases of
dominance confrontations where one party insulted or threatened an
associate or stranger, such that their status in the AR relationship was
determined by who backed down, or, failing that, who killed whom. Most
of the homicides in Luckenbill’s (1977) California sample and Decker’s
(1996a) St. Louis sample were similarly motivated – people killed to
demonstrate that they were not someone whom people should “mess with.”
Kubrin and Weitzer (2003) found that 19% of St. Louis homicides in 1985–
95 were explicit retaliations for insults or offenses against the killer or
against a friend, girlfriend, or relative of the killer. Analysis of 185 assaults
recorded in Las Vegas police files for 1998 found that two-thirds arose from
“character contests” about “social face,” especially “relative social power
and prestige” (Deibert and Miethe, 2010). In the neighborhoods and
subcultures where such homicides are most prevalent, any sort of disrespect
or challenge is sufficient to motivate killing, and these character contests
are not limited to men or to young people.

The offender, victim, and two neighbors were sitting in the living room
drinking wine. The victim started calling the offender, his wife,
abusive names. The offender told him to ‘shut up.’ Nevertheless, he
continued. Finally, she shouted, ‘I said shut up. If you don’t shut up
and stop it, I’m going to kill you and I mean it.’ Whereupon he didn’t
and she did.
(Luckenbill, 1977: 182)

Others in the community may approve of killing someone who consistently

violates social relationships.

Neighbors who have no relation to those involved in a dispute may not

only tolerate but also actively support the use of retaliatory violence…
In several cases residents were quite vehement in saying the person
killed was a legitimate victim, so disliked in the neighborhood that his
passing was regarded as a good riddance, and for this reason they
would not cooperate with the police. Familial support for retaliatory
violence is also evident in our data. In several instances, the killer
proudly tells family members about a planned or completed killing.
(Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003: 176)
Katz (1988) interprets nearly all American and British violence as moral,
finding that

Central to all these experiences in deviance is a member of the family

of moral emotions: humiliation, righteousness, arrogance, ridicule,
cynicism, defilement, and vengeance. In each, the attraction that
proves to be most fundamentally compelling is that of overcoming a
personal challenge to moral – not to material – existence. For the
impassioned killer, the challenge is to escape a situation that has come
to seem otherwise inexorably humiliating. Unable to sense how he or
she can move with self-respect from the current situation, now, to any
mundane-time relationship that might be reengaged, then, the world-be
killer leaps at the possibility of embodying, though the practice of
“righteous” slaughter, some eternal, universal form of the Good.
(Katz, 1988: 9; see also pp. 312–13)

In other words, the moral aim of many homicides is termination of an

intolerable relationship that the killer cannot evade or escape. Or else an
intolerable relationship is so tightly linked to other essential relationships
through metarelational models that withdrawing from the focal relationship
would cause irreparable harm to those other essential relationships. Such
homicides result from moral rage when the victim has attacked the killer’s
moral character or standing, so the humiliated killer perceives that “the
situation requires a last stand in defense of his basic worth” (Katz, 1988:
19). Katz analyzes these situations as challenges to AR status, in particular:

Both humiliation and rage are experienced on a vertical dimension…

Humiliation drives you down; in humiliation, you feel suddenly made
small, so small that everyone seems to look down on you… In
contrast, rage proceeds in an upward direction … angry people “rise
up.”
(Katz, 1988: 27)

Rage is often coherent, disciplined action, cunning in its moral

structure. Would-be killers create their homicidal rage only through a
 precisely articulated leap to righteousness.
(Katz, 1988: 30)

As recently as 40 years ago in the United States, police, prosecutors, grand

juries, trial juries, and judges often agreed that killers were morally justified
in killing to preserve familial relationships: many such killers were not
convicted, or were convicted but put on probation or given minimal
sentences (Lundsgaarde, 1977; Vera Institute, 1977). Family homicides and
other homicides among acquaintances were especially unlikely to result in
prosecution or time served (Lundsgaarde, 1977; Vera Institute, 1977). These
official third parties’ metarelational stance was to condone or at least
tolerate murder motivated by the intense moral emotions of the closest
relationships. Still today, people who kill close CS partners are often treated
very leniently compared to those who kill strangers (Cooney, 2009: 156–83,
189).
Most of the data on motives for homicide are from the modern West, but
the moral motives for homicides in a number of African societies that have
been studied are generally similar to those identified in the West, though, of
course, the specific social relationships and hence the precise moral
provocations leading to homicide are different (Bohannan, 1967a).
Additionally, in most traditional societies, people also experience many
kinds of suffering as punishable moral transgressions. People attribute many
deaths, illnesses, injuries, setbacks, and misfortunes to witchcraft or
sorcery, even when human agency has not been directly observed, but has
been inferred from divination, oracles, or spirit mediums. In most cultures
people know that witchcraft operates more or less “directly” though the
medium of the emotions, attitudes, or motives of the witch without her
taking palpable actions in the material world. Indeed, in some cultures,
some witches are thought to be unaware of their witchcraft. In some
cultures it is the prerogative of the chief or king to execute witches and
sorcerers, but the bereaved family may also avenge themselves, or mobs of
community members may kill women accused of witchcraft or men accused
of sorcery. However, in many cultures, people aren’t able to identify the
witch or sorcerer who killed a family member, so they use magic to avenge
themselves against whoever did it (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Overing,
1986). Eventually, someone in the vicinity dies whom the oracles then
identify as the guilty party. In the many cultures where people fear witches
or sorcerers, it is also common for people to deploy protective magic
against them; the magic is supposed to kill anyone who supernaturally
attacks the possessor of the magic. In order to prevent the targets of magic
from deploying effective countermagic, people using magic almost always
keep secret the nature of their magic, and typically also conceal the fact that
they are using magic at all. In these instances, people confidently
experience themselves as using violence to regulate their social
relationships, morally motivated by their right to self-protection and
vengeance. Magic used in these ways is somewhat like carrying a concealed
gun.
In many cultures people also use magic to enhance their relationships and
pursue social goals such as attracting a lover, being appointed chief,
supporting victory in war, gaining customers, or facilitating success in other
ventures. Often it is implicitly understood – though hardly ever stated – that
the magic may work by harming rivals. Such magic is motivated to regulate
social relationships. It is nearly always kept secret to prevent others from
countering it effectively, but above all it must be concealed because any
harm it does, however justifiable it may feel from the perpetrator’s egoistic
perspective, is likely to be judged illegitimate by the victims and their
supporters, and perhaps by the traditional or modern authorities (Evans-
Pritchard, 1937; Fiske, field notes; Knauft, 1985; Schieffelin, 2004).

Mass murder
Mass murder, in particular, seems pathological, yet even if it is, the
perpetrators’ motives are often moral. In a study of mass murders
committed by adolescents, the most common precipitant was rejection by a
real girlfriend – or by someone who hardly recognized the killer (Meloy et
al., 2001: 726). “Unfair” treatment by others, including one’s family, was
the second most common perceived insult. Examining newspaper reports of
106 incidents of mass murders in public places committed by 137
perpetrators, Petee et al. (1997) found that more than half of the mass
murders were morally motivated relationship regulation. They found that
32% were motivated by revenge directed at persons, institutions, or more
defuse targets. In an additional 5% of incidents, the motives derived from
domestic or romantic relationships; 4% were due to “direct interpersonal
conflict”; 6% were motivated by gang relationships; and 10% were
politically motivated (terrorism).
Research consistently shows that mass murders are typically motivated
by redressive sentiments; let’s briefly consider the evidence. Based on all
the data available for the cases they examined, Levin and Fox (1996) found
that the majority of mass murders were motivated by revenge, sometimes
carried out against proxies for the persons who were perceived to have
wronged the killer, or to get even with a whole social category (e.g., the
Post Office, feminists). Levin and Fox found that some family murders
were motivated by “love” where the perpetrator killed his children to keep
them from an intolerable relationship, such as the custody of an estranged
wife. In another study of documentary evidence on adolescent, male mass
murderers in the United States between 1958 and 1999, 59% of the
perpetrators appeared to have been motivated by relationship issues:

Such events included the loss of a real or fantasized relation with a

female, a family dispute, suspension from school, insults by peers,
termination from a job, anger over involuntary hospitalization, a
physical injury that hampered athleticism, and denial of entry into the
military. These triggering events usually occurred within hours or days
of the mass murder.
(Meloy et al., 2001: 722)

“They never treated me like a son – they treated me like an outsider all
the time. I mean – I don’t think they cared.” 19 year-old male who
killed his father, stepmother, and stepbrothers.
(Meloy et al., 2001: 723)

The US Secret Service and Department of Education’s study of 37 incidents

of school shootings and other mass violence from 1974 to 2000, involving
41 attackers, found that 71% “of individual attackers had experienced
bullying and harassment that was long-standing and severe. In some of
these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant
impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to
mount an attack at the school” (Vossekuil et al., 2002: 21).1 While the
community is horrified at the evil of these murders, in the minds of the
perpetrators they are necessary and right; the perpetrators feel obligated or
entitled to act to rectify their most vital social relationships – and often
expressly intend to terminate all of their bad relationships by dying at the
end of their killing spree.

Homicides committed by the mentally ill

Moral motives to constitute social relationships are culturally informed such
that any individual’s motives are generally more or less congruent with
those of other people in the same roles in the same culture. This congruence
is a matter of degree, however. In a culture of honor, some men may be too
meek or gentle to kill people who insult them or dishonor their daughters.
Conversely, an individual in a Quaker, an Amish, or a Mennonite
community may respond with violence to an insult when they should turn
the other cheek and walk away. Moreover, many psychological disorders
affect the intensity of moral emotions and social motives, or affect
perceptions of the state of social relationships and the significance of
others’ social actions. Hence, a person afflicted with a psychological
disorder may commit violence that is morally motivated, yet excessive or
bizarre by community standards. A paranoid man may retaliate against
people he believes have caused him harm, or plan to do so – so, in his mind,
he is acting virtuously. Likewise, a depressed woman may believe that she
has failed her family, and kill herself to punish herself and terminate the
relationships that feel intolerable to her. A schizophrenic person may
perceive that God is ordering him to kill the devil, who is disguised as Santa
Claus. These or other disorders can facilitate a man’s belief that he is
justified in killing the boss who fired him, along with the coworkers who
conspired against and humiliated him. Just because a person is crazy
doesn’t mean her motives are not moral, even when those motives result in
violence.

Metarelational motives for homicide

Alongside moral sentiments generated by dyadic relationships, there are
commonly metarelational moral considerations. In the contexts of cultural
concerns with honor, especially, failure to stand up for one’s dignity is a
moral failure that weakens or jeopardizes the offended person’s social
relations with many others. Indeed, an offended person’s family, friends,
and neighbors may egg him on, and mock him as weak and cowardly if he
doesn’t strike back. And, especially in non-state and non-modern societies
or in ghettos where the police are not likely to enforce the law effectively,
CS relationships are constituted by collective moral responsibility for
violence. If a person is injured or killed, the victim’s kin group or age set or
gang is collectively responsible for vengeance, which may be carried out
against any member of the perpetrator’s group. Both as victims and as
perpetrators, the essence of the primary group is its corporate liability, its
corporate accountability. The primary group is a unit in which all are
equivalent as perpetrators and as retaliators – EM vengeance is served
regardless of who in the victim’s group kills whom in the perpetrator’s
group (the famous example is the Nuer; see Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Gough,
1972).

In short, when people kill, they usually do so because they feel that a
crucial relationship is being threatened or has been violated, that their
position in a crucial relationship is as stake, or that the relationship has
reached an intolerable state and cannot be rectified, yet they cannot simply
withdraw from it by ceasing to interact.

1 For comparison, a large nationally representative survey by the US

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that
4.8% of male 10th graders (ages 15–16) reported being bullied at least once
a week during the current term (Nansel, 2001). Among all 6th through 10th
graders of both sexes, 8.4% reported being bullied weekly. Among males,
17.8% of those bullied reported being hit, slapped, or pushed at least once a
week; the rest reported bullying that was verbal or gestural. For females the
percentage being physically bullied at least once a week was 11.1.
 16 Ethnic violence and genocide
Historically, CS unity and AR hierarchy moral motives may become
connected to caste systems, in which the moral order is crucially constituted
by preserving the CS essence of a high caste from degrading pollution by
the substance of a lower caste. In some caste systems, the high caste is
polluted if they eat or drink or share comestibles with low-caste persons, or
eat food prepared by low-caste persons. In South Asia, the American South,
and other caste systems, the collective corporeal purity of the high caste is
perceived to be fundamentally polluted if a high-caste woman has sexual
relations with a low-caste man. In these moral systems, “miscegenation” is
a grave threat to the CS integrity of the high caste and at the same time a
violation of its superior social status. This CS unity morality may motivate
lynching of low-caste men, and, at its most extreme, it can generate mass
killing and genocide.

Violence against African-Americans in the US

South
In the US South, “Negro” disrespect to any white person, or, far worse,
dishonoring the purity of a white woman, justified immediate lynching
(Black, 1998: 152–3). Most whites regarded “Negroes” as a degraded kind
who had to be kept in their place, and the sexual potency of Negro men was
a particular threat to the purity of white women and hence to the honor of
white men (Graves, 1906). Negro men accused of violence against any
white, or of even the slightest sexually tinged communication with a white
woman, were typically lynched, and this might involve burning alive or
otherwise torturing to death (Clark, 1998; Godshalk, 2000). Often a large,
appreciative, and encouraging audience of respectable citizens assembled to
enjoy the show and then to vie for souvenir body pieces. For example, in
1899, after being accused of killing his employer and sexually assaulting
the man’s wife, Sam Hose was chained to a stake, his ears and fingers were
sliced off and tossed to the audience, his tongue was removed with pliers,
and he was then doused in coal oil and set on fire. White men then
butchered his charred corpse and sold pieces as souvenirs to the audience of
2,000 who had arrived by special excursion train. The Georgia
Congressman James M. Griggs made a public statement about the lynching:

I appeal to you, gentlemen – you fathers, you husbands; to all men,

white or black, north or south, east or west – do you blame these
people for that burst of human fury? God forbid there should be any
man on this continent who would! Thank God there is not a man in
Georgia who does.
(Grem, 2006: 36)

Even a scuffle between boys could lead to mob violence against a whole
community (Ginzburg, 1962). In race-based AR, Negroes were severely
punished for any lapse in servility to whites:

For generations, young black men learned early in their lives that they
could at any time be grabbed by a white mob – whether for murder,
looking at a white woman the wrong way, or merely being “smart” –
and dragged into the woods or a public street to be tortured, burned,
mutilated.
(Ayers, 1995: 110)

From the point of view of the perpetrators in the American South or

elsewhere, lynching of insolent caste inferiors defends the moral order
(Thurston, 2011). “Collective violence, then, is commonly a moralistic
response to deviant behavior. And, aptly enough, it is sometimes described
as “popular justice” (Senechal de la Roche, 1996: 98).
In general, lynching in the US South redressed and sustained AR
relationships between whites and blacks, but also CS bonds of purity among
whites. For some recent immigrant participants, lynching simultaneously
enhanced their otherwise tenuous CS bonds with established white people
and ensured their AR position above local blacks.

By the turn of the century, when they were arriving in Brazos County
[Texas] in droves, the county’s foreign-born immigrants began
 claiming whiteness with a vengeance. They did so by taking advantage
of, even participating in, the South’s most brutal form of racial
domination: the lynching of black men. For each of the immigrant
groups caught up in the violence – Italians, Irish, and Bohemians – the
deaths of black men helped to resolve the immigrants’ ambiguous
racial identity and to bestow the privileges of whiteness.
(Nevels, 2007: 6–7)

Genocide
Whatever its origin, group conflict does not produce violence without
a consensus among the in-group, or at least its leaders, that another
group has done something wrong and harmful, something dangerous to
the in-group.

But what motivates those who carry out these deeds is also solidarity
and identification with their own group, which, they feel, benefits from
such actions. Thus the obverse of genocide is identification with a
loved group – friends, family, village, clan, tribe, class, nation, or
religion on whose behalf the massacres are carried out.
(Chirot and McCauley, 2006: 71, 75–6)

When people kill, rape, or drive out a whole category of persons, the
perpetrators’ motives are usually moral. State-run programs of the Soviet
Union, China, North Korea, and the Congo Free State, and the Armenian
genocide killed approximately 89 million people during the twentieth
century (Leitenberg, 2006). From the sixteenth through the nineteenth
century, invaders and settlers from Europe killed many millions of
indigenous people in the Americas. In every country, jingoistic or racist
sentiments generated, drove, and justified the killing, as can be seen in this
excerpt from the Hutu ten commandments, a piece of propaganda used to
spur anti-Tutsi sentiment prior to the Rwandan genocide:
 The Hutu, wherever they are, must have unity and solidarity and be
concerned with the fate of their Hutu brothers. The Hutu inside and
outside Rwanda must constantly look for friends and allies for the
Hutu cause, starting with their Hutu brothers. They must constantly
counteract Tutsi propaganda. The Hutu must be firm and vigilant
against their common Tutsi enemy.
(Berry and Berry, 1999)

A people who feel that another people’s presence or intermarriage pollutes

their CS-defining collective essence may wipe them out to purify and
cleanse this endangered essence. “The Nazis executed up to six million
Jews who were ideologically portrayed as a ‘disease,’ as ‘bacilli,’ and as
‘parasites’ that threatened to poison the German national body and
contaminate the purity of German blood” (Hinton, 2002: 14). Staub (1989)
has argued that this exclusion of the out-group as something separate from
the in-group leads to a transformation of indifference to the out-group into a
moral obligation to kill them.
But this moral motivation to wipe out entire kinds of people is not a
modern invention. Sixteenth-century French Catholics killed and mutilated
Protestants and burned their villages to purify themselves of the Protestant
heresy (Chirot and McCauley, 2006). In the Great Mutiny of 1857, Indians
cleansed their community of the British Kafir infidels. The Old Testament
Israelite genocides of the Midianites and Amalekites, and the massacres of
Jews by Crusaders, were simultaneous unity-motivated acts of purification
and hierarchy-motivated obedience to God’s will (Chirot and McCauley,
2006). The perpetrators essentialized both their own group and the polluting
out-group as CS equivalence categories, setting the stage for a moral outcry
to decontaminate the in-group polluted by the out-group. This was the
moral motivation at the core of the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the
purges by Stalin and Mao, the Catholic extermination of Huguenots, and the
Hutu massacres of Tutsis.

The result of this double essentializing is a battle of good and evil, or

two incomparable essences in which love of the good means
necessarily hate for the threatening out-group. This is what lies at the
heart of the most extreme genocidal cases, where the fear of pollution
 can lead to what would otherwise seem to be incomprehensible mass
murder. The out-group’s essence must be kept from contaminating the
in-group’s essence … that is endangered by contact or infection.
(Chirot and McCauley, 2006: 86)

Based on his comprehensive review of the history of genocide, Kiernan

(2007) concludes that “fetishes of purity and contamination” have
aggravated the violence of many intergroup conflicts. Kiernan reports that
in 1580 the British commander in Ireland, Lord Grey, referred to
Catholicism as a disease and a canker. In 1641, the English commander Sir
Charles Coote ordered his soldiers to kill Irish women and children because
“Kill the nits [eggs of the body louse] and you will have no lice,” and
Scottish soldiers shouted this slogan in 1642 as they massacred thousands
of Irish Catholic civilians: men, women, and children. The nit slogan
reappeared in the American West and the Australian outback as a call to
eliminate indigenous populations, in Nazi declarations about Jews, and Al-
Qaeda statements about Shi’a communities (Kiernan, 2007: 606). Hitler
was obsessed by concerns about racial purity and the defiling Jewish
“disease” or “virus”; Pol Pot was obsessed by the necessity to eliminate all
traces of polluting Vietnamese blood from the Khmer essence (Chirot and
McCauley, 2006; also see Hinton, 2002). This is not simply
dehumanization: it constitutes the derogated group as a filthy infestation
that defiles the CS purity of the in-group. Again, from the Hutu ten
commandments, the first three commandments are explicitly focused on
preventing Hutu men from having sexual intercourse with Tutsi women
because it contaminates the purity of the Hutu people.

1. Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is,
works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we
shall consider a traitor any Hutu who
• marries a Tutsi woman
• befriends a Tutsi woman
• employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or a concubine.
2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more
suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and
 mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries
and more honest?
3. Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands,
brothers and sons back to reason.

In conjunction with CS unity motives to cleanse the in-group of the

impurities of the derogated out-group, genocide is also motivated by AR
hierarchy in which the in-group has the right and the requirement to put the
derogated out-group in its place as a subordinate race. The Nazis claimed
that Aryans are a race superior to all others, the pinnacle of evolutionary
progress, and hence destined to rule the world: it was natural, right, and
necessary that they do so, eliminating any entities that stood in their way.
Similar judgments motivated the massacres and displacement of the
indigenous populations of the Americas.

The indigenous populations were stigmatized as savages who ought to

make way for civilization. In his book The Winning of the West, for
example, Theodore Roosevelt justified the treatment meted out to the
Indians of the United States in the following terms: “The settler and
pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent
could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid
savages” (Roosevelt, 1889: 90). General Roca, the minister for war in
Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, put it even more bluntly
when he stated the case for clearing the pampas of their Indian
inhabitants. Speaking to his fellow countrymen he argued that “our
self-respect as a virile people obliges us to put down as soon as
possible, by reason or by force, this handful of savages who destroy
our wealth and prevent us from definitively occupying, in the name of
law, progress and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of
the Republic” (Serres Güiraldes, 1979: 377–8). Roca then proceeded to
lead a campaign, known in Argentine history as the Conquest of the
Desert, whose express purpose was to clear the pampas of Indians.
(Maybury-Lewis, 2002: 45)

Everywhere, imperialist genocide “was often inspired furthermore by the

rulers’ determination to show who was master and who was, if not slave,
then at least obedient subject; and it was often put into effect as deliberate
policy where the masters felt that their subjects had to be taught a lesson.
Acts of resistance or rebellion were often punished by genocidal killings”
(Maybury-Lewis, 2002: 47–8). Caesar annihilated the Eburones, Genghis
Khan eliminated the inhabitants of Herat, and the German general von
Trotha massacred the Herero people, in each case because they refused to
submit to imperial authority (Chirot and McCauley, 2006). In short,
imperial and colonial genocide was the morally motivated redress and
enforcement of AR relationships deemed legitimate by the imperial killers.
In some cases, mass killing and genocide take the form of vengeance or
revolution against what is perceived as an illegitimate authority. In the case
of the Rwandan genocide, the minority Tutsis were given control of the
country over the majority Hutus when the Belgian government ruled the
colony. Hutus refer to this period as a time of slavery. In the late 1950 and
early 1960s, the Hutus rebelled against Tutsi and Belgian rule, resulting in
the deaths of over 50,000 Tutsis. Over the next three decades, the Hutus
engaged in violence and discrimination against Tutsis. In 1990, Tutsi
fighters known as the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda
from Uganda. The RPA comprised primarily the children of Tutsis who had
been forced out of Rwanda by the decades of severe discrimination and the
violence. Hutus responded by arguing for the need to purify the in-group
against the Tutsis and eventually attempted to wipe out all of the Tutsis in
Rwanda (Staub, 2006).

Null attitudes and dehumanization in the

perpetuation of mass violence
Although the Holocaust was ultimately motivated by a desire to purify
Germany and protect Aryans from polluting vermin, Bauman (2001)
cogently underlines that once Hitler had determined the objective, the
proximate mechanisms of extermination were motivated by an MP
proportionality desire for rational efficiency: the most extermination at the
least possible cost.

The department in the SS headquarters in charge of the destruction of

European Jews was officially designated as the Section of
 Administration and Economy… To a degree much too high for
comfort, the designation faithfully reflected the organizational
meaning of activity. Except for the moral repulsiveness of its goal (or,
to be precise, the gigantic scale of the moral odium), the activity did
not differ in any formal sense (the only sense that can be expressed in
the language of bureaucracy) from all other organized activities
designed, monitored and supervised by “ordinary” administrative and
economic sections. Like all other activities amenable to bureaucratic
rationalization, it fits well the sober description of modern
administration offered by Max Weber.
(Bauman, 2001: 14)

Nazi experts, including engineers and scientists, carefully designed the most
rational procedures, chose the optimal technologies, and carefully,
economically salvaged all the labor and material value they could extract
from the people they exterminated. So the motivation for the operational
procedures for carrying out the Holocaust were as rationally calculative as
those of any modern bureaucracy.

The most shattering of lessons deriving from the analysis of the

‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ is that – in the last resort – the choice of
physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung
[removal] was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means-
ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application. To make
the point sharper still – the choice was an effect of the earnest effort to
find rational solutions to successive ‘problems’, as they arose in the
changing circumstances.
(Bauman, 2001: 17; italics in original)

At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come
in conflict with the principles of rationality. The ‘Final Solution’ did
not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal
goal implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely
rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form
and purpose.
(Bauman, 2001: 18; italics in original)
But this proportionality-motivated MP rationality requires the perpetrators
to treat human lives and suffering as entirely fungible with all other
commodities or utilities. How can we make sense of this apparent
commodification of the lives of victims of mass violence that allows
morally motivated actors to engage in MP proportionality or asocial means–
end calculus in the extermination of their victims? RMT posits that there
are just four morally motivated universal schemas for social coordination.
But RMT also recognizes that the mere co-presence of two or more persons
does not imply moral social coordination. People can simply ignore each
other, but they can also treat other Homo sapiens as if they were mere
organisms or objects. In this case, where a person takes account of another
human merely as an object or animate agent, the person has a null
relationship with the other human. People intending to make a farm can
clear a field of rocks or trees, and they can also shoot the deer who eat their
crops or the wolves who may eat their sheep. Ordinarily, there is no moral
social relationship between the farmer and the rocks, trees, deer, or wolves.
In human history, farmers have sometimes driven off or killed indigenous
Homo sapiens who were competitors for the land, and who might eat their
crops or their livestock (Maybury-Lewis, 2002). In such a case, the farmers
have a null “relationship” with – or perhaps more aptly characterized, null
attitude toward – the Homo sapiens they kill: the farmers are treating their
victims just like rocks, trees, or deer – as mere animate objects. Of course,
the farmer is likely to be morally motivated by his love for his family to
remove the rocks or the indigeni; he has a responsibility to feed and protect
his spouse and children. But he has no moral motivations with regard to the
rocks, trees, deer, wolves, or indigeni, because moral motives are
concomitants of social relationships, and the farmer has no social
relationships with the objects and agents he needs to eliminate.
If the farmer originally did have a social relationship with the indigeni,
and then that relationship transformed into a null attitude, we could term the
process “dehumanization.” But “dehumanization” implies an original state
of social relatedness, although, in fact, in many circumstances there never
was a relationship in the first place. The concept of “moral disengagement”
likewise falsely assumes that moral engagement is the original and default
attitude. If the farmer does engage in social relationships with the indigeni,
and hence humanizes and morally engages with them, he doesn’t treat them
like rocks or wolves. Of course, if some indigeni killed other settlers like
him, EM might morally motivate him to seek vengeance against other
indigeni, whom he would likely treat as all equivalent for revenge,
regarding them as a collectively responsible CS group. In contrast, if he has
no social relationship with them in the first place, then, driven by his moral
motives regarding his family, he is likely to engage in traditional practices
of clearing his fields and protecting his livestock without much reflection;
these practices may involve killing predators or indigeni. If and when the
farmer stops to reflect, his decisions are likely to involve a purely
dispassionate rational calculation of the most efficient and effective way to
remove the rocks or eliminate the indigeni.
Such configurations of moral social relationships linked to amoral null
attitudes operated in slave trading, colonial rubber plantations, and warfare.
Harry Truman and Robert McNamara must have been genuinely morally
motivated by their AR responsibilities and their CS patriotism to use MP to
calculate how to minimize the price to be paid in American casualty rates to
achieve eventual victory. But Truman and McNamara dehumanized,
respectively, the Japanese and North Vietnamese, allowing themselves to
make rational strategic decisions. European slave traders and colonial
rubber-plantation managers killed tens of millions in the course of their
enterprises. “During the slave trade, in King Leopold’s Congo and in the
Peruvian rubber-gathering regime, genocide was quite simply a business
expense, the human cost of capturing and coercing unwilling laborers to
produce for the international export trade” (Maybury-Lewis, 2002: 47).
Slave traders, slave owners, and rubber-plantation managers were morally
motivated by their AR and EM relationships with their employers and
bosses, their CS desires to provide for their families, and no doubt their AR
ambitions. But their cruelty was literally inhumane because they perceived
no morally motivating social relationship with their victims. Contemporary
managers of international corporations who contract with Third World
sweatshops where children work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions are
operating within a similar configuration of morally motivated
responsibilities toward their CEOs, stockholders, and customers, joined
with distant and indirect rational links through subcontractors that allow
them to disregard, disengage, and dehumanize the laborers who produce
their products.
 Chapter 17 Self-harm and suicide
To be, or not to be – that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them…
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death –
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns – puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene i

A person may redress a wrong by harming the transgressor, or by

harming someone with whom the transgressor has a vital CS relationship.
Suicide and self-harm take both forms, sometimes simultaneously. Thus,
Annie may kill herself because she has violated a relationship that only her
self-punishment can redeem, or she may kill herself to punish Bill who has
transgressed against her, but who loves her and will suffer when she kills
herself. In either case there are often important metarelational motives at
work. Hurting or killing oneself may restore the collective honor of one’s
primary CS group, such as family or military unit. Suicide and self-harm
may also show that one accepts full individual responsibility for failure, so
third parties should not blame anyone else. In other metarelational
processes, Annie’s suicide to punish Bill’s transgression against Annie may
make George, who loves Annie, hate Bill, or at the very least shame Bill by
drawing George’s and others’ attention to the gravity of Bill’s transgression
against Annie. Similarly, like Lucretia’s suicide after being raped by Sextus,
it may spur others to avenge a grave transgression. More recently, Tibetan
monks’ suicide by setting themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule over
Tibet and repression of Buddhism have put great moral pressure on China,
and in 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi’s suicide by fire in Tunisia brought out
masses of protestors who overthrew the government. All of these moral
motivations for suicide and self-harm are aimed at redressing and rectifying
transgressions of one or more relationships.

Non-suicidal self-injury
Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), including cutting, burning, and injurious
blows, often functions like suicide, to morally regulate relationships. Flett et
al. (2012) found that NSSI is often self-punitive: among women university
students, NSSI is associated with shame, self-reported parental criticism,
socially prescribed perfectionism (e.g., “I find it difficult to meet others’
expectations of me”), and over-generalization of self-evaluation (e.g., “How
I feel about myself overall is easily influenced by a single mistake”).
Reviewing 18 studies of NSSI, Klonsky (2007) found widespread evidence
for its self-punishment function. Nock (2009) reviews several studies
showing that NSSI is often self-punishment, or is social signaling when less
intense forms of communication have proven ineffective. In a survey of
western Canadian urban adolescents, Laye-Gindhu and Schonert-Reichel
(2005) found that, among a sample of 64 who reported self-harming, their
motivations included the following: “I wanted to punish myself,” 27%; “I
was angry at my parent(s)/guardian(s),” 39%; “I was angry at myself,”
63%; “I was angry at someone (friend or other)”, 39%; “I wanted to get
back at someone,” 21%; and “I felt like I was a failure,” 64%. In a
university student sample in which 183 participants reported NSSI, 40% of
participants indicated that their reason for initiating self-injury was anger at
themselves, while 22% started NSSI because they were angry at someone
else, 11% wanted someone to notice them or their injuries, 6% wanted to fit
in with others, and 5% wanted to shock or hurt someone (Muehlenkamp et
al., 2013). Reasons for continuing to self-injure had mostly to do with
“regulating emotions,” but also included dealing with anger, 27%; self-
punishment, 15%; self-hatred, 11%; shocking or hurting someone, 7%;
“because my friends do it,” 4%; and “to be part of a group,” 2%. In an
online study of 162 mostly English-speaking women who reported NSSI,
100% endorsed some self-punishment functions, while 85% endorsed some
interpersonal communication functions (e.g., “to communicate or let others
know how desperate I am”), and 51% endorsed some interpersonal
influence functions (e.g., “to get back at or hurt someone” (Turner et al.,
2012).

Suicide
Durkheim (1951/1897) posited that when social integration is very strong,
people may perceive a normative duty to commit suicide under certain
circumstances; he called this “obligatory altruistic suicide.” Dutiful suicide
includes Indian suttee (sati), in which a widow throws herself on her
husband’s funeral pyre, and the suicide of attendants and followers of a
chief when he dies among the Gauls, Hawaiians, and Ashanti (Durkheim,
1951/1897: 219). When a person has a duty to commit suicide, people
disrespect the person who fails to do so, and often believe that the defaulter
will suffer in the afterlife. Suicide is required, Durkheim observes, when the
wife or followers are strictly subordinated to the deceased such that they
must follow him even into death: they cannot live independently. That is,
the dependant exists only as a dependant, without any other social role, so
her intention is to sustain her relationship with her deceased partner in the
realm of the dead (Hawley, 1994). Conversely, in ancient northeastern
Europe and India, when an old man was unable to perform his duties as a
leader and protector, he must honorably kill himself rather than ignobly
succumbing to death in bed (Durkheim, 1951/1897: 217–18). In other
words, the AR relationship between superior and inferior is their only
possible life; without it – or rather, to maintain it – they must die. In
addition, Durkheim cites East Asian, American Indian, and Polynesian
norms that valorize suicide when a person has violated an important social
relationship, or someone has violated a relationship with the person, as well
as suicide performed to demonstrate superiority and gain prestige (p. 222).
Durkheim also ascribes high rates of suicide among military officers, in
particular, to the experience of “a refusal of leave, a reprimand, an unjust
punishment, a delay in promotion, a question of honor, a flush of
momentary jealousy” – in other words, to someone violating a social
relationship with the officer (p. 239). As he puts it, “the profession of a
soldier develops a moral constitution powerfully predisposing man to make
away with himself,” a moral constitution of CS solidarity.
People occasionally kill themselves to be with God, in close, secure,
peaceful rest; they may also kill a spouse, lover, or child first to bring the
victim along or have the victim all to themselves (Douglas, 1967: 297–300).
The ultimate Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain renunciation is suicide that, in RMT
terms, is necessary to attain CS union with ultimate oneness (Durkheim,
1951/1897: 223–4). Durkheim mentions East Asian suicides of self-
sacrifices to Shiva, Amida Buddha, and other gods. In short, Durkheim’s
thesis is that obligatory altruistic suicide is suicide to sustain or redress a
crucial social relationship.
Manning (2012) cogently reviews the subsequent literature across
cultures to show that suicide is “moralistic” – in sociological terms, it is
“social control” of “deviance.” In the language of sociology, suicide as
vengeance, punishment, atonement, avoidance, political protest, or appeal
to a third party is “conflict management” (see also Black, 1998). A person
may execute himself as atonement for harming or doing wrong to others
(Douglas, 1967: 302). Indeed, in Britain and the United States in the
twentieth century, apparently more people executed themselves for
homicide than were executed by the state (Bohannan, 1967b).
A person may commit suicide as self-punishment for failing in his duty to
a superior (Westermarck, 1908: vol. II, 240), or, conversely, as a way of
sanctioning a superior who has violated the AR relationship with him.
People may commit suicide to evoke love, sympathy, and regret – and to
make others acknowledge responsibility and feel guilty for their suffering
(Douglas, 1967: 309–19). In some cultures and circumstances, people may
carry out a suicide in such a way as to magnify the impact of the suicide on
others, making the others feel guilty, shaming them, or exposing them to
sanctions (Manning, 2012). Following Black’s (1998) paradigm, Manning
presents ethnologic evidence that suicide is most likely when the
transgressed relationship is between people who are socially close
(intimates who share a culture) and functionally interdependent. A person is
most likely to commit suicide when they are in a distinctly subordinate
position in the violated AR relationship, and when they have little effective
social support from others.
In Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India, Iran, Pakistan, Syria,
Jordan, and Egypt, suicide is very often motivated or provoked by quarrels
within the family or disputes with neighbors or associates; occupational or
educational failures; romantic rejection, jealousy, or blockage by third
parties; desertion, dissolution of relationships, bereavement, or social
isolation; disgrace, dishonor, shame, or the person’s own transgressions
(Headley, 1983). In Japan, China, and some other cultures in various
historical periods, suicide has been especially virtuous when performed for
the welfare or honor of the group, or as an apology and atonement for
failing in one’s duties or committing a major transgression (Iga, 1986;
Westermarck, 1908: vol. II, 241). Similar motives and events provoke
suicide among the Soga, Gisu, and other African societies where suicide has
been studied; men often commit suicide due to circumstances that
drastically reduce their status (Bohannan, 1967a, 1967b; Fallers and Fallers,
1967; La Fontaine, 1967).
Interviews with 50 suicide-attempter patients in a Midwestern US
suburban psychiatric facility diagnosed with major depressive disorder
(MDD) and data on 50 suicide completers retrospectively diagnosed with
MDD found that the major precipitants were interpersonal conflicts; divorce
or relationship breakup; and, especially among the completers, job stress
and financial stress (DeJong et al., 2010). Responding to questionnaires, 35
New York City adolescents who seriously considered killing themselves
and 32 who attempted to commit suicide identified the precipitating
situation; 43% and 56%, respectively, reported that fighting with a parent
was a precipitant; 31% and 37% indicated fighting with others was a
precipitant; 14% and 22% indicated school problems (respondents could
indicate more than one precipitating situation; Negron et al., 1997).
Describing their emotions at the time, 64% and 69% reported they were
angry; 43% and 81% felt isolated. Among 254 adolescents who were seen
in a hospital for attempted suicide in a suburb of Oslo, Norway, between
1984 and 2006, clinical interviews found that a relational conflict was the
most common trigger (50%), and a dysfunctional family (conflicts within
the family) was the most common underlying reason (44%) (Dieserud et al.,
2010). Other studies have found that the major suicide-attempt triggers for
adolescents and young adults are relationship conflicts; relationship
breakups; and economic, school, and work difficulties (reviewed in
Dieserud et al., 2010). Among 104 Australian suicidal adolescents seen
between 1994 and 1998, clinical interviews found that they were
“perfectionistic, were overly conscientious and experienced enormous
inappropriate guilt”; in addition, their parents described them as unable to
accept being wrong and overly sensitive to perceived criticism (Haliburn,
2000). In 56 suicide notes from completed adult suicides in the United
States and 262 in Australia, love or marital problems were very common for
both men and women; other motives arose from problems with
achievement, school, or work (Canetto and Lester, 2002; Lester et al.,
2004). The most common reason for suicide in Russia, and among the
Apache and Navaho, is an interpersonal conflict or relationship problem,
particularly in marriage, romantic relationships, and the family; grief over
the death of a loved one also provokes some suicides in some cultures
(Ambrumova and Postovalova, 2010; Everett, 1975; Wyman and Thorne,
1945).

Among White Mountain Apache [suicide] is aggressive, retaliation for

a real or supposed offense committed by an antagonist who is either a
spouse or close kinsman.
(Everett, 1975: 278)

The aim to redress a social-relational transgression against a person, and

sometimes other moral motives, may lead to either suicide or homicide,
depending on the circumstances. For example, Elwin (1950) describes
major causes of both suicide and homicide among the indigenous Maria of
Maharashtra, India: avenging a transgression or an insult, family quarrels,
love affairs gone wrong, other disputes, and fear of – or self-defense against
– the assaults of witches or sorcerers. However, the loss of an essential
relationship partner, or the prospect of social isolation, such as the ostracism
of lepers or those shamed by their own egregious misdeeds, leads
specifically to suicide. Depending on the circumstances, suicide may be
aimed at punishing oneself for a relationship transgression, punishing
relationship partners for their transgression, terminating a relationship, or
preserving a relationship in death.
 All of these studied cases converge on the conclusion that non-suicidal
self-injury and suicide are intended to constitute relationships, especially to
rectify or terminate relationships, but sometimes to sustain a crucial
relationship by staying with a partner who has died. The subjective
phenomenology of injuring or killing oneself is moral as well: it is
motivated by shame, guilt, moral outrage, loyalty, love, or the need to evoke
love, guilt, or shame. Violence against the self has a lot in common with
violence against others, both emotionally and with respect to its regulative
functions.
 18 Violent bereavement
“Alas, my royal lord Achilles … Patroclus has been killed…”

When Achilles heard this he sank deep into the black depths of despair.
He picked up the dark dust in both his hands and poured it on his head.
He soiled his comely face with it, and filthy ashes settled on his
scented tunic. He cast himself down on the earth and lay their like a
fallen giant, fouling his hair and tearing it out with his own hands. The
maidservants whom he and Patroclus had captured caught the alarm
and all ran screaming out of doors. They beat their breasts with their
hands and sank to the ground beside their royal master. On the other
side, Antilochus shedding tears of misery held the hands of Achilles as
he sobbed out his noble heart, for fear that he might take a knife and
cut his throat.
Homer, Iliad, Book XVIII, 18–34

Briseis came back, beautiful as golden Aphrodite. But when she saw
Patroclus lying there, mangled by the sharp bronze, she gave a piercing
scream, threw herself on his body and tore her breast and tender neck
and her fair cheeks with her hands.
Homer, Iliad, Book XIX, 310–15

The phases of relationship constitution begin with the creation of the

relationship, and variously proceed in no particular sequence though
conduct and enhancement, protection, and redress and rectification.
Eventually, a relationship “terminates” through one or both parties’ choice,
their involuntary separation, or death. Yet the loss of one’s partner, even his
death, doesn’t actually end the relationship. Just as a person can sustain a
social relationship with a deity, spirit, or other supernatural being, a person
can continue to relate to someone who leaves even if that person never
directly or materially communicates with the person left behind. Similarly,
you can relate in every psychological sense through e-mail, or text, or
telephone – even if your interlocutor doesn’t actually receive the message
when there is a technical glitch, or the person has died without your
knowing it. If you are talking to someone in the next room, you are relating,
although it might turn out that she’s not really in the next room, after all;
she’s gone out of earshot.
But it is typically quite distressing to know that the other person has
intended to break off the relationship, or can’t receive ordinary
communications from you or can’t communicate with you as he previously
did, or can no longer be touched or fed or kissed or seen. This distress often
makes the isolated partner angry, makes him suffer in many ways, or evokes
a feeling of burdensome sorrow. Any of these emotions may lead to
violence against others, or the self. This is especially pronounced when a
partner dies. As Homer recounts, ancient Greek women mourners, for
example, lacerated their cheeks, beat their breasts so as to cause wounds,
and tore their hair out to such a degree that eventually laws were
promulgated prohibiting mourners from lacerating their flesh (Garland,
2001: 29, 121; Graves, 1891: 36–8; Toohey, 2010).

There can be no doubt that in normal mourning anger expressed

towards one target or another is the rule… Furthermore, there are good
grounds for believing that even in healthy mourning a person’s anger is
often directed toward the person lost, though it may equally often be
directed towards other persons, including the self. Among the many
problems requiring study, therefore, are the causes of these various
expressions of anger, the functions they may serve (if any), the targets
towards which they may be directed, and the vicissitudes, many of
them pathological, that angry impulses may undergo.
(Bowlby, 1989: 29)

There are few if any quantitative data on the incidence of anger, let alone
violence, following the death of a partner (or loss due to choice or
separation), but anger is certainly a common component of bereavement
(Bonanno and Kaltman, 2001; Bowlby, 1973: 245–57, 1989; Rosenblatt et
al., 1976: 29). In Western cultures such as that of the UK, some bereaved
just feel generally irritable and diffusely angry (Parkes, 1996: 81–4). But as
we have seen in diverse cultures, when a person’s crucial relationship
partner betrays the relationship or terminates it, the aggrieved person
sometimes harms or kills himself, sometimes attacks or kills the partner,
and sometimes does both. Bereavement anger and its violent expression can
be entirely normative: in quite a few cultures, people deal with death by
harming themselves or other mourners (Stroebe and Stroebe, 1987: 40–1).
In a diverse though perhaps not perfectly representative sample of 78
cultures examined by Rosenblatt et al. (1976: 19), the bereaved were angry
or aggressive in 76% of the societies where this variable could be rated. In
67% of the cultures, some mourners – often those in culturally specified
relationships with the deceased – normally injured themselves (females in
45% of cultures, males in 40%; p. 142). Notably, out-group persons were
“institutionalized targets” of attack in 22% of the sample, while the
presumed killer was the “institutionalized target” in just 17%. In 17% of the
sample, raters found evidence that “spontaneous aggression after sudden
death” was typical, but the authors do not explain how they coded this
(Rosenblatt et al., 1976). These percentages are lower than the true
proportions, since the ethnographer’s not mentioning a practice does not
imply the absence of that practice in that culture. Evidently, many cultures
prescribe bereavement injury to the self or others, probably in part as a
strong signal of the bereaved’s attachment, sorrow, or determination to
avenge the death. And even in cultures in which deliberate self-harm is not
culturally prescribed in bereavement, some individuals nevertheless harm
themselves (Haw and Hawton, 2008).
Psychoanalytic theory would explain anger, guilt, or shame after loss as
displacement or another hydraulic “defense” mechanism in which anger at
the dead person for leaving/ending the relationship is displaced onto others.
Bowlby (1989: 68) writes, “To direct anger away from the person who
elicited it and towards some more or less irrelevant person is so well known
that little need be said about it.” But there is little or no empirical evidence
for such displacement mechanisms. So, while it is empirically well
established that bereavement and loss by separation often evoke anger or
guilt, it is unclear whether that anger always, or even commonly, arises
from blaming the deceased. In any event, particularly when the
circumstances of a close partner’s death are terrifying or horrific, the
surviving partner’s resulting rage may endure indefinitely. As the definition
of PTSD makes clear, the experience of an associate’s “death, threatened
death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual
violence” often results in “anger” and “irritable or aggressive behavior, self-
destructive or reckless behavior” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
In the United States, people with PTSD are more likely to be “aggressive”
and, in particular, violent against their intimate partners (Bell and Orcutt,
2009). And, of course, people often hurt or kill someone they blame for
their partner’s departure or death. But it’s not entirely clear whether or how
mourning and PTSD emotions are linked to these punitive, retaliatory, and
vengeful emotions that are probably universal.
Subjectively, sometimes the mourners simply “can’t take it any longer,”
so they attack or kill others more or less indiscriminately – and this is
precisely what they are culturally expected to do. Anything less would be a
failure to honor the relationships with the deceased, would be offensive, and
would be widely criticized. Among the northern Australian Aboriginal
Unmatjera (Anmatyerre) and Kaitish (Kaytej, or Kaititja), when a man dies,
the gammona (“mother’s brothers,” – that is, men who have married women
of the deceased’s clan) cut themselves on the shoulder. In a subsequent
funerary ceremony, the widow “and other relatives cut themselves, both to
show their sorrow and to indicate to the dead man’s spirit that he has been
sufficiently mourned for, and that now he must return to his Alcheringa
camping-place and leave them in peace” (the Alcheringa is the Dreamtime,
the era when the totemic spirits created the world) (Spencer and Gillen,
1904: 508). The gammona shave off the deceased man’s hair and make it
into a band to girdle the waist; wearing this “is supposed to make the
inward parts of the man hot and savage, and it is then his duty to avenge the
death of his ikuntera” (“sister’s son,” or “daughter’s husband” – that is, a
man of the clan into which women of his clan have married) (p. 510).

Amongst these tribes there is a curious custom according to which the

gammona who secures the hair of a dead man is obliged to go and first
of all fight with some other gammona. Along with a party of men
whom he has summoned for the purpose, he goes to a distant part of
the tribe and there challenges another gammona man belonging to that
locality to fight. The challenge cannot be refused, and, when they have
fought and cut one another about on the thighs and shoulders, the
challenger hands over the dead man’s hair to his opponent, who will
later on challenge another gammona, and so the quarrel, if such it may
be called, passes on from group to group. Not seldom a distant
 gammona will hear that some special individual, belonging to another
local group of the tribe, has his dead ikuntera’s hair-girdle, and will
come up armed with that of another dead ikuntera. This necessitates
another fight, and, when it is over, the two men pull their hair-girdles
off, rub them in their own blood, and then exchange them. Young
gammonas will often have arm-bands presented to them which have
been worn by the dead man. In the event of this, when the fight
between the older men is over, these younger ones will fight and cut
one another, after which the fur-bands are rubbed in their own blood
and exchanged.
In addition to all that has been described above, it not infrequently
happens that, with the assistance of the medicine men, the gammona
learns who was really the cause of his ikuntera’s death, and then it is
his further duty to organise an avenging party and kill the guilty
person.
(Spencer and Gillen, 1904: 510–11)

The Arunta (Aranda, or Arrente), a nearby Australian tribe, engage in

similar mortuary violence.

In the Arunta, unless the gammona cuts himself when an ikuntera dies,
then any one of the men who stands in the same relationship to the
deceased may take away his wife and present her to some more dutiful
son-in-law; but the attempt to actually kill, or at least seriously injure,
a gammona seems to be an extreme expression of this feeling. It is not
even suggested that the gammona who suffers has actually had
anything whatever to do with the man’s death; in fact, not seldom
another man, who is suspected of being the real culprit, is also killed at
a later time.
(Spencer and Gillen, 1904: 514–15)

Among the nearby Warramunga, when someone dies, there is a kind of

violent pandemonium in which people cut, burn, and injure themselves and
others in prescribed ways (and the bereaved women then cease to speak for
years, restricting their communication to signing) (Kendon, 1988: 70, 85–
93; Sansom, 1982; Spencer and Gillen, 1904).1 Spencer and Gillen (1904)
describe the scene they observed as a Warramunga man died, with men and
women of the camp wailing and women cutting the crowns of their heads.
People tore the dying man’s dwelling to pieces and then men rushed to the
scene and piled themselves all together on top of the dying man. Then a
man

rushed on to the ground yelling and brandishing a stone knife.

Reaching the camp, he suddenly gashed both thighs deeply, cutting
right across the muscles, and, unable to stand, fell down into the
middle of the group from which he was dragged out after a time by
three or four female relatives – his mother, wife, and sisters – who
immediately applied their mouths to the gaping wounds while he lay
exhausted on the ground. Then another man of the same class came
rushing up, prancing about, and to all appearances intent upon gashing
his thighs, but, watching him, we saw that in his case it was merely a
pretence. Each time that he pretended to cut he merely drew the flat
side of his knife across his thigh, and so inflicted nothing more serious
than a few slight scratches. Gradually the struggling mass of dark
bodies began to loosen, and then we could see that the unfortunate man
was not actually dead, though the terribly rough treatment to which he
had been subjected had sealed his fate. The weeping and wailing still
continued, and the sun went down leaving the camp in darkness. Later
on in the evening, when the man actually died, the same scene was re-
enacted, only this time the wailing was still louder, and men and
women, apparently frantic with grief, were rushing about cutting
themselves with knives and sharp-pointed sticks, the women battering
one another’s heads with fighting clubs, no one attempting to ward off
either cuts or blows. Then, without more than an hour’s delay, a small
torchlight procession started off across the plain to a belt of timber a
mile away, and there the body was left on a platform built of boughs in
a low gum-tree.

Next morning there was not a sign of any habitation to be seen on the
side of the creek on which the dead man’s camp had formerly been
placed. The only trace left was a small mound of earth called kakiti,
piled up on the actual spot on which the man had died, and around this
the ground was carefully smoothed down for a few feet in every
direction. Every camp was removed to a considerable distance from
the scene, as no one was anxious to meet with the spirit – the
ungwulan – of the dead man, which would be hovering about the spot,
or with that of the man who had brought about the death by evil magic,
as it would probably come to visit the place in the form of an animal. It
must be remembered that, though the man was declared by the old
doctors to have died because he had violated tribal custom, yet at the
same time he had of course been killed by some one, though by whom
they could not yet exactly determine.
The next day was a busy one in camp, because, according to etiquette,
there were certain mourning ceremonies which had to be performed,
the omission of which would indicate a want of respect for and be very
displeasing to the spirit of the dead man. Different men belonging to
the Thungalla, Tjupila, Thakomara, and Thapungarti classes were
lying hors de combat with gashed thighs. They had done their duty,
and henceforth, in token of this, would be marked with deep scars [a
photograph shows one such man with deep wounds]. On one such man
we counted the traces of no less than twenty-three wounds which had
been inflicted at different times. Of course everything is hedged
around with very definite rules, and when a man of any particular class
dies it is always men who stand in a special relationship to him who
have to cut themselves. On this occasion it was a Tjunguri man who
had died, and the men who gashed their thighs – an operation called
kulungara – stood to him in one or other of the following
relationships: – Grandfather on the mother’s side, mother’s brother
(the same as son-in-law), brother of the mother of the dead man’s wife,
and brother of the last. In addition to this the Tjupila, Thungalla, and
Thakomara men had cut their hair off closely, burnt it, and smeared
their scalps with pipe-clay, whilst the Tjapeltjeri – the tribal fathers –
had cut their whiskers off. Groups of men and women were sitting
about embracing each other and weeping. The leg of the Thapungarti
man who had most deeply gashed himself was held by his father, a
Panunga man, who at the same time was embraced from behind by an
aged Thungalla, as if to support him in his grief. Then a tribal brother
of the dead man came up and embraced the Thapungarti, both of them
howling loudly. The Tjunguri man then sat down and was embraced
 from behind by an old Tjapeltjeri man who was his tribal father, and
who in turn was embraced by other Tjapeltjeri, Tjupila, Tjunguri, and
Thapungarti men, all of them alternately howling and moaning…
[Soon] the women set to work wailing and cutting their scalps. When
this had gone on for some time they once more got up and approached
the lubras’ [women’s] camp, where forty or fifty women were
assembled. The latter came out in small bands of perhaps six or eight
at a time, every individual carrying a yam-stick [a fire-hardened stick
for digging tubers] (Fig. 138). After a series of sham fights they all sat
down in groups with their arms round one another, weeping and
wailing frantically (Fig. 139), while the actual and tribal wives,
mothers, wives’ mothers, daughters, sisters, mothers’ mothers, sisters’
husbands’ mothers, and grand daughters, according to custom, once
more cut their scalps open with yam-sticks. In addition to all this the
actual widows afterwards scared [sic] the scalp wound with a red-hot
fire-stick. The men apparently took no notice whatever of what the
women were doing, though of course they were well aware of what
was taking place; in fact if a woman does not do her duty in this
respect she is liable to be severely chastised, or even killed, by her
brother.
(Spencer and Gillen, 1904: 517–22)

In the following days, Warramunga men looked carefully over the spot
where the deceased had died, and around the tree in which his body had
been placed in a nest of branches, and then examined the flow of liquids
from the decomposing body, looking for signs to indicate what sorcerer
killed him. During the same period they performed a set of magical and
ascetic acts to kill the unidentified sorcerer responsible. Quite some time
later the community retrieved the deceased’s bones and performed an
elaborate series of rituals with them, over the course of months, culminating
in the killing of the sorcerer blamed for the death. Toward the end of their
ritual preparations before they set off to kill the sorcerer,

all of the men stood up, opened veins in their penes by means of sharp
flakes or pointed sticks, and, standing opposite to one another, allowed
the blood to spurtle out over each other’s thighs. This gruesome
 ceremony is supposed both to mutually strengthen those who take part
in it, and at the same time to bind them still more closely together and
to make anything like treachery quite impossible.
(Spencer and Gillen, 1904: 560, 562)

Among Australian Aboriginal cultures, mortuary wounding of the self and

others was evidently rather widespread, but the specific practices varied.
The mortuary rituals of the Lardil of Mornington Island, Australia, always
included a “square up.” This consisted of a controlled battle between two ad
hoc groups.

Spears and boomerangs were thrown at will in an unorganized fashion,

and then the two groups rushed at each other. Needless to say, people
did their best not to hurt close relatives on the opposing side.
Normally, as soon as someone was seriously injured or killed the battle
would stop. Ideally, in the evening the two groups danced together,
thus indicating that hostilities had ceased.
(McKnight, 1986: 146)

Violence is also intrinsic to bereavement in other cultures. Tahitians have

long been noted for their placidity and gentleness, but in the eighteenth
century when a person died, for two or three days the bereaved women
would strike the crown of their heads repeatedly with sharks’ teeth, making
themselves bleed extensively (Levy, 1973: 289–91). (Women also struck
their heads with a shark’s tooth when reunited with someone they loved
after a long separation; it seems to have been an expression of being deeply
moved by transitions in close CS relationships.) Then late at night and early
in the morning the men ran about seeking anyone they could strike with
clubs set with shark’s teeth. But the marauding men were preceded by boys
who warned anyone they saw to hide, so apparently they typically found
few if any victims. Interestingly, when Levy (1973) intensively studied
contemporary Tahitians’ emotional lives, the Tahitians showed remarkable
composure and avoided displays – or experience – of strong emotions; they
minimized the seriousness of death, quickly moving on with their lives.
 Violent mourning may be coupled with beautifully elaborated visual and
poetic esthetics. In Papua New Guinea, Kaluli villages host groups of men
from other villages, who come into their longhouses at night in magnificent
feathered garb. The feathered visitors dance and sing of places imbued with
the memories of their hosts’ deceased relatives and friends (Schieffelin,
2004). Through these songs, the singers aim to evoke great sadness in their
hosts by making them feel the loss of those they loved. If the singers are
successful in evoking their hosts’ painfully sad memories of lost loved
ones, their hosts, enraged to feel such sorrow, grab burning brands from the
fire and burn the dancers, often severely. In the morning, the dancers have
to pay compensation to their hosts for making them feel so sad. Burning the
dancers is entirely normative: they deserve to be burned for making their
hosts feel so hopelessly sad. Yet, on another occasion, their hosts, in turn,
will compose touching songs of places that remind their hosts of lost loved
ones, create elaborate feather garments, and ceremonially visit their former
guests or others, where they will perform their songs to make hosts so sad
these men in turn burn them for evoking such painful memories.
In another culture area, the Philippines, the central virtue for the Ilongot
is liget: fierce, energetic, restless “anger” (M. Rosaldo, 1980). Liget
motivates people, especially young men, to take the risks to perform
dangerous acts such as climbing out on limbs of the giant trees that shade
their gardens to cut back the branches and let sunlight in. More generally,
liget moves people to overcome lethargy, laziness, fear, or other barriers to
action, provoking them to make the effort to do something. A rough
analogy, albeit not at the same level of intensity, would be the fierce spirit
that an American football coach might try to inspire among his players to
come from behind and beat their rivals in the championship game. Liget is a
moral emotion, motivating Ilongot to do what they must do to meet their
responsibilities and realize the full potential of crucial relational
affordances. It is the core virtue of the culture: it is admirable and morally
necessary for a man, especially, to be liget. When an Ilongot dies, the
bereaved feel an unbearable burden that weighs on them and, perhaps, like
depression, makes them not want to make any effort to do anything. Young
Ilongot men seek a catharsis that will rid them of this paralyzing weight of
grief. They want to transform the weight of grief into the fierce assertion of
liget. So they seek one or more elder men to lead them on an expedition
through the forest. The first person they encounter – whoever it is, it doesn’t
matter – they spear and decapitate. The first young man to grab the head
and toss it to the ground is a hero. Relieved of the burden of death, the
euphoric head-tosser and his peers returns home to be feted. The head-
tosser, in particular, is admired by all and envied by his peers who have not
yet tossed a head. Tossing a head is the epitome of male virtue (M. Rosaldo,
1980; R. Rosaldo, 1980, 1984).2
On yet another continent we again see men raging against death. Among
the Nyakyusa of southern Tanzania, at funerals the young men commonly
danced a war dance, which often led to spear fights (Wilson, 1951: 151,
1957: 24–30, 35). The motivating moral emotion, ilyojo, is somewhat
similar to liget. The war dance at a Nyakyusa funeral was impressive:

It is led by young men dressed in a special costume of ankle-bells and

cloth skirts and, traditionally, bedaubed with red and white clay. All
hold spears and leap wildly about, stamping down the soft earth of the
grave as they dance. There is little common movement, each dances
alone as if fighting a single combat. Among the men some of the
women move about, singly or in twos and threes, calling the war-cry
and swinging their hips in a kind of rhythmical walk. Under a tropical
sun in a damp heat, with the thermometer often over 90°F. in the
shade, they dance for hours. In the dust and excitement there are no
very apparent signs of grief; and yet if you ask the onlookers what it is
all about they reply: ‘They are mourning the dead.’
This burial dance is traditionally a dance of war; now, as also in former
times, it provides those men most affected by grief and fear with a
violent and passionate means of expression, in which their feelings are
assuaged by the touch of life; for the others it was, in the old days, an
assertion of their own and their dead neighbor’s warlike quality, and
this significance is still vividly present to their minds…
‘This war-dance (ukukina)’, said an old man, ‘is mourning, we are
mourning the dead man. We dance because there is war in our hearts.
A passion of grief and fear exasperates us (ilyojo likutusila)’… Ilyojo
means a passion of grief, anger, or fear; ukusila means to annoy or
exasperate beyond endurance. ‘A kinsman, when he dances, assuages
his passionate grief (ilyojo); he goes into the house to weep and then
 he comes out and dances the war-dance; his passionate grief is made
tolerable in the dance (lit. he is able to endure it there in the dance), it
bound his heart and the dance assuages it’…
‘We used not actually to fight at burials so much as to dance and
become conscious of our strength for future wars against other
chiefdoms, when, on another day, we would go to raid their cows.’
But although an actual fight was not a necessary part of the funeral it
frequently occurred; and burials are still one of the most usual
occasions of spearing. ‘In the old days, before the country was at peace
[under colonial administration], we men often fought at burials; we ran
in front spearing one another, while our wives ran behind calling the
war-cry and watching the prowess of their husbands’…
‘At burials there was often war. If the men of two chiefdoms were
there together at a burial they would often quarrel and fight.’
(Wilson, 1957: 23–5)

In indigenous North America, mourning was also quite violent. In the

Western Plains of Native North America, bereavement took the form of

a violent expression of loss and upheaval. Abandon took the form of

self-mutilation, especially for women. They gashed their heads, the
calves, they cut off fingers. Long lines of women marched through
camp after the death of an important person, their legs bare and
bleeding. The blood on their heads and legs they let cake and did not
remove… At the grave the man’s favorite horses were killed and both
men and women wailed for the dead.
(Grinnell, 1923: vol. II, 162)

In mourning, the Blackfoot and the Crow cut off a finger joint, while
Omaha and Pawnee cut their arms and legs (Benedict, 1922). On the death
of children these actions were especially intense, and bereaved parents
sometimes committed suicide. Among the Assiniboine

should anyone offend the father during this time his death would most
certainly follow, as the man, being in profound sorrow, seeks
 something on which to wreak his revenge, and he soon after goes to
war, to kill or be killed, either being immaterial to him in that state.
(Denig, 2000 46: 573)

Diffusely directed violence was characteristic of Plains Indian mourning

(Benedict, 1932: 7–8), similar to mourning in other cultures of indigenous
North America. But the Kwakiutl of the Northwest coast went further. The
Kwakiutl, famous for their potlatches, were extremely competitive; pride
based on besting others was everything, while anything but success was
humiliating – so much so that men not infrequently committed suicide when
shamed (Benedict, 1959).3 Nothing was more humiliating for a man than
the death of someone close to him.

Death was the paramount affront they recognized, and it was met as
they met any major accident, by distribution and destruction of
property [to reassert superiority], by head-hunting, and by suicide.
They took recognized means, that is, to wipe out the shame. When a
chief’s near relative died, he gave away his house … it was
potlatching… It was called ‘craziness strikes on account of the death
of a loved one,’ and by means of it the Kwakiutl handled mourning by
the same procedures that they used at marriage, at the attainment of
supernatural powers, or in a quarrel.
There was a more extreme way of meeting the affront of death. This
was by head-hunting. It was in no sense retaliation upon the group
which had killed the dead man. The dead relative might equally have
died in bed of disease or by the hand of an enemy. The head-hunting
was called ‘killing to wipe one’s eyes,’ and it was a means of getting
even by making another household mourn instead.
(Benedict, 1959: 216)

When the chief Neqapenkem’s sister and her daughter did not come
back from Victoria either, people said, because their boat capsized or
they drank bad whiskey, he called together the warriors. “Now I ask
you tribes, who shall wail? Shall I do it or shall another?” The
foremost responded, “Not you, Chief, let some other of the tribes.”
They set up the war pole, and the others came forward saying, “We
 came here to ask you to go to war that someone else may wail on
account of our deceased sister.” So they started out with full war rites
to “pull under” the Sanetch [a neighboring tribe] for the chief’s dead
relatives. They found seven men and two children asleep and killed all
except one girl whom they took captive.
Again, the chief Qaselas’ son died, and he and his brother and uncle
set out to wipe out the stain. They were entertained by Nengemalis at
their first stop. After they had eaten, “Now I will tell you the news,
Chief,” Qaselas said. “My prince died today and you will go with
him.” So they killed their host and his wife. “Then Qaselas and his
crew felt good when they arrived at Sebaa in the evening… It is not
called war, but ‘to die with those that are dead.’”
(Benedict, 1932: 21, citing Franz Boas, Ethnology of the Kwakiutl
(Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE-R), vol. 35:
pp. 1363, 1385)

Another informant relates his experience when a chief’s daughter died. The
grieving, humiliated chief sent a war party of sixty men to kill another
chief, his cousin; they beheaded him in his canoe in front of his young son
and brought his head home for the grieving chief (Benedict, 1959: 217–18).
The choice of the person to kill was based purely on the rank of the person
who died: to balance the humiliating blow of death, to maintain his
position, the mourner needed to kill someone whose rank was equivalent to
the person who had died. Otherwise it didn’t matter who the victim was.
In Amazonian Ecuador the Waorani are resolutely, fiercely independent,
believing that each person should be self-reliant, fully capable of getting
what they want for themselves (Robarchek and Robarchek, 2005). They are
passionately egalitarian: each feels that it is wrong for anyone to have more
than he or she has. Their most central moral concern is that no one should
tell anyone else what to do, or in any way attempt to control or interfere
with anyone else. Everyone has an absolute right to control his own destiny,
free of any interference. The expected and legitimate response to other
humans “deliberately” infringing one’s autonomy or interfering in one’s life
is pïïnti, homicidal rage. It is not frustration of pragmatic goals that evoke
this rage – it is the sense that someone has violated one’s fundamental right
to control one’s own life. In this unbearable state of pïïnti, killing someone
– anyone – reasserts one’s sense of autonomous efficacy. Killing re-
establishes control – regardless of who is killed. The death of a loved one is
the quintessential affront to one’s autonomy, because all deaths are murders.

One’s child is bitten by a snake and dies; a sibling contracts polio and
is dead in a few days; a man’s wife is stung by a scorpion, goes into
shock, and dies in hours. In all of these cases, the almost immediate
reaction on the part of surviving kin was homicidal rage. In situations
such as these, the relationship between culture and emotion enters into
the processes of definition and evaluation in at least two ways. First,
all of these situations were culturally defined as the consequences of
the actions of other persons, as acts of sorcery. Thus each was defined
and perceived by surviving kin as a human attack on their autonomy…
Second, all of these situations violated the assumptions of the
autonomous and effective self that has the capacity to control its
experience; they generated the subjective experience of powerlessness.
The emotion that is culturally appropriate to that experience is, for
Waorani, rage, and it was in terms of rage that the survivors defined
their feelings. The emotional response, in all of these cases, was rage,
and the behavioral response was homicide…
Curiously (to us), however, the rage and violence elicited in these
kinds of situations are not necessarily directed at the perceived
“guilty” party. As the Rosaldos described for the Ilongot, an innocent
person may serve just as well as a target. Returning from a raid in
which a sibling has been killed by kowudï [foreigners/outsiders], a
Waorani youth sees his elderly grandmother lying in her hammock,
and drives a spear through her where she lies…
In the Waorani psychological map, the natural reaction to such rage,
one that restores a sense of autonomy and control, is homicide. As
with the Ilongot, the identity of the victim is largely irrelevant.
(Robarchek and Robarchek, 2005: 214–15)

Emotions more or less similar to these may be widespread in some people

in many cultures. Waorani, however, are morally licensed to experience this
rage and to act on it. They feel that a person is entitled to reassert control,
and judge that killing is the ideal way to do that.
Ilongot, Nyakyusa, Waorani, Kwakiutl, Coast Salish, Blackfoot, Crow,
Omaha, Pawnee, Assiniboine, Tahitians, Arunta, Warramunga, Unmatjera,
Kaitish, Lardil, and people in many other cultures evidently experience
emotions at the death of a close relationship partner that seem to be
something like what would provoke a contemporary American to scream, “I
can’t take it anymore!” It is an unendurable vexation or exasperation
amplified into rage. Death deprives the survivors of the control they are
morally entitled to – it is a moral affront. Kwakiutl, Coast Salish, Waorani,
Ilongot and other men are not just morally entitled to kill anyone to escape,
or rather to transcend, the paralyzing despair of loss, to reassert themselves
against the terrible defeat that death is – rather, this is what everyone judges
that men should do, what they must do. Tahitians, Warramunga, and Kaluli
ordinarily don’t kill anyone in these mourning practices, but they wound
themselves and others painfully. Doing so testifies to the love and loss they
feel, while acting out the rage that would otherwise be paralyzing. In each
culture the bereaved or offended people just want to hurt someone, anyone
– and it feels right, it feels like they are morally entitled to do it, and “the
world” deserves the mayhem. In all of these cultures, peers, family, and
community reference groups unanimously approve of this exasperated rage
and the violence that ensues: it is virtuous violence. Good people do it and
it is good to do.
As we have reviewed in previous chapters, there are numerous historical
and archeological records of cultures in which, when an elite person died,
the mourners killed family members or retainers to inter with and perhaps
continue to serve the deceased. In some instances, close kin or retainers
may have killed themselves to accompany the deceased. In India to the
present day, people sometimes perform sati, the voluntary or forced
immolation of a wife on the funeral pyre of her husband (Hawley, 1994). In
some of these cultures and others, the mourners sacrificed captive enemies,
slaves, or others to the deceased in the mortuary or subsequent
commemorative rites. Taken together, these self-injurious, other-harming,
and homicidal practices are normative in a substantial proportion of the
world’s cultures, and in these and many other cultures, grief at the death of
a loved child or partner can be so unbearable that a bereaved person may
kill herself. If we add all of these practices together, violent mourning is
relatively common.

Why are people sometimes enraged by death?

Note that in the practices described in this chapter, the mourners are not
especially angry at anyone in particular. In the mourning practices as such,
focused blame does not seem to be what gives rise to the rage – in this
context, the mourners are not primarily motivated to hold any specific
person accountable – they’re simply outraged at their loss. Of course,
nearly every society has a history of killing persons deemed responsible for
murder: vengeance homicides and capital punishment are widespread. In
the societies in which diffuse anger and randomly directed violence are
normative mourning practices, if the deceased is thought to have been
murdered, people also are angry at the killer and seek to avenge the death
by killing him, or someone equivalent to him. If there is no manifest killer –
when the deceased died of an illness, injury, drowning, lightning, or
snakebite – in most of these cultures people do divination or consult an
oracle to determine who is specifically responsible. If people died because
they themselves did something wrong and the ancestors or deities punished
them, then in many cultures the mourners make appropriate propitiatory
sacrifices: they kill animals as offerings to the aggrieved ancestors or
deities. (Note that they don’t kill the animals angrily.) But as we discuss
elsewhere in the book, in many cultures throughout history, including some
in Africa today, a great many deaths are attributed to witchcraft or sorcery;
occasionally, women identified as the witches or men identified as the
sorcerers responsible for a death, or for an illness or any misfortune, may be
stoned or killed. This is done in angry retaliation, to punish the witch or
sorcerer.
In short, diffuse, generalized angry violence occurs alongside retaliatory,
vengeful, punitive violence; they are distinct aspects of response to death.
They may have the same source and they may have the same orientation, or
they may not. In any case they evidently differ enough so that the two sorts
of violent anger, or the dimension on which they are poles, should be
analytically distinguished.
 So, then, why do people get diffusely angry, even go into a rage, when an
important relationship partner dies (or ends their relationship while still
alive), when that anger is not directed at anyone whom the mourners blame
for the death? Beyond just anger, why is it that in some cultural practices
the bereaved are self-injuriously or homicidally violent – toward just about
anyone? Why do they hurt themselves? The adaptive, psychological, and
social functions of bereavement rage or violence are not obvious. Violence
directed at whoever happens to be present or whomever the raiding party
comes across doesn’t seem to do anything to regulate a relationship. What’s
the use of killing some random stranger, let alone attacking a family
member, neighbor, or ally – or injuring oneself?
Clearly, in the cultures we considered in this chapter, bereavement
violence is expected, condoned, or even admired as the most seemly
expression of the bereaved’s affection for the deceased. Violence shows – it
means – that the mourners cared, that their loss is great, and that they are
virtuously engaged in mourning. And it shows they will not give in and let
themselves be defeated by death. Violence is a way to fiercely, defiantly,
and cathartically assert oneself when one could easily become overwhelmed
and inert. But in what way is bereavement violence constitutive of any
social relationship? Does it have any intended or unintended social-
relational functions? Specifically, does it regulate relationships?
The loss of a crucial relationship partner typically means that a new
relationship must be forged to replace the lost relationship. While the
original relationship endured and could be relied on, third parties’
evaluations of the perpetrator were less important. But when the perpetrator
needs to attract a new partner, he needs to establish that he is a worthy,
attractive, motivated candidate – and that he will be a committed and
trustworthy partner in new relationships. In the societies in which
bereavement entails virtuous violence, it seems that mourners committing
violence raise their rank in the AR status hierarchy of the community, or
restore the balance in EM relationships threatened by the death. By killing
someone or injuring himself, the perpetrator demonstrates that he is
courageous and that he cares deeply about his lost relationship – making
him a more appealing potential partner with whom attractive others might
want to form a relationship to take the place of the one that death has ended.
The homicide and severe self-injury are very costly, reliable, honest,
unfakable signals of meritorious courage and determination, along with the
capacity for commitment; so this signal may increase the perpetrator’s
chances of forming a good, new relationship with a desirable partner. It
seems possible that this is an evolutionary foundation for psychological
responsiveness to cultural affordances to bereavement violence. Violence
proves that despite the mourner’s loss, he is still a formidable force to be
reckoned with.
Note the crucial fact, however, that this proclivity is only adaptive when
violence actually does raise rank or restore EM balance. So if there is an
evolved foundation for the proclivity, it must be highly sensitive to that
sociocultural contingency. In most societies, killing random persons
drastically reduces the perpetrator’s chances to form new fitness-enhancing
relationships to replace the lost one, and substantially undermines existing
relationships. So an “adaptation” consisting of a fixed violent response to
bereavement that ignored these crucial local social-relational consequences
could not evolve. Indeed, while we described these practices in the
conventional ethnographic present, the historical record is that in every one
of these cultures diffusely violent and homicidal responses to bereavement
disappeared as soon as the consequences of violence became maladaptive.
Being imprisoned or executed is quite detrimental to fitness (not to mention
psychosocial well-being). Once people were reliably imprisoned or
executed for homicide or random assault, it became foolish to do it, people
ceased to admire what was now seen as reckless and pointless violence, and
bereavement violence consequently ceased.
There may be another contributing adaptive benefit to generalized
bereavement anger under some social conditions. The bereaved may not
know for sure whether someone killed his partner, or conspired in or
indirectly contributed to her death. The circumstances may be ambiguous,
and the causes of death are not always clear-cut without autopsy and
extensive detective work. Generalized violence may not hit the culpable
target, even if there are culpable parties, but it is a dramatic warning to
anyone who might wish the bereaved ill. It screams, “If I ever found out
that someone killed her, I’ll get the son of a bitch if it’s the last thing I do!”
If someone did kill his partner, or is thinking of killing another or future
partner of his, or the mourner himself, they clearly see that “they’d better
watch out!” As Frank (1988) theorizes, a reputation for irrational violent
rage will dissuade potential aggressors or defectors from preying on a
person whom it would otherwise be rational to attack or betray. Moreover,
when a person has suffered the loss of a crucial partner, the loss of the ally
weakens him and makes him vulnerable. He needs to make it clear that
despite his loss of the deceased partner he is not an easy mark. To
demonstrate convincingly how fierce and formidable an adversary he is,
what better way is there than killing someone, or, to show how brave and
determined he is, willfully injuring himself?
This sort of ferocious random violence may be adaptive when it is
actually fairly likely that others will attempt to kill, abduct, or seduce a
person’s partners, and likely that others will prey on a person when they
have an advantage over him. However, when there is an effective chief or a
powerful state that enforces laws against assault and homicide, randomly
directed violence is disastrous to one’s fitness. And, indeed, it is not a
common cultural practice in states or chiefdoms that enforce laws; in such
societies, the bereaved may be generally, indiscriminately angry, but most
mourners in most cultures don’t hurt anyone, because they would be
severely punished for doing so. The societies in which mourners killed
random outsiders are societies in which there was no state and virtually no
laws, as such. When these societies were incorporated into states with
effective police, judges, and penal systems, mourning violence ceased.
That’s exactly what we expect of an adaptive psychology – discriminating
responsiveness to adaptive conditions, constraints, and opportunities.
Bereavement violence is senseless when powerful third parties provide
protection, when people rarely use force to pursue their social objectives,
and where there is little risk that isolated people with few allies will be
forcibly exploited.
We admit that until someone systematically investigates the conditions
under which people react to a partner’s death with indiscriminate violence,
this is just another “Just So Story.” We will examine this signaling aspect of
violence in greater detail in Chapter 21, but regardless of the validity of this
tentative theory of bereavement violence, the clear fact is that the loss of a
significant partner does tend to make people angry. People often feel
diffusely irritable or enraged even if they don’t see anyone to blame, or
can’t legitimately assign blame: the bereaved often feel a generalized anger
that is not based on any attribution of responsibility. Although they are not
essentially angry at anyone in particular, they may take it out on random
associates – whoever crosses their path. Or there may be cultural
prescriptions about whom to injure. They may injure themselves.
Furthermore, social practices, conflicts, and animosities, in conjunction
with cultural beliefs and personal attributions, may orient what starts out as
diffuse anger, focusing it on a particular person or social being who is
eventually held culpable and “should” be punished. “Someone should pay
for this!” So, “naturally,” mourners are often angry at people whom they
blame for the loss or death of their partner: tangible murderers, intangible
witches or sorcerers, negligent professionals or corporations, evil
governments, hidden conspiracies, malevolent ancestors, or callous deities.
Not infrequently, people blame themselves for the loss or death of a partner:
they feel guilty. This process leads to violence against the “culpable” person
or beings, corporations, or nations. But we should not ignore the fact that in
many cultures bereaved, angry perpetrators simply lash out at any or all
associates or onlookers, or harm themselves, without being motivated by
blame – they hurt or kill people whom they don’t think are in any way
responsible for their loss. In some cultures, bereavement anger evolves into
morally expected practices of violence or homicide that entail killing just
about anyone. The death of a partner feels unfair; it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be,
it’s an injury, insult, and offense. It’s humiliating. It’s outrageous and it
enrages. It’s the ultimate affront to the need to control one’s world. So the
end of a relationship sometimes makes people angry enough to hurt or kill
someone, and feel entitled to do so. The culture may require it, so that good,
loving mourners must do so. In sum, the final phase of the constitution of
social relationships is loss by death, and like every other phase of
constituting relationships, loss can be violently enacted.

1 Durkheim’s (2008/1912) theory presented in The Elementary Forms of

the Religious Life drew extensively on Spencer and Gillen’s ethnographies;
see pp. 391–2 for Durkheim’s discussion of self-injury in Warramunga
mourning.

2 When grievous rage motivates a killing, this death may provoke further
killing, in a potentially endless chain. As far as we can make out from the
ethnographies, such chains do occur, resulting in very high rates of death in
some societies at some points in history. But in some cases it seems that the
victim’s kin may lack the cultural moral motivation or aggressive capacity
to retaliate, or be too terrified to strike back. Many other factors may
intervene, including the state. For an investigation of such factors, see
Renato Rosaldo’s (1980) historical analysis of how Ilongot headhunting
waxed and waned.

3 In her analyses of the fieldwork reports of her mentor, Franz Boas (the
founder of American anthropology), Benedict doesn’t say whether women
were similarly competitive, felt deeply shamed by death, or reacted
violently to it.
 19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
What was the motive behind it? What made it worthwhile to me? I
strongly wanted to get even with society for the wrong which I felt it
had done me. This spirit of revenge, instilled into me by the years of
suffering and ill-treatment behind prison walls, pervaded my whole
nature … I left prison with a feeling of bitterness and of hatred in my
heart… Almost every man with whom I came in contact while in
prison expressed that same feeling… He was “going to get even” and
“make somebody pay” for his punishment and suffering.
(Davis, 1922: 148–9)

There was an almost magical transformation in my relationship with

the rest of the world when I drew that gun on folks. I always marveled
at how the toughest cats on those street corners whimpered and begged
for their lives when I stuck the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun into their
faces. Adults who ordinarily would have commanded my respect were
forced to follow my orders like obedient kids.
(McCall, 1995: 101)

Western popular culture and social science have tended to conflate material
goods with selfish individualism. But except under the most desperate
circumstances – and sometimes even then – the principal meaning and
function of goods and money are to constitute social relationships. This has
been most cogently demonstrated by studies of “gifts,” but also by research
on eating, raiding, marriage, ritual, and political economy (e.g., Komter,
2004; Lévi-Strauss, 1961/1949; Malinowski, 1922; Mauss, 1925; Polanyi,
2001; Sahlins, 1965; Veblen, 2007/1899). People want and use money and
goods primarily to share, give, exchange, flaunt, conspicuously consume, or
measure success and achievement. Material goods mediate relationships.
Research on the social-relational meaning of goods and money has focused
primarily on giving and sharing initiated by the giver, exploring the moral
motives and social-relational aims of giving. But the motives and aims of
the taker are similarly moral and relationship-constitutive, even when the
taker takes violently.
Our primary focus in this book has been on corporeal, bodily harm. But,
as we stated at the beginning, we think that virtuous violence theory can
ultimately explain non-corporeal forms of violence. In this chapter, we
examine the motives that underlie acts of robbery. What we find on the
whole is that most robberies are not principally motivated by the material
gains of the robbery per se. Instead, two distinct moral motivations appear.
The first is a redressive EM equality motive intended to enact vengeance in
response to a perceived violation on the part of the victim. The second is an
AR hierarchy motive directed toward elevating the robber over his victims
and winning him legitimate status in the eyes of his peers.

Robbery for equality-matching vengeance

Robbery and burglary are irrational courses of action from a purely material
point of view; they don’t pay off economically, given the risks of being
hurt, killed, or imprisoned. But property crimes may make sense morally.
Robbers steal to get revenge on someone or some category of persons who,
they feel, has transgressed against them. A career burglar sums it up for us,
explaining why he took the risks and pursued breaking and entering:

For me, the loot which was secured constituted a small factor in the
question. What I wanted was to take something away from society in
retaliation for what I felt it had taken away from me.
(Davis, 1922: 151)

In those days, I could not see or comprehend anything but the jungle
law of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
(Davis, 1922: 159)

In a sample of St. Louis robbers, EM “payback” was a common framing of

drug-dealing transgressions; dealers responded to a violation with a
symmetrical retaliation:
 A direct, tit-for-tat response to a business-related dispute is the
stereotypical use of robbery as retaliation in the street criminal
underworld. Somebody robs you and you rob them back. It also fits the
commonsense understanding of what retribution and just deserts are all
about: The punishment, at least theoretically, matches the type and
general seriousness of the wrongdoing [originally perpetrated against
the robber] and is calibrated with both of these objectives in mind.
(Jacobs and Wright, 2008: 515)

Sometimes, like rape, robbery is revenge redirected from an unavailable

perceived transgressor onto a substitute regarded as equivalent in some
fundamental respect, thereby getting even indirectly (Jacobs and Wright,
2008: 517–18).

Robbery for authority-ranking status

Like many others before and since, Greek warriors went to battle seeking
booty, especially the armor and the women of the warriors they defeated.
Medieval and early modern soldiers were similarly motivated to fight to
acquire booty (Brown, 2011; Whitman, 2012). But this was not only, and
usually not primarily, because of the asocial individual subsistence value of
the booty. The spoils of battle constituted the relationships not only between
the victor and the vanquished but also among the victors. As we noted, the
Iliad revolves around Achilles’ wounded honor when, after the Achaeans
had awarded the beautiful captive Briseis to Achilles to honor his prowess
in the battles, Agamemnon takes Briseis from him. At the beginning of the
epic, Achilles angrily rebukes Agamemnon for his dishonorable greed.

Achilles scowled at him and answered, “You are steeped in insolence

and lust of gain. With what heart can any of the Achaeans do your
bidding, either on foray or in open fighting? I came not warring here
for any ill the Trojans had done me. I have no quarrel with them. They
have not raided my cattle nor my horses, nor cut down my harvests on
the rich plains of Phthia; for between me and them there is a great
space, both mountain and sounding sea. We have followed you, Sir
Insolence! for your pleasure, not ours – to gain satisfaction from the
 Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and
threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the
sons of the Achaeans have given me. Never when the Achaeans sack
any rich city of the Trojans do I receive so good a prize as you do,
though it is my hands that do the better part of the fighting. When the
sharing comes, your share is far the largest, and I, forsooth, must go
back to my ships, take what I can get and be thankful, when my labour
of fighting is done. Now, therefore, I shall go back to Phthia; it will be
much better for me to return home with my ships, for I will not stay
here dishonoured to gather gold and substance for you.”
(Homer, Iliad, Book I (Trans. Samuel Butler))

As with traditional leaders and warriors in innumerable other cultures, for

Achilles the value of goods is their potential to constitute AR and CS
relationships when they are shared, given away, and ultimately consumed
by others who are thereby bonded to the giver (Boas and Codere, 1966;
Polanyi, 2001; Rappaport, 1967). And simultaneously, the violent
acquisition and ostentatious display of booty asserts AR status over those
defeated, and those who won less booty. Achilles rebukes Agamemnon for
failing to respect an AR-based distribution of booty, including the women
captured. Similarly, cattle raiders in Crete and East Africa take cattle for the
glory of success and possession (Herzfeld, 1985; Spencer, 1965). The
possession, display, or gifting of the spoils of violence simultaneously
demonstrate moral AR superiority over those whom the victor vanquished,
superiority over those who won less, and CS solidarity with those with
whom the victor freely shares his spoils. As we saw in the previous section,
taking or displaying booty may also be EM retaliation for the victim’s
previous victory over or affront to the taker.
Although their cultural reference group does not extend to the entire
society in which they operate, modern robbers commonly have moral
motives and relationship-constitutive aims very similar to those of
traditional warriors and raiders. Armed robbers are often proud of their
status and look down on other criminals, as well as the pitiful people who
have to work long hours to support themselves (Katz, 1988; Wright and
Decker, 1997: 16, 47–9). Some American robbers and gangsters were
heroes in their own day and became legends: Billy the Kid (William Henry
McCarty), Jesse James, John Dillinger, and Al Capone. Evidence that their
ethos resonates with dominant cultural values is the popularity of movies
such as Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, Reservoir Dogs, Heat, The Usual Suspects, and The Fast
and the Furious – whose audiences identify with the robbers. Likewise, the
fastest selling entertainment product of all time (with a billion dollars in
sales over its first three days of release) was the video game Grand Theft
Auto V, in which the player controls a crew of criminals that wreak
destruction throughout a fantasy version of the greater Los Angeles area. As
these movies and video games illustrate, the shared risk, adventure, and
collective responsibility for robbery is an added relational motive – a moral
motive, because the partners or gang members are morally committed to
looking out for each other, even sacrificing their lives for each other. Most
robbers are less charismatic, less chivalrous, less loyal, and less cool than
their depictions in legends or movies, but their motives apparently are often
similarly moral and the culturally informed relationships they seek to
constitute are often the same.
Many mundane real-world robberies redress violations that diminish the
robber’s status. Addicts may rob a dealer who explicitly and excessively
degrades the addict. An addict who chose the pseudonym “Low Down”
described his response to a dealer telling him he looked bad, evidently
because he was on drugs. Low Down says he thought, “Why do you look
down on me when you probably doing things wrong? … I just sit down and
think about, OK, so he got all this [money] and then he gonna talk down on
me like that? … I was like, I’m gonna get this dude” (Jacobs and Wright,
2008: 521).
Robbing a violator “puts the violator in a submissive position and enjoins
him to think about the humiliation long after the offense has passed”
(Jacobs and Wright, 2008: 523).

Taking violators’ valuables deals a financial blow to them that likely

will be felt for some time. Using or threatening force against people
who have crossed you establishes you as a so-called “badass” who
should not be messed with. Seizing [the original] violator’s assets
brings the violator down and the aggrieved party up.
(Jacobs and Wright, 2008: 512)
Stolen money and valuables enable the robber to ostentatiously display and
dispense (Honaker and Shover, 1992; Katz, 1988: 232, 315; Wright and
Decker, 1997: 40–2).

We’d pimp into school the next day, clean as hell, profiling in clothes
we’d stolen off somebody’s back the night before… Our sharp clothes
and hip style boosted our popularity in school. I saw girls and dudes,
especially young underclassmen, gazing admiringly at [my
accomplice] Shell Shock and me the same way I had admired Scobie-
D, Kennie Banks, and other old-heads not very many years before.
(McCall, 1995: 101)

Ostentatious display of luxury – “flossing” – is a claim to superiority, and

those who resent the flosser’s claim to superiority are motivated to relieve
the claimant of his glitter (Wright and Decker, 1997: 37). Brazen cruising in
a car decked out with expensive wheel rims, myriad speakers booming and
subwoofers thumping, is a provocation to any onlooker who rejects being
put down by this ostentatious display, not uncommonly provoking a
carjacking (Jacobs and Wright, 2008: 522). Auto thieves sometimes steal a
car specifically so that they may drive it around “flossing,” to take parts to
upgrade their own car, or to sell it for money to buy parts to make their own
car flashier (Copes, 2003). This gives the thief prestige (Shover, 1996: 103–
4). When the money from the last robbery runs out, thieves become envious
of those with resources and ashamed of their loss of capacity to party and
their all-around stigmatization. “It just makes me upset, angry, mad, jealous
… cause I ain’t got the stuff that [others] got” (Wright and Decker, 1997:
36). Having ample funds from robbery raises the robber’s AR position, and
enables him (or her) to generously share food, drink, and drugs in
commensal CS events; running out of money makes the impoverished
robber feel humiliated and envy those who have funds.
Moreover, the bravado of armed robbery is an act of domination relished
by the robber, an assertion of superiority through the domineering
declaration, “This is a robbery – don’t make it a murder” (Katz, 1988). In
other contexts the robber’s identity is degraded, but in the act of robbery, it
is the victim who is humiliated by the triumphant robber. From analysis of
437 Chicago robberies in 1982–3, Katz concludes, “In virtually all
robberies, the offender discovers, fantasizes or manufactures an angle of
moral superiority over the intended victim” that justifies the robber’s
appropriation of the victim’s property, while creating a satisfying
dominance relationship (Katz, 1988: 169).
Armed robbers enjoy the domination, power, and control over their
victims, and the terror they project. They take pride in giving orders and
getting their way. To bring off a robbery successfully, he must “succeed in
having the authority to control people” (Wright and Decker, 1997: 56). The
weapon is not sufficient: armed robbery succeeds only if the robber can
establish dominance over the victim (Wright and Decker, 1997: 103). In a
Nietzschean way of thinking, “outlaws” are proud of their power identity.
Motivated by AR hierarchy, “inevitably they prey on the weak who, they
believe, are destined and even deserve to be victims. Since it is their refusal
or inability to employ violence that invites victimization, victims have no
one to blame but themselves” (Shover, 1996: 87). “Victims who resist are
thought stupid and deserving of whatever countermeasures they
necessitate” (Shover, 1996: 64). Note that especially in commercial
robberies or where there are multiple victims, robbers often make the
victims lie down. This is not just an instrumental act to reduce the danger of
resistance or flight, it iconically constitutes social superiority: the robbers
“put down” the victims, who can’t “stand up” to them.

Robbery is sometimes an EM moral retaliation for a transgression against

the robber, but at other times it is a way of proclaiming or reclaiming a high
position in AR relationships. The fact that material goods and money are
the medium of regulating the robber’s social relationships should not blind
us to the fact that the robber’s violence is morally motivated: he aims to
enhance his culturally ideal relationships through the culturally legitimated
means of robbing foolish people who have more than they deserve. All
social action is intentional – it is meant to do something, and hence is a
means to some end – but construing robbery or any other action as
“instrumental” doesn’t illuminate its relational motives or relational aims.
Within these cultural subgroups, the robbers’ violence is exalted, praised,
and admired. In the eyes of their peers, their violence is virtuous. The
robbers’ motives are moral to the extent that they subjectively believe that
their position in the hierarchy is legitimately contestable and that they
deserve a higher position, or they believe that someone has transgressed
against them, and that robbery is a legitimate means either to demonstrate
their deservingness or to rectify the original transgression. If robbers felt
that they had not been transgressed against or that they deserved to be
subordinate, and that robbery was not a legitimate means within their
subculture of either rectifying a wrong or elevating status, then their
robberies would not be morally motivated. (We have not located evidence
to suggest that robbers acknowledge and embrace the responsibilities of
authority in addition to its material entitlements, but we predict that they do
feel these moral responsibilities of superior AR status.)
Ironically, a core motivation – sometimes the core motivation – for
“property crimes” is not to secure the property for its material use value.
Robbers often take property to get revenge for a previous transgression
against them, to establish their dominance over their victims, to elevate
their status within a group, to show it off ostentatiously, to treat their
associates to drinks and drugs, or to share it with family. Thus, the main
motive for forcefully taking material things is quite often moral, and the
main function of taking, like giving, is to constitute social relationships.
 20 The specific form of violence for constituting
each relational model
People violently constitute relationships though circumcision and excision,
brutal initiations, killing rivals to the throne, proving loyalty to a superior
by killing someone who threatens him, and human sacrifice. People
enhance their own relationships with their deities by extreme asceticism,
flagellation, or amputating a digit as an offering; others facilitate a vision of
their personal companion spirit by hanging themselves by hooks through
their chest muscles. The conduct or performance of many relationships
consists of organized, socially instituted violence such as boxing and mixed
martial arts, ice-hockey checking and football tackling, or combat among
warriors who fight for glory. Redressive and terminative violence in
response to transgressions of social relationships includes all sorts of
corporal and capital punishment: burning witches, killing adulterers, eye-
for-an-eye vengeance and feuding, killing men who insult one’s honor, and
honor suicide by those who have failed to do their duty. Redressive violence
is ubiquitous, ranging from dueling to resolve a dishonor, judicial combat to
determine guilt, lynching those perceived as disrespectful, beating wives
perceived as having failed to be sufficiently dutiful, attacking husbands who
are disrespectful jerks, terrorist bombing, and targeted killing by drones.
Sometimes violence is intended to enforce a relationship by forestalling
transgression – for example, by terrorizing subjects or slaves into
submission. Torturing heretics and enemies falls somewhere in between
redress and enforcement, as do violent self-defense and killing intruders. In
honor cultures, killing a dishonored sister, daughter, or cousin terminates an
intolerable relationship, cleansing the stain and thereby restoring the family
honor. Innumerable cultures conduct, or used to conduct, trial by ordeal –
for example, adjudicating witchcraft guilt by submerging the accused to see
if she drowns, making her hold a hot iron to see if it burns her, or giving her
poison to see if she dies. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was morally motivated violence on a mass scale, motivated by MP
proportionality cost and benefit computations aimed to reduce American
casualties in the most efficient way. The most massive moral violence
practices in history were twentieth-century ethnic cleansings, acts of
“purifying the race” or the nation, where the removal or killing of persons
construed to “pollute” the shared essence of a “people” was motivated by
the feeling that “mixture” or “mongrelization” is evil, unnatural, disgusting,
dishonorable, and dangerous.
Violence is morally motivated to regulate relationships. That much is
clear. But why do people hurt and kill in specific ways? There are
innumerable ways to inflict pain; to maim; to cause suffering, fear, or
distress; and to kill. Violence can be characterized by the actions involved,
or by the manner in which it causes distress or death. In either respect, are
those forms of violence that people tend to use for constituting one RM less
likely to be used for constituting other RMs? Do people experience and
perceive some forms of violence as more apt, more natural, more intuitively
“right” for certain relationships than for other relationships? Are some
forms of violence more effective for regulating some types of social
relationships than others? While we can’t offer a confident or definitive
answer to these questions about the RM-specific morphology of violence,
we think we do see some patterns that are consistent with the available
accounts of violence.
Conformation systems theory (Fiske, 1991, 2004; Fiske and Schubert,
2012) posits that people employ a semiotically distinct medium – the
conformation system (ConSyst) – for constituting each RM. That is, there is
a natural, intuitive, especially evocative, especially binding conformation
system through which people constitute each RM. The ConSyst of a RM is
the primary way in which people regulate that RM; and it is the primary
way that people represent the RM in interpersonal communication and in
intrapersonal cognition. Children innately expect each RM to operate in its
own distinctive ConSyst; seek, attend to, and are uniquely responsive to the
ConSyst of a RM when constituting it; and intuitively initiate each kind of
RM, using its particular ConSyst. The ConSyst of a RM arouses especially
intense motives to sustain the RM, evokes especially strong moral
commitments to it, and invokes especially effective normative enforcement
of the RM by participants and others.
Communal-sharing violence: indexical
consubstantial assimilation
The ConSyst of CS models is consubstantial assimilation: by making their
bodies equivalent, people make themselves socially equivalent. Thus,
consubstantial assimilation is semiotically indexical, with the
correspondence in substance, surface, or motion of people’s bodies indexing
the correspondence of the social persons so embodied. Prototypical
examples are caressing and kissing, intimate sex, giving birth, nursing,
feeding, and commensal consumption of food, drink, tobacco, or other
comestibles or drugs. To form a CS group, people may make their body
surfaces equivalent by tattooing, scarification, circumcision, and excision,
along with hair arrangements, body coloring, insignia, uniforms, and other
clothing. Rhythmic synchronous movement such as military drill, tai chi or
calisthenics, and ritual and recreational dance also have strong bonding
effects because participants experience their congruently moving bodies as
merging into one.
Conformation systems theory predicts that violence to constitute CS
relationships should be focused on the bodily essence of the victim in
relation to the bodily essence of the person with whom the relationship is
being constituted: violence to create CS should join bodies, make them
alike, or conversely, to rectify or terminate CS, should separate or purify the
bodies. Indeed, as we have seen in our overview of genital modification,
where violence is intended to create, reinforce, or restore the CS
relationship, it aims to make the victim’s body the same as the perpetrator’s.
In initiation and identify marking, people bleed together or modify the body
to make it the same as others, thereby making the embodied person one
with those similarly marked or who bled together. When a person is
wounded, the blood that flows on the ground, along with viscera or brain
matter, is not just the substance of the body; it is the social person and the
substance of his CS relationships. Disrupting the integrity of the body,
especially when weapons or rape pierces the body envelope, desecrates the
body and hence defiles the embodied social person. So when people want to
attack the social essence of a person, the most fundamental way to do this is
to penetrate or pierce their body, shed his blood, and mutilate his body. In
genocide, where the aim is to restore the perpetrator’s purity by severing the
relationship, the violence separates the polluting victim from the
perpetrator, and may consist of desecrating, destroying, or eliminating the
body of the victim, removing all traces of the “polluting” persons. In
contrast, in some cases, perpetrators may take body parts as souvenirs and
trophies that index the destruction and removal of the victim from the
community. The wholesale killing of women and children to eliminate a
“race” is also characteristic of CS violence.

Authority-ranking violence: iconic physics of

magnitudes and dimensions
The ConSyst of AR is the physics of magnitudes and dimensions, in which
relative magnitude or order along the dimension corresponds to social rank.
This is iconic because the spatiotemporal relations map onto social
relations: the linear ordering of persons on a physical dimension is
congruent with their linear social ranks. People think, communicate, and
constitute AR according to the dimensions of

above – below
bigger – smaller
many – singular
in front – behind,
stronger – weaker
preceding – following
brighter – dimmer
louder – quieter.

That is, “superiors” are “great” and “powerful,” “lead” their “backers” and
“followers,” and are often addressed or represented as plural. Those who
are “senior” go first, and are often dressed or represented as luminous.
Trumpets, drums, bells, gongs, or cannon salutes may mark their
appearances or their worship.
Hence, when it constitutes an AR relationship, violence generally should
make the victim lower or below the perpetrator, make them smaller, behind,
or quieter; or the violence should prove that the perpetrator is “stronger,”
“more forceful.” Dungeons, of course, are the lowest part of a castle,
iconically constituting the status of the miscreant below the lord who
imprisons him. When a vertically construed AR relationship is at stake,
flattening an opponent and standing above him is an iconically powerful act
of “superiority.” That is, the violence consists of the perpetrator “putting
down” the victim and “belittling” him. In battle, combat, and contact sports,
the aim is to bring the opponent down, so the victor stands above the
defeated opponent, raising his arms in triumph. Likewise, for all kinds of
infractions, drill sergeants and coaches often order painfully prolonged
series of pushups, putting the miscreants’ faces against the ground, while
the sergeant or coach stands tall above them. Nineteenth-century and earlier
parents, schoolmasters, and naval officers punished insolent or disobedient
children and youths by making them bend over to receive a whipping –
often with pants lowered to bare their buttocks. For treason or any other
offense against the overarching state, offenders may be hanged by dropping
them from a platform, or they may kneel and bend low as if bowing on the
block, and then be decapitated so that their head rolls down while their
body falls to the ground.

Equality-matching violence: concrete ostensive

operations
The ConSyst of EM is concrete ostensive operations that establish one-to-
one correspondence: turn-taking, fair lotteries, even shares counted out one-
for-one, starting and stopping an activity simultaneously, counting-out
rhymes, casting ballots, in-kind balanced reciprocity, and eye-for-an-eye
vengeance. These concrete operations are operational definitions of
evenness among the participants: if the procedure is correctly followed, the
participants are matched and balanced.
Thus, violence to create or sustain EM relationships should consist of
concrete operations of one-to-one correspondence: each of us must jump
into the freezing water, or run across the same red-hot coals. Violence to
rectify an EM relationship should concretely, ostensively match a
corresponding violent act that the victim did to the perpetrator: it should be
a practical demonstration that balance is restored. The harm should be
evenly matched: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus
21:23–5). EM violence should usually adopt natural bodily units of this sort
(an eye) or units of action (a spear thrust, a burn) that readily afford one-to-
one correspondence. That is, the violence will be perceived and construed
in terms of manifestly matching chunks or acts. Furthermore, as far as
feasible, EM-redressive violence will comprise a one-to-one
correspondence-matching operation, performed in the same way, following
the same procedure, that the victim previously carried out against the
perpetrator. In baseball, it’s throwing a pitch at a batter in retaliation for the
other team’s pitcher hitting our batter. In homicide, it’s a life for a life. In
warfare, it’s a bombing for a bombing, or nuclear annihilation in reciprocity
for nuclear annihilation. In the case of an assault that resulted in paralysis of
the victim, a Saudi Arabian judge even inquired whether the perpetrator
could have his spinal cord medically severed at the exact same place as the
victim’s, as the victim requested (Jamjoom and Ahmen, 2010).

Market-pricing violence: arbitrary conventional

symbolism
The ConSyst of MP is arbitrary conventional symbolism, in which the signs
have constitutive meaning and effect purely by virtue of their conventional
use in a particular culture. The prototype is money: pieces of metal or paper,
“signed” documents, or strings of digits whose value totally depends on
people’s use, understanding, and acceptance of the signs, along with their
expectation that everyone in the system will continue to use, understand,
and accept them in the same manner. Other examples are numerals that
people use to calculate and communicate prices, taxes, fines, penal
sentences, efficiency, or cost-benefit utilities.
MP violence is proportionally computed as “the price you pay” for
something, or “the cost of doing business.” The violence is metered by a
conception of how the quantity of harm inflicted is fungible with the
relational acts, events, or states that the violence regulates. For example,
“rationalized” violence includes computations of penalties meted out as
strokes of a cane or whip, or the infliction of a number of days of a
specified degree of suffering. Moreover, MP violence is rationally planned
and administered according to abstract rules and formal regulations, such as
“rules of engagement” and sentencing guidelines. It is impersonally carried
out in a bureaucratic manner by trained technicians and professionals
working according to manuals based on criteria logically designed to
maximize efficiency and expected utility, impersonally assessed in terms of
such abstractions as “casualties” and “collateral damage.” Perpetrators will
often keep careful records to facilitate rational review to improve the
efficiency of violence, maximizing the “return” while minimizing the “cost”
and “risk.”
Perhaps the most notable aspect of MP violence is that it is indifferent to
the manner of harming or killing except insofar as that is relevant to the
desired results. Different sorts of pain or harm or different periods of
suffering are fungible, in that people construe them all as interchangeable
ways of “paying” the “same” “price.” In the abstract, formal, rational
calculus of MP violence, the body is merely a biological mechanism in
which all forms of pain and suffering and all means to death are comparable
on some conventional metric of efficacy. The only question is which is
cheaper and more cost-effective: destroying their crops so as to starve them,
killing them with machine guns, incinerating them with napalm, or
vaporizing and incinerating them with atomic bombs. The violence in MP is
morally motivated to regulate social relationships in the most efficient, cost-
effective, utility-maximizing, rational manner. MP is social coordination
oriented to proportionally valued costs and benefits – where harm and death
may be fungible with every other value, so that the right thing to do is to
compute the course of action that brings the greatest good to the greatest
number with the minimal costs, even when the costs include morbidity and
mortality.

Many dyads and groups with multifaceted relationships use different

RMs to coordinate different aspects or phases of their relationship. If a
violent act or practice performs multiple constitutive roles with respect to
aspects or phases coordinated by different RMs, conformation systems
theory would predict that the form of the act or practice is likely to have
features of the conformation systems of each model that the perpetrator is
regulating. This may make it difficult to discern and discriminate the
component conformation systems that shape the violence, but that’s simply
because human action is often multiply motivated.
 Overall, conformation systems theory promises to extend virtuous
violence theory by illuminating the distinct morphologies of violence that
people are apt to perpetrate to constitute the respective RMs. The forms of
violence that regulate the respective RMs seem to differ, but the available
evidence is insufficient, so it would be productive to focus more research on
the forms of violence, asking precisely how people harm, hurt, or kill to
constitute each of the elementary types of social relationships. In each
respective RM, a distinctive kind of violence should be intuitively expected,
should feel natural, should most readily evoke relationship-appropriate
emotions, and should be especially “satisfying.”
 21 Why do people use violence to constitute their
social relationships, rather than using some other
medium?
Violence is not the usual way to constitute relationships; people usually
constitute relationships non-violently. So while we have explained the
motivation for violence, this explanation raises a new question: why and
when do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather
than using other means? Sometimes people shoot a person who runs over
their dog, but much more often the driver apologizes and the dog owner
accepts the apology, or the driver offers compensation, or the dog owner
brings a law suit. Other options are to complain, or exit: when do people
merely walk away from an unsatisfactory interaction, or gossip about it?
Sometimes people connect and become one with each other by cutting their
bodies the same way or scourging their bodies together, but much more
often people connect and become one by feasting commensally, dancing
together, hugging, and kissing. What determines which course people
follow?
Of course, the incidence of violence is greatly influenced by social-
structural, technical, and biological factors, such as the lack of a reliable
third-party state police force, the nature and availability of weapons, or the
hormones that drive young males. But in terms of the motives to engage in
violence, we suggest that the major factor that determines whether people
constitute a relationship violently, and, if so, with what kind of violence, is
the set of cultural preos that guide the implementation of the relationship.
From the observer’s point of view, the best predictor of violent regulation of
a relationship is the cultural context. From the actor’s point of view,
whether violence is natural or unnatural, inevitable or evitable, depends on
his cultural psychology. For eighteenth-century Europeans and American
fathers, it was natural and inevitable that they should whip their sons for
disobedience, disrespect, or lack of diligence. In this cultural-historical
context, fathers made tactical decisions about precisely when and how
much to whip, but they didn’t strategize about whether to whip their sons;
they didn’t analyze alternative child-rearing strategies or in any meaningful
sense “choose” to whip. That was simply what good fathers did when a son
was bad. In turn, those sons learned that whipping was right and necessary
from their fathers, and reproduced the practice when punishing their own
children.
Certainly, every father had to interpret the precedents and prescriptions
for whipping, applying them to decide whether a particular infraction
merited whipping. Presumably, the latitude built into the ambiguity of any
preo and the multiplicity of potentially relevant preos resulted in some
difficult decisions, and variation between families. In the long run, these
decisions and variations must have been involved in the historical decline in
whipping. So, while keeping clearly in mind that the cultural preos for
paternal responsibility were the overwhelming determinants at any given
point in time, we should consider the psychosocial factors that must have
gradually contributed to the decline, disregard, disapproval, and ultimate
criminalization of whipping. Given that in many cultures in which parents
and schoolmasters formerly felt morally obliged to whip disobedient
children they now feel morally obliged not to do so, the question is why
these judgments changed when they did – in some cultures, but not others.
More generally, what kinds of social psychological, social ecological,
political, and other historical factors operate in the long run to transform
and replace cultural preos toward or away from violently regulating
relationships? Sometimes argued and political, sometimes imperceptible
and practical, cultural historical changes in the preos for violence (or
anything else) must be mediated by social psychological processes. The
ultimate factors may be environmental, technological, communicative, and
demographic, but the effects of these factors on cultural preos and hence
motives for violence are proximately mediated by social psychological
processes.
Not much is known about this. Few theorists and fewer empirical
researchers have addressed this question in these general terms, so if
virtuous violence theory contributes nothing else, at least it should direct
attention to the issue. However, thanks to Steven Pinker (2011), we know
that people use violence much less now than they ever have in history or
prehistory. Pinker shows that rates of violence have dramatically declined
over recent decades, over the past few centuries, and over the last several
millennia. Relying on existing theories of violence, he attributes the decline
in part to culturally and ontogenetically cultivated self-control and empathy.
He also theorizes that CS and AR are intrinsically most likely to motivate
violence, so that violence diminishes as CS and AR relationships are
displaced by more dispassionate MP, along with the super-rationality of
impersonal perspective-taking that MP leads to. This thesis echoes
Durkheim’s (1997/1893, 1973/1899–1900) theory that transgressions of
organic solidarity evoke retributive sanctions, while transgressions of
mechanical solidarity evoke restitutive sanctions. These are helpful
observations about the changing incidence of violence, but they don’t
answer our question. However, they provide a crucial historical framework
for it: whatever the factors are that promote violent regulation of
relationships, they must have greatly declined over the last several
millennia, over the last few centuries, and over the last few decades.

Criticality
Our thesis is that people constitute their social relationships violently when

it is necessary to attract participants’ and others’ attention to a

constitutive transformation of the relationship;
it is necessary to raise the stakes in the relationship because the
relationship is crucial;
they are constituting the relationship, rather than merely conducting
(performing) it;
there is a great deal at stake;
people are responding to transgression through redress or protection
rather than regulating relationships in other ways;
people are acting according to CS and AR relational models rather
than more dispassionate EM and MP relational models;
people have no good alternative ways to regulate the relationship, nor
do they have alternative relationships, so they cannot simply leave this
relationship and start a new one;
the violence will enhance the metarelational models within which the
perpetrator–victim relationship is embedded or enhance the constituent
relationships that comprise those metarelational models.
More informally, virtuous violence theory posits that people use violence to
grab others’ attention and impress them by demonstrating that the relational
stakes are high – so long as the violence is consistent with the web of social
relationships comprising the metarelational models in which the action is
embedded. Milder, weaker, gentler, less salient ways of regulating
relationships are adequate for most everyday purposes, often require less
effort, and are usually safer.
These conditions for violence are highly correlated and interdependent:
they do not act separately and their violence-fostering effects combine in a
mutually reinforcing manner that is more than additive. Sometimes these
attentional, stakes, and metarelational model issues shape behavior
intuitively without people being aware of them, and sometimes they are
explicit strategic considerations. Since they are typically intertwined, we
will discuss these factors together and refer to the violence-triggering level
of this constellation of highly interactive, violence-fostering factors as the
criticality of the relationship. This term evokes the apt analogy of the self-
sustaining state of a nuclear chain reaction that results when sufficient
fissionable material is in sufficiently close proximity without too much
impeding material absorbing the radiation. Criticality is the condition where
the participants get very hot very fast and are likely to explode. We address
here the first seven components of criticality, focusing on metarelational
factors in the following chapter.

Attention to violence
People are intensely interested in violence: they want to hear all about it,
and they often go to see it. From Plato to Edmund Burke to Baudelaire,
commentators have noted the magnetic attraction to viewing, hearing, or
reading about injury and death – especially when the injury or death is
inflicted by humans (Sontag, 2003: 97–107). People are consistently drawn
to art and photographs depicting pain and death (Sontag, 2003). For
example, stories and images of humans and gods inflicting pain and death
are widespread in classical antiquity: consider the detailed descriptions of
wounds and death in the Iliad, and in Christian iconography the Crucifixion
and the torture and deaths of the martyrs (Sontag, 2003: 41, 74). Images of
Christ on the cross and martyrs suffering and dying have long been popular,
as well as stories about their torture and death (Crachiolo, 2004). The
readers evidently revered and relished the extreme and prolonged pain, the
depiction of which is the essence of such hagiography. Similarly, Gallonio’s
Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, first published in 1591, and
very popular across Europe, was widely reprinted and translated. Huge
Roman audiences came to see animals kill criminals and watch gladiators
fight. Today, there is a huge audience for American football, ice hockey,
rugby, boxing, and mixed martial arts. British and American public
executions often drew thousands of spectators (Goldberg, 1998). In the mid
1800s, throngs visited Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, which
depicted the executions during the French Revolution and excruciating
executions of criminals (Goldberg, 1998). In Britain and its North American
colonies, the popular press of the mid-eighteenth century prominently
displayed gruesome images of murders and war casualties (Goldberg,
1998).
Today, the whole highway slows to a crawl as drivers peer at a gruesome
traffic accident, but what draws the most avid attention is a human who
kills.

The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those

understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human. (Suffering
from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily
represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not
at all – as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or
misadventure.)
(Sontag, 2003: 40)

Moreover, research on cinema violence suggests that people experience an

almost euphoric feeling of elation when an extremely violent, evil character
suffers and dies, getting what he deserves (Zillmann, 1998).
The evidence of the attention-grabbing power of violence is all around us,
and always has been. Violence is ubiquitous in news media, movies, video
games, and, throughout human history, mythology and storytelling –
ubiquitous because people want to see and hear about it (Scott et al., 2013).
In one sample of 220 freshman and sophomore students from a Midwestern
high school, 95% reported that they like and regularly view “slasher” films
that involve graphic killing (Johnston, 1995). Asked to explain why they go
to such movies, many respondents responded, “I watch because I’m
interested in the ways people die,” “I like to see blood and guts,” and “I like
to see the victims get what they deserve” (Johnston, 1995: 527). Even
fourth and fifth graders (ages 9–11) in the United States play very violent
video games and watch violent movies (Funk et al., 2004). American
children watch hours of violent television every week; even very young
children watch cartoons that consist of extremely violent interactions of the
sort that would be horribly painful or fatal to real animals or humans
(Cantor, 1998). The most popular video games today involve very graphic,
realistic images of killing (e.g., Call of Duty, Halo). It is not merely the
“action” that attracts players: in 1993 when Sega sold a version of Mortal
Kombat graphically depicting violence such as bloody decapitations, while
Nintendo sold a much less graphic version in which the violence was toned
down, the graphic Sega version outsold the milder Nintendo version 7 to 1,
despite there being more Nintendo systems in US homes (Goldstein, 1998).
“Superviolent” movies attract huge audiences everywhere in the world
where they are shown (Zillmann, 1998). But, of course, children loved war
and cowboy and Indian killing games long before such “entertainment” was
digitalized. And for centuries adults have told stories to (or written stories
for) children recounting gruesome mortal consequences of moral
transgression (Tatar, 1998).
Pain and fear are the most attention-grabbing of all stimuli, dominating
other modes of perception. Furthermore, the motives evoked by intense fear
or pain are very strong: they usually get people to act with great immediacy
and effort. Under extreme danger and stress, one’s own pain sensations are
muted, and sometimes fear as well. But what was not felt in the height of
battle is nonetheless unforgettable later: pain and fear are extraordinarily
memorable. Memories of great pain or terrifying fear of death or severe
injury, one’s own or others’, typically last a lifetime, are easily re-evoked,
and leave enduring effects. PTSD is the extreme syndrome, but violence is
always unforgettable.
For perpetrators, this all means that their violence will be noticed by a
wide audience, and then quickly and vividly communicated to many others.
Violence is so dramatic, so enthralling, that people will know what the
perpetrator did and not soon forget it. Because people pay so much attention
to their own and others’ pain and danger, and to others’ death, and
remember the experiences so vividly, inflicting or threatening harm are
powerful means to regulate social relationships, while killing is
incomparable. No one will miss the message, no one who gets the message
will ignore it, and no one will ever forget it. In sum, violence grabs people’s
attention: people perceive, note, and remember what happened. So the
salience of violence is a major component of criticality.
Sometimes criticality evokes violence without any conscious reflection,
so that people are not aware of explicitly making a decision to be violent.
At other times, perpetrators are more or less aware of the dramatic impact
of violence, and use it accordingly. Studies of intimate partner violence in
some cultures also show that quite often the perpetrator’s stated reason for
violence was to get a partner’s attention, as, for example, when the partner
wasn’t listening (Flynn and Graham, 2010: 245).
Pain and fear of injury or death, hearing of killing or observing it, don’t
simply grab people’s attention, and stay in their memory – they also get
people to act, or refrain from action. For perpetrators, this all means that the
motivational impact of violence and credible threat of violence is virtually
unmatched – violence is an extraordinarily effective way to influence others
to accommodate the perpetrator’s social-relational goals. Threatening or
carrying out violence is a very risky strategy that may sometimes jeopardize
the relationship which it aims to regulate, not to mention the life and
functioning of the relational partner and of the perpetrator. But when the
stakes are high and safer strategies are ineffective, it may be adaptive.

High stakes
The physical death of the sacrificial victim, the martyr, or the war dead
charges an action with a seriousness or a compelling power it would
otherwise lack; the bodies of the dead give a tangible form to an
abstract commitment or belief. In the latter the belief that life is
precious leads men to use killing or dying as a measure for value; what
men die for is supremely important.
(Lewis, 1990: 3)
Harming oneself or loved ones, as by taking a hard hit from an opponent to
protect a teammate or circumcising one’s son, are sacrifices that
demonstrate great commitment to one’s team or community. Killing a
female relative who has shamed the family declares the family’s total
commitment to honor – it shows that the family will give up what they love
most to adhere to the fundamental morality of the honor code. Aztecs risked
their lives and the lives of their comrades and subordinates in raids to
secure sacrificial victims, and then cut out the victims’ beating hearts on the
altar of their gods. This practice terrorized their enemies, their vassal states,
and their subjects because it demonstrated that resistance to royal authority
meant a horrible death. A modern mundane example is the defensive end
who blindsides the quarterback, leaving him dazed or writhing in pain. By
doing so, the defensive end has changed the relationship between the
offense and defense: now the quarterback is not only diminished as a passer
and scrambler, he is humiliated and afraid. The quarterback now knows that
the longer he waits before passing, the more he risks being hammered
again. Harming an opponent, inflicting pain on recruits in boot camp, or
killing a man who insults your daughter enforces a relationship by imposing
a huge cost. Braving pain and suffering, the agent demonstrates that he can
be counted on to do his part, even at great cost to himself. The person who
inflicts violence is a relational partner to be reckoned with – others cannot
take lightly the creation, maintenance, regulation, or redress of relationships
with him.
In general, virtuous violence demonstrates to the violent agent’s partners,
and to observers, that a great deal is at stake in their relational performance.
Violence immediately gets people’s attention, and then “forcefully” warns
them that the violent agent is committed to enforcing the relationship, even
at great risk or cost to himself or his partners. Hence, virtuous violence
motivates the violent agent’s partners to perform their parts energetically
and scrupulously, however difficult it may be for them to do what the
relationship requires. It is analogous to raising the ante: it increases the
stakes in the relationship, like placing a big bet or making a big raise. When
you raise the stakes in poker, you are impressively signaling that you expect
to win the hand, you are committing yourself to a big loss if you don’t, and
you are giving the other players a choice: fold, conceding the pot, or risk
the amount of the raise to stay in and contest the hand. Violence works in a
similar way, except that often there are no cards: whoever imposes
sufficient harm to make the other concede, wins. In other words, if a player
is willing and able to bet more than the other players’ stakes – more than
the others are willing to put into play and risk losing – he wins. Hence, if it
is essential to create a relationship, if an essential relationship must be
sustained, if an essential relationship is going badly or there is a risk that it
will, violence may be an adaptive strategy to protect or to transform the
relationship to ensure that the perpetrator gets what he feels he’s “entitled
to” in relational terms. In this sense, violence can be analyzed as a chicken
game (Rapoport and Chammah, 1966) or hawk–dove game (Maynard
Smith, 1979) or as a deterrence strategy (Frank, 1988; Kavka, 1986, 1987),
with the added factor of interdependence.
As Frank and Kavka show, in order to win it isn’t always necessary to
actually impose any harm: it is sufficient that your opponent be convinced
that in order to win, you are committed to imposing more harm than they
are willing or able to endure. But how does your opponent know you will
actually impose such terrible harm? Given that it may be emotionally
difficult and very dangerous to be violent, why should your opponent
believe that you actually will be, if they contest the relationship? Frank
(1988) argues that the only way to persuasively demonstrate that you will be
violent is to consistently be violent. That is, you must have a consistent
track record of violence in similar circumstances in this relationship or
similar relationships. In small communities, people learn by observation
and gossip who actually will be violent if they are crossed. And occasional,
arbitrary pre-emptive violence will keep uppermost in everyone’s mind the
prospect of violence if they contest a relationship with you.

Is the constitution of the relationship at stake, or

merely its conduct?
This brings us to an even more fundamental aspect of relationship-
regulating violence. Relational acts differ in their constitutivity: some
actions are fundamental to the creation and existence of a relationship,
while other less constitutive acts are more peripheral. To simplify
somewhat, we can distinguish those acts that make or break a relationship
from those acts that are merely the performance or conduct of the
relationship. So, a wedding makes a marriage, while depositing money to a
joint checking account or taking joint responsibility for household chores
merely follows from the relationship that the wedding ceremony created.
Likewise, sexual faithfulness is crucially constitutive, while doing the
dishes together is not. People are more motivated to violence by
unfaithfulness than failure to deposit money or wash dishes. An officer may
shoot a soldier for blatantly refusing to obey an order, but not for running
too slowly to perform it. In short, actions that are crucially constitutive, that
make or break a relationship, are more likely to consist of or provoke
violence than actions that simply comprise the routine conduct of the
relationship.

What is the constitutive phase of the violence?

People are more frequently violent when responding to transgressions,
either through redress or protection, than when creating, conducting,
terminating, or mourning relationships. As we have seen, all these
constitutive processes sometimes motivate violence, even homicide, but
punishment and defense are the most frequent motives. It’s not clear why.

What type of relationship is being constituted?

When a relationship doesn’t matter very much, people are unlikely to
escalate to violence. Pinker (2011) suggests that people generally aren’t as
invested in MP relationships as they are in CS and AR relationships, so that
the historically increasing prevalence of MP relationships (progressively
replacing CS and AR) is an important cause of the huge historical decline in
violence. This seems plausible, and finer grained analyses might show that
within each RM, the incidence of violence also depends on the importance
of the relationship. Any type of relationship, whether consisting of CS, AR,
EM, or MP, can vary in its emotional intensity, motivational impetus, and
moral obligatoriness. CS varies from merely casual friendship to true love,
from merely being American to being ready to die for your fellow soldiers
in the platoon. The stronger the relationship, the more the participants are
prone to violently regulate it.

Does the perpetrator have alternative means to

regulate the relationship or alternative
relationships to join?
In addition, violence only makes sense when alternative, less risky, and less
costly means of regulating relationships are not readily available. This may
mean that the more verbally articulate and persuasive people are, the more
“attractive” they are in various respects, or the greater the material
inducements and extrinsic social resources they can bestow, the less violent
they are likely to be. That is, if someone can effectively influence their
partners in other ways, they don’t need violence. Alternatively, there may
be meta-relational means for regulating relationships non-violently, such as
the presence of third-party governing bodies to enforce rules. None of this
may involve reflectively weighing or even consciously considering these
factors, much less making choices through a rational calculus that the
perpetrator can articulate. But natural and cultural evolution along with
individual experience will tend to support violence in some circumstances
and inhibit violence under other conditions.
When it is feasible to abandon a bad relationship and replace it with
another, violence may be maladaptive. That is, where there is relational
mobility, such that old relationships are easily abandoned and new
relationships are easily formed, it may not be worthwhile to use violence to
sustain a relationship that is in jeopardy (cf. Cooney, 1998: 115–22; on
some other ways that relational mobility affects relationships, see Yuki and
Schug, 2012). Don’t like this relationship? Leave it and find a better one.
But if there are few or no alternatives to an existing relationship, then
people may resort to violence to make it work – because this relationship
must work. In addition, if relational-mobility opportunities are few, the
victim of the violence may not be able to leave the relationship, diminishing
the perpetrator’s risk that her violence will lead to her partner’s exit. Thus,
violence may be prevalent in small, closed communities in which it is
ecologically, economically, or socially difficult to leave unsatisfactory
relationships, and there are few new alternative relationships available.
Where kinship ties are not crucial for survival or well-being, where it’s easy
to leave almost any unsatisfactory relationship and find a better substitute,
why regulate any relationship violently?
 In short, violence impresses the victim, the audience, and the many others
who quickly and reliably learn of it through gossip (or, today, the media).
People notice violence, remember it, and are highly motivated by it. As a
result, doing violence or effectively threatening violence can be a very
effective way to regulate relationships. But the risks of engaging in violence
are high, and so it should only be used when the social-relational stakes are
high, and less costly, non-violent means are unavailable. We suggest that
where violence has declined, it has done so when the socioecological
conditions have effectively lowered the social-relational stakes and
provided alternative, less costly, non-violent means to regulate
relationships.
 22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide
alternatives to violence
As we have seen throughout the book, perpetrators may inflict violence on
one person to constitute relationships with others. For example, a soldier
may kill an enemy in obedience to an officer, or an initiate may kill a
member of a rival gang. A perpetrator may kill one member of another
group in retaliation for some other member of that group’s killing a member
of the perpetrator’s group. A man may kill his wife’s lover to regulate his
relationship with his wife, or, in an honor culture, kill his niece’s lover, and
his niece, in order to regulate his relationships with his family and with
everyone in the community. As we saw, the Trojan War was all about men
fighting men to constitute relationships with other men, or with the gods. In
all these and many other cases we have considered in this book, the motive
to constitute one or more of the component relationships of a metarelational
model morally requires violence in another of the relationships that
compose the metarelational model. In general, relationships have moral
implications for other relationships with which they are metarelationally
linked.
But these moral links often work the other way around. As we mentioned
briefly in Chapter 2, metarelational models may inhibit violence. If a soldier
is ordered to kill a family member or his village chief, he may refuse. The
gang initiate may avoid killing his sister’s boyfriend. In a feud, potential
perpetrators may refrain from violence if the opposing group includes in-
laws, co-members of an age set or secret society, blood brothers, or
compadres. Conflict-restraining relationships such as these are “cross-
cutting ties” that limit violence in many societies, including ones where
there are no effective police, judiciaries, or chiefs (Colson, 1953; Cooney,
1998: 90–6; Evans-Pritchard, 1939; Gluckman, 1954, 1963; LeVine, 1961;
Nader, 1990; Rae and Taylor, 1970; Ross, 1993). Such metarelational cross-
cutting ties operate in all societies, including modern ones. For example,
Varshney (2003) found that violence between Hindus and Muslims was less
likely to occur following an instigating act of violence elsewhere in the
country in cities where Hindus and Muslims were already working together
on joint civic projects.
Inhabitants of modern states have powerful cross-cutting ties with the
state. Indeed, the definition of a state is something like “a political power
that claims legitimate authority to use force to regulate relationships
between itself and its subjects, along with many relationships among its
subjects or citizens, and between its subjects and citizens and outsiders.”
So, if I rob a store or beat up someone, armed police will intervene, and
they will exercise their mandate to use force if I resist. Then the courts may
forcibly incarcerate me. This is the operation of metarelational models in
which the state is obligated to use violence to regulate relationships among
citizens. More generally, where there is an effective Hobbesian Leviathan –
a powerful chief, or an executive with police and a penal system – the
Leviathan is the ultimate third party in metarelationships regulating all of
the social relationships among its subjects or citizens (Hobbes, 2010/1651;
Kavka, 1986; Schneider, 1971).
Figure 22.1 schematically graphs some violence-inhibiting effects of
metarelational models. In the simplest case, diagramed in Figure 22.1a
(identical to Figure 2.3b), the potential perpetrator, P, is morally motivated
toward violence against the victim, V, but also morally motivated to sustain
a relationship with another person, O, who in turn wants to sustain a
relationship with the victim, and hence cares about the victim, or is
obligated to protect her. Because O cares about V, any harm P does to V
threatens P’s relationship with O – and, indeed, O may sanction P for
harming V. For example, if the perpetrator catches a man stealing his
money, the perpetrator may restrain himself or limit his violence if the thief
is his wife’s brother or his daughter’s husband. Even when there is a chain
of three (or more) relationships linking the P with V, as in Figure 22.1b, P
may mitigate or avoid violence in order to sustain his relationship with O.
Consider here the case of a warlord disposed to punish an insubordinate
soldier, but checking his rage because the soldier is his mother’s brother’s
child, or his age-mate’s blood brother’s son.
Figure 22.1: Violence-reducing metarelational models

Figure 22.1c illustrates the obvious fact that there may be as many as six
linked relationships among four persons, all of which may be linked in a
metarelational model to all of the others. So a suicide bomber may hesitate
to detonate his bomb if one of his victims will be a man who is his closest
friend’s guru and his teacher’s guest, where the guru and the guest are also
brothers. Likewise, you will be less inclined to hang a cattle rustler if you
discover that the rustler is the son of your sister, especially if your sister’s
husband, the rustler’s father, is your close friend. The more such ties that
the perpetrator is directly or indirectly concerned to preserve, and the
stronger they are, the greater the inhibition of his violence.
Figure 22.1d displays the simplest inhibitory metarelational model, if we
can call it that. This is the case when two persons have multiple
relationships with each other. Suppose a man buys a horse, but discovers
that the seller cheated him: the horse is lame. He might be inclined to
violently rectify the wrong he has suffered. But if the seller is also the
buyer’s pastor, and his oldest friend, the buyer may find a way to rectify the
wrong without violence. If the man who insults you, offending your honor,
is your brother or a fellow soldier in the same platoon, you may let him off
with an angry warning, rather than stab him. In short, when two parties
have multiple relationships, the parallel relationships may inhibit violence
morally motivated by one of those relationships. Here, and in the multiparty
metarelational models, moral motives based on different social relationships
conflict. To act on moral motives impelling toward violence against
someone may be to violate moral motives toward compassion, care, or
protection of the same person.
As we analyzed in Chapter 2 and have seen in every chapter, however,
metarelational models often potentiate, morally permit. or, indeed, morally
require violence. Some metarelation models promote violence, while others
inhibit it. A warrior may be motivated by his relationship to his girlfriend to
kill, if she admires valor, or not to kill, if she hates killing and will end their
relationship if he kills anyone. The severity, frequency, and probability of a
perpetrator’s violence against a victim depend on the number of
metarelational models involved and their importance, and, of course, how
they are linked. That is, violence in one relationship may enhance or
threaten other relationships linked to it. The more important and the more
numerous these metarelational models, the greater is their total effect on the
severity, frequency, and probability of A’s violence against V. A Quaker
who commits violence against anyone diminishes or jeopardizes his
relationships with all other Quakers. But a traditional Greek shepherd who
fights a man who insults him thereby gains the respect and admiration of
everyone else, except the victim’s kin: his violence enhances his honor with
many people.
Whether or not violence occurs depends on the balance of moral motives,
which in turn depends on the number of component relationships of the
combined metarelational models, the importance of each of those
relationships, and how strongly the violence constitutes each of the morally
linked relationships in the metarelational model. Thus, we can qualitatively
summarize the variable effects of metarelational models in three tenets:

1. The more important and the more numerous the other relationships
that are linked through metarelational models to the focal
relationship, the greater their potential effects (facilitating or
inhibiting) on the frequency, intensity, and lethality of the violence
in the focal relationship.
 2. The greater the imbalance between the number and importance of
linked relationships that are enhanced by violence in the focal
relationship, compared to the lower number and importance of
linked relationships that are jeopardized by violence in the focal
relationship, the greater the frequency, intensity, and lethality of the
violence in the focal relationship. And vice versa.
3. In general, the more metarelational models in which a relationship
is embedded, the less violence will occur in it (less frequent, less
injurious, less lethal). This is because, more often than not,
violence in one relationship undermines or jeopardizes most other
relationships linked to the focal relationship, and most relationships
are mostly peaceful. That is, most people don’t want most of their
associates to be harmed. People typically sanction or avoid people
who are violent in other relationships – for their own safety, and
because the harm to the victim is objectionable to most of the
people who relate to the victim. That is, most of the time most
relationships inhibit violence in most of the other relationships in
the metarelational models that they are enmeshed in. So, on the
whole, the more metarelational models a relationship belongs to,
the less violence will tend to occur in it. But, as we have seen, there
are many exceptions, the most dramatic of which are cultures of
honor and shame.

This last principle may seem to be inconsistent with the long-term decline
of violence (Pinker, 2011). However, as communications improve, and as
people come to depend on wider and wider MP and other networks,
anything a person does in any relationship comes to have wider and wider
ramifications. A person’s conviction for murder is in the public record,
preventing him from ever being hired by most employers or being trusted
by just about anyone. A person convicted of rape is listed on an online
database of sex offenders.
Our representation of metarelational models potentiating and constraining
violence represents the links among relationships synchronically and
depicts persons as mere points at the intersection of relationships. But
relationships are dynamic, their moral motivational implications for each
other evolve, and people are not the passive circles these graphs connote.
People actively manage their relationships and metarelational models.
When there is conflict or threat of conflict between two persons with whom
a person is relating, she often intervenes to mediate the conflict between her
partners (Black, 1998; Cooney, 1998). That is, she seeks solutions for the
conflict between her relationship partners and pushes them to find a way
out of the conflict, sometimes implicitly or explicitly putting her
relationship with either or both on the line. The prototype is the parent
interceding in conflicts between her children. She makes it clear to her
children that the status of their respective relationships with her depend to
some degree on their moderating or ending their conflict or avoiding
violence. For the potential perpetrators, this often provides a face-saving
way out of the conflict: the opponents can step back, making it clear that
they do so out of respect or affection for the mediator. Legal anthropologists
and political scientists have studied these mediational rituals and practices
extensively (e.g., Lienhardt, 1961; Middleton and Tait, 1954), while
political and legal historians have illuminated the development of police,
courts, and the whole apparatus of the state as third-party guarantor and
regulator of social relationships. The business of civil courts – and
professional mediators – is to mediate relationships, which reduces recourse
to violence. And disputants know that the criminal justice system will
intervene if there is violence, a fact that gives them both motivations and
excuses for avoiding violence. In short, people intercede to regulate each
other’s relationships – sometimes interceding violently, but more often
mediating to forestall, moderate, or end each other’s violence.

A great mystery of violence is that the perpetrators are often very

ordinary people who are good neighbors, good friends, good siblings, and
good parents. But bewilderment about this results from an assumption that
violence can be attributed to some trait or state of the individual perpetrator.
Within this individualistic worldview, the natural question is, “What is it
about this person that made him violent?” But perhaps traits or states of the
individual person can’t account for violence – because violence isn’t a
product of an isolated individual. Virtuous violence theory offers an
alternative paradigm: that violence is emergent from social relationships. If
you ask, “What is it about oxygen that makes it explosive?” or “What is it
about hydrogen that makes it explosive?” there’s no answer to either
question, because there isn’t anything specific to oxygen, as such, or
hydrogen, as such, that makes it likely to explode. In isolation, neither one
will ever explode. But when combined, the tiniest spark will set off a blast.
Put the oxygen together with the nitrogen (making laughing gas) before
bringing them together with the hydrogen and despite endless sparks there
will never be an explosion. Put the oxygen and hydrogen together in a
polymer exchange membrane fuel cell and instead of an explosion you have
a nice, controllable source of clean energy for your car, releasing water. If
virtuous violence theory is correct, then it is often fruitless to seek purely
individualistic explanations of violence – because separate individuals as
such don’t produce violence. Of course, traits of persons make some prone
to violence in social-relational circumstances that others would simply
shrug off. But even the most violent people are not violent in most of their
interactions, and when they are violent, their violence is motivated by the
perception that violence is necessary to constitute a particular, crucial social
relationship that cannot readily be regulated more easily, safely, or gently.
Furthermore, many sets of dyads (or groups) that would be peaceful and
gentle by themselves are nevertheless components of metarelational models
whose configurational moral implications motivate violence.
 23 How do we end violence?
Empirically, as we have seen in chapter after chapter, the objective fact is
that people are sometimes morally motivated to harm or kill. Sometimes
people feel that to be good, to be just, to be honorable, to do their duty, they
have to hurt someone. Morality consists of regulating social relationships
(Rai and Fiske, 2011, 2012), and the inductively assembled evidence shows
that sometimes moral motives impel people to regulate critical relationships
violently. This reveals how profoundly important social relationships are:
people will sometimes kill or die to make their relationships right. People’s
relationships sometimes are more important to them than their bodies or
their very lives, and sometimes to make their relationships right, people
sacrifice the bodies or the lives of their spouses, children, friends,
neighbors, or others.
Thus, the essential message of virtuous violence theory is that we cannot
attribute most violence to the “breakdown” of morals, or to individualistic
rational actors amorally maximizing their personal asocial utility functions.
The obverse message is that we cannot equate morality with just gentleness,
compassion, caring, or harm-avoidance: there are moralities that impel to
violence. Meritorious performance of one’s moral duty may consist of
kindness or killing.
From these facts there are three conclusions that we cannot draw. These
facts do not imply that a person cannot help but constitute relationships
violently. These facts do not imply that human society will inevitably be
violent. These facts do not imply that we ought to constitute relationships
violently. Consider the analogy with procreation. All animals maximize
their reproductive success, and nearly all human populations have done so
throughout history, limited only by their ecological constraints. But today
most people use contraception; some people abstain from sex; birthrates in
most modern societies have dropped to replacement levels and in some
cases below that; and there is no moral obligation to have as many children
as possible. The same conclusions apply to violence. So to end violence,
what should we do?
 One thing is clear: the better we understand the moral motivations for
violence, the better we will be able to reduce it. If virtuous violence theory
is valid, then to reduce violence we will have to do more than provide
economic or material incentives, and we will have to do more than impose
punishment. It will not be enough to minimize frustration, foster self-
control, humanize victims, or reinforce moral reasoning. To reduce
violence, people must develop other ways to constitute and regulate their
social relationships. Violence will be reduced when potential perpetrators
can implement critical relationships non-violently. Violence will be avoided
when potential victims can freely and safely leave relationships in which
they are subject to violence – and form new, violence-free relationships.
Violence will be reduced as metarelational models emerge that make
violence in one relationship incompatible with many other important,
meaningful, rewarding relationships linked to the potentially violent
relationship. When violence in any relationship is an intolerable violation of
all of the perpetrators’ relationships, most violence will be eliminated.
In his work on preventing additional outbreaks of violence following the
Rwandan genocide and other intergroup conflicts through efforts at
reconciliation, Ervin Staub (2006) argues for the importance of helping
victims understand that the perpetrators were not motivated by pure evil, in
order to rebuild relationships between the two groups in the conflict, and to
encourage bystanders to violence to take active steps to stop it. Mapping
these recommendations onto virtuous violence theory, we would argue that
key elements of violence reduction and prevention must involve
understanding that perpetrators feel morally motivated in their actions; that
the key to preventing violence lies in constituting supportive, non-violent
relationships among the participants, particularly CS relationships that elicit
a shared group identity; and that the meta-relationships within which
relationships are embedded will be crucial in forcing potential perpetrators
to understand the impacts that their violence has on all of their relationships
and the relationships of everyone they relate with. Let us consider two
approaches to this, the first based outside existing political structures, and
the second within them.

Civil disobedience and hunger strikes

One of the rarest but most virtuous forms of morally motivated violence is
that which non-violent protestors intentionally provoke against themselves,
or foresee and accept, when they deliberately, publicly, and flagrantly resist
illegitimate authority or unjust laws (Roberts and Ach, 2011). By blatantly
violating illegitimate power, then accepting and nobly enduring the violent
sanctions their civil disobedience likely evokes, those who civilly disobey
shame the perpetrators of that violence and those who support or tolerate it.
Similarly, the self-imposed suffering of hunger strikers shames those who
would violently oppress them. Resisters’ non-violent response to violence
may make some perpetrators question the morality of their own violence; at
a minimum, it disavows violent regulation of the relationship. However,
these forms of non-violent resistance are metarelational, because their aim
is not primarily to make the police or military perpetrators themselves feel
guilty, but to shame those who command the enforcers to be violent, and
especially to shame the supporters of those commanders, moving them to
withdraw their support for the violent enforcement and, ultimately, for the
authority and rules being enforced. Furthermore, by risking or even seeking
violent punishment but not responding to violence with violence, the
resisters demonstrate commitment to their cause and moral superiority over
those who inflict the violence. Refusing to adopt violent means to resist the
authority, even when they suffer violent retribution for their transgressions,
the resisters delegitimate all violence, and hence delegitimate the policies
and practices that can only be enforced with violence. Perhaps this is what
Jesus intended when he preached that “If someone slaps you on one cheek,
turn to them the other also” (New International Version, Luke 6:29,
corresponding to Matthew 5:39).
The civil rights movement in the American South was based on the
movement’s use of Southern authorities’ violence against them. Consider
some of the events of the early 1960s:

In some Southern counties, almost no African-Americans in the

twentieth century had ever even attempted to register, so there were
few cases to litigate. One goal of voter-registration drives was to build
up the inventory of litigable cases.
The primary goal, though, was to provoke official reaction sufficiently
violent to compel the White House to produce a voting-rights bill with
enforcement bite. The provocation part proved amazingly easy. All
that the protesters had to do was to walk to the courthouse and ask to
register. There was nothing covert about the strategy – “We are going
to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma,” King
proclaimed from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel – yet Southern
police, troopers, sheriffs, and deputies clubbed, sicced police dogs on,
blasted fire hoses at, teargassed, and shocked with cattle prods
nonviolent demonstrators, many of them clergymen and children, with
an indifference to national and international opinion that was almost
blithe. Their tactics were encouraged, defended, and sometimes
ordered by Southern city halls and statehouses.
But in Birmingham, when the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene
(Bull) Connor, brought out the police dogs and fire hoses, and in
Selma, when Sheriff Jim Clark socked a black minister, C. T. Vivian,
in the face, reporters and cameramen were right there. Many white
Americans who saw or read about the violence blamed the
demonstrators, but the world blamed the American government. That
got the attention of the White House.
Southern mayors and governors were playing to their electoral bases.
But American Presidents were trying to run a Cold War. They could
live with Jim Crow when it was an invisible regional peculiarity, but
once conditions were broadcast around the world they experienced an
urgent need to make the problem go away.
The pressure of world opinion was crucial to the speed with which
civil-rights gains were made after 1954. It forced American Presidents
to do something…
Kennedy finally took the moral high ground and gave a nationally
televised speech on civil rights. A week later he delivered a civil-rights
bill to Congress… Less than three months later, Kennedy was dead.
Lyndon Johnson was known to civil-rights leaders as the man who,
when he was Senate Majority Leader, had carefully emasculated
Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Bill in order to secure enough Southern
votes for passage. But, as President, Johnson unexpectedly assumed
the mantle of a crusader for racial justice, and he pushed the 1964
Civil Rights Bill through the longest filibuster in Senate history.
 (Menand, 2013: 82–4)

As this illustrates, civil disobedience does not work unless a pivotal

audience has common knowledge – everyone knows, knows that everyone
knows, and knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. – of the
violence inflicted on the resisters. Nor does it work unless that audience
morally condemns the punitive violence and reflects on the validity of
inflicting it to regulate the existing relationships, and has the capacity to
transform the social relationships that the resisters are disobeying. If the
entire audience feels that the resisters deserve violent punishment for their
disobedience, as many of the white American southerners at the time felt,
civil disobedience fails. If the audience is indifferent to the suffering of the
hunger strikers, or regards the relationships they are resisting as valid, self-
starvation fails. So, ironically, for passive resistance to work, the audience,
or at least an influential part of it, must form a relationship with the resisters
in which violence is immoral. That relationship may be compassionate CS
unity, protective AR hierarchy, fair EM quality, or utilitarian MP
proportionality, so long as the audience implements the relationship such
that the enforcers’ violence against the resisters implicates the audience
metarelationally. The audience must be horrified and ashamed, feel
incriminated, and take indirect yet significant responsibility for the violence
against the resisters. If they don’t see the violence as illegitimate, the
peaceful resistance fails. In the case of the civil rights movement, the global
audience condemned the acts of southern forces, while national leaders and
northerners felt implicated and ashamed by what was going on in their
country.
The decision to use non-violent resistance to transform a political regime
may be based on either moral or pragmatic foundations (Roberts and Ash,
2011). Empirically, non-violent resistance has sometimes been accompanied
or followed by violent action by the resisters, or their predecessors, allies,
or successors. The success of non-violent strategies may depend on support
from nations or groups prepared to use violence to protect the resisters or
advance their cause. However, it is striking that an analysis of 323 violent
and non-violent resistance campaigns in the last century found that only
26% of the violent campaigns “succeeded,” while 53% of the non-violent
ones succeeded (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Stephan and Chenoweth,
2008).

There are two reasons for this success. First, a campaign’s

commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and
international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based
participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure
being brought to bear on the target. Recognition of the challenge
group’s grievances can translate into greater internal and external
support for that group and alienation of the target regime, undermining
the regime’s main sources of political, economic, and even military
power.
Second, whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks
against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent
movements is more likely to backfire against the regime. Potentially
sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or
extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent
resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and
facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.
(Stephan and Chenoweth, 2008: 8–9)

We suggest that non-violent campaigns are also more likely to succeed than
violent ones when and because the number of people willing to engage in
non-violent resistance – even at great risk or certain harm to themselves – is
orders of magnitude greater than the numbers willing to use violence
against others. Of course, when social movements do succeed in
transforming or replacing violent regimes, there is a danger that the
successful leaders may themselves become violently oppressive. However,
in addition to being more likely to succeed in their objectives, compared to
violent insurrection, non-violent campaigns against repressive regimes are
more likely to result in transitions to liberal democracies (Karatnycky,
2005). As Gandhi argued, the means are inseparable from the ends (Gandhi,
1998).
Since the metarelational impact of non-violent resistance depends on
common knowledge, it is enormously potentiated by mass communication,
and especially by mass exposure to images and videos of violent
suppression of non-violent resistance. Furthermore, non-violent campaigns
are inspired by and learn strategy and tactics from previously successful
ones when people can readily learn about them through modern
decentralized communications (Roberts and Ash, 2011; Stephan and
Chenoweth, 2008). This presumably is a major factor in the extraordinarily
rapid acceleration of the deployment of and participation in non-violent
campaigns over the past century.

Urban gang homicide

It is a world with its own rules, its own standards, its own
misunderstandings. It is a community, make no mistake; it is a
community were men will kill for their [gang] brothers, die for their
brothers, where being a thug is a good and honorable thing, were thug
love means having your brothers’ backs, no matter what the cost… As
long as the community of the streets sees itself as righteous and
justified, the killing will continue. As long as the community of the
streets sees its own neighborhoods as approving, it will continue. As
long as the streets see the police as racist and hateful, it will continue.
(Kennedy, 2011: 20–1)

In some cases, it is not enough that the larger society or world condemns
and punishes violence, because violence is a function of the moral motives
of the perpetrators and potential perpetrators themselves. “Their own ideas
about right and wrong matter most; the ideas of those they care about and
respect matter more” (Kennedy, 2009: 182).
To control violence associated with gangs and drug-dealing, for many
decades police forces in every city in the United States and many other
nations have used violence, often extreme violence, and mass incarceration.
It hasn’t worked. However, with his colleagues and associates, David M.
Kennedy (2002, 2009, 2011) developed remarkably effective non-violent
interventions to reduce gang- and drug-related, urban American homicide.
Essentially, Kennedy and his collaborators found that when perpetrators get
the message that violence against anyone violates the perpetrators’
relationships with everyone, violence diminishes. The core of the program
consists of meetings in which 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 (Kennedy, 2002, 2009, 2011). 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. “People care about what other
people think. Social-bonding theory suggests that those with strong ties to
others, and with “investments” in those ties, will be less likely to risk those
ties and those investments by offending” (Kennedy, 2009: 32).
The “Cure Violence” program in Chicago, previously known as
CeaseFire Chicago, enacted similar strategies and had similar success,
reducing gun violence by 40–70% in all of the areas in which the program
operated (Hartnett et al., 2008). “Cure Violence” was built on the
assumption that violence spreads like an infectious disease, and so violence
must be stopped at the source of the outbreak. In our terms, violence is
embedded in metarelational models where any single act of violence can
lead to violence being morally required in the connecting relations. “Cure
Violence” employs “interrupters” to reach out and stop potential
perpetrators from engaging in violence, especially when someone is
considering retaliation in response to an attack on their loved ones. The
documentary The Interrupters (James, 2011) depicts this process, as in this
exchange between a community member referred to as Flammo and the
interrupter Cobe.

FLAMMO: Fuck a problem. Fuck a solution. You ain’t just crossed me, you
cross my fuckin’ mama. For my mama nigger I come in your crib and
kill every motherfuckin’ body.
COBE: Two of your brothers gone. If you be gone that ain’t gonna do nothin’
but hurt your mama.

Oftentimes, the interrupters use the potential perpetrators’ relationships as a

starting point for engaging in discussions about non-violence, such as when
the interrupter Tio is talking to two brothers, Kenneth and Bud, who are
affiliated with rival gangs.
TIO: I ain’t putting you on the spot, but if they came at your brother, would
you stop them?
KENNETH: Yeah.
TIO: You would. Okay. (To Bud) The clique you in, if they came at your
brother, would you stop them?
BUD: Of course.

Crucially, the interrupters must be respected members of the community,

which in these communities often means being a former gang member
themselves.

TIO: Most of the violence interrupters come from the hierarchy in some of
these gangs. Because can’t no anybody come in and tell a guy to put
his gun down.

When potential perpetrators respect and are socially connected to the person
telling them to refrain from violence, and when interrupters convey to the
potential perpetrator that violence is not the answer and that it will carry
immense consequences for all of their relationships and the relationships of
all of their loved ones, perpetrators do restrain themselves from killing. In
our terms, interrupters make clear to potential perpetrators the
metarelationships within which their actions are embedded, thus convincing
them that violence is not the optimal way to regulate their relationships.

COBE: But shit you look like you doin’ great.

FLAMMO: Tryin’ to do stuff positive and seein’ how it workin’. And I ain’t
been to jail, I ain’t been arguin’ and fightin’. I ain’t been havin’ to
shoot nobody.
COBE: Man I just so happy for you. I promise you boy, I’m so happy for you
man.
FLAMMO: I hope you do feel good about yourself. Cuz, to keep it real with
you man, I had like three, four people lined up. And I was really
plottin’ on how to get them. But you was just in my ear, you know
what I’m sayin’?
While the deterrence strategies used by these programs are designed
specifically to target criminal violence committed by young men in gangs
or networks, many of the basic principles of their interventions can be
generalized to point to ways of reducing other kinds of culturally condoned
violence. Retheorized and expanded in terms of virtuous violence theory,
de-emphasizing the forms of deterrence whose relevance is limited to
crime, and with a few additions, steps to reduce any kind of violence might
consist of:

1. Generate precedents, prototypes, and precepts for non-violent

relationship regulation.
2. Generate precedents, prototypes, and precepts that prohibit violent
relationship regulation.
3. Generate metarelational models that make important and desirable
social relationships follow from and contingent on non-violent
relationship regulation. Thus, make peaceful relationship regulation
reliably foster other good relationships.
4. Conversely, make violent regulation of any relationship
irreconcilable with positive relationships with the perpetrator of
violence. Publicly demonstrate to perpetrators that their violence
hurts good people whom they should care about, and whom the
people they care about care about. Shame, shun, and ostracize those
who are violent to anyone.
5. Make these preos and metarelational models definite and clear, so
there is no latitude or ambiguity about the unacceptability of
violent relationship regulation.
6. Develop near-unanimous consensus among the primary groups,
reference groups, and respected leaders of potential perpetrators,
ensuring that nearly everyone adopts the peaceful preos and the
metarelational models that ensure them.
7. Ensure that these preos and metarelational models are universal
common knowledge: everyone knows them, everyone knows that
everyone else knows them, and everyone knows that everyone else
knows that everyone else knows them.

To enact these prescriptions will always be a challenge, but they can be

enacted, and often have been. For, ultimately, these steps characterize what
cultural change consists of: consensual transformation of preos and
metarelational models.
If we fail to take these steps – if we fail to change the cultures of violence
– people will continue to hurt and kill each other to regulate their
relationships. Taking these steps to change our cultures is the only way to
reduce morally motivated violence. We can do it and we must. People hurt
and kill because they feel that they should; if their own primary reference
groups make them feel they shouldn’t be violent, they won’t be. If violence
is immoral, people generally won’t do it.

We are not moral philosophers, and as scientists we are skeptical about

whether any objective foundation can be established for prescriptive ethics.
We doubt that moral prescriptions can ever be logically derived from
empirical facts or analytic principles. Nevertheless, as humans, we have to
make moral choices and judgments. Even though we cannot ground our
actions in purely logical reasoning from irrefutably true premises, the
foundation for our choices and judgments ought to be as coherently
articulated as possible, so as to guide us as clearly as possible in difficult
circumstances. We all want to live in a world where we don’t have to hurt
others, we don’t have to fear being hurt, and we don’t get hurt. To do so, we
must cultivate a morality of non-violence. Violence is not the only way to
constitute social relationships, it’s not the predominant way to constitute
relationships, and it’s not necessary for constituting good relationships. We
can motivate ourselves to constitute our relationships gently. That is what
we must do.
Morality is culturally informed relationship regulation, so just what is
moral depends on the cultural preos for the relationships we form. And we
are perfectly capable of forming tolerant, forgiving, caring, compassionate
relationships – they are just as natural, indeed, evidently more natural, than
violent relationships. The huge preponderance of relationship regulation is
non-violent: we all regulate all sorts of relationships day after day without
any violence. And all of the constitutive phases of all sorts of relationships
that in earlier millennia, previous centuries, and past decades most people
often regulated violently, nearly everyone now regulates peacefully (Pinker,
2011). So violence is not necessary to regulate relationships.
 There is a clear and simple implication of the thesis that most violence is
morally motivated to regulate relationships in accord with cultural
implementations of the four fundamental RMs: to reduce violence we must
make it immoral. And we can make violence immoral. People have many
competing moral motives; our disposition to violently constitute our
relationships is only one among many, many dispositions, all just as natural
as our disposition to violence. We can cultivate, combine, and call upon
these non-violent moral dispositions to block the disposition to violence. If
it is common knowledge that everyone unequivocally condemns violence,
and there are clear and respectable cultural guidelines for regulating
relationships non-violently, people will regulate their relationships non-
violently. Preos in some cultures at some points in history guide people to
violently perform some of the constitutive phases of some relationships. But
other cultural preos guide people to perform those same constitutive phases
in other, non-violent ways – and these preos are progressively replacing the
preos that orient people to regulate their relationships violently (Pinker,
2011). The same moral motives to regulate relationships may generate
violent or non-violent relationship regulation, depending on the culture. So
it’s the culture we must change
 24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal,
psychological, and research implications

Evolution
Virtuous violence theory is an explanation for human violence, but naturally
one would like to know whether it is “natural” for violence to be morally
motivated. Has Homo sapiens been morally violent since the species
emerged? Do other primates shape their social relationships violently? How
early in life do moral motives for violence emerge?
In fact, Homo sapiens is not the only species that uses violence to
constitute social relationships. In non-human animals, violence is not
simply a way of gaining access to resources: it is about regulating
relationships. And in certain circumstances, it may be evolutionarily
adaptive to violently regulate social relationships. As de Waal (1992: 43)
points out, “aggressive behavior is not by definition antisocial or
maladaptive.” As in humans, much of the aggression observed in non-
human primates and other mammals enforces social coordination and
indirectly promotes cohesion, or organizes dominance relations that are
adaptively beneficial for all participants. For example, in captive
chimpanzees and other primates, reconciliation after conflict results in
increased proximity after fights, compared to other times. De Waal (1992:
45) also observed that in captive chimpanzees, stinginess in food sharing is
“sanctioned” by aggression. In cercopithecine monkeys (vervets, baboons,
etc.), “older relatives (e.g., mothers) use aggressive behavior to punish and
inhibit ‘unacceptable’ behavior patterns in young monkeys” (p. 46). De
Waal interprets this aggression as “teaching” and “active socialization”
(p. 49). Although one might argue that he uses these terms in an overly
broad and anthropomorphic sense, the violence he describes and analyzes is
certainly constitutive of relationships, and evidently intended to do so.
As in humans, non-human relationship-constitutive violence is often
organized by metarelational models. There is ample evidence in non-human
primates and many other animals of male violence and threat of violence to
keep their mates from consorting or mating with other males. Moreover, in
many primate species and a number of other mammals and birds, a third
party may intervene in ways that tend to halt conflicts between two animals,
either by threatening or attacking one or both combatants or by making
affiliative gestures toward either or both (e.g., Petit and Thierry, 1994; see
Fiske, 2011). For example, silverback gorillas frequently intervene in
conflicts between females and in conflicts involving immature members of
their troop, usually supporting the younger of the immature opponents
(Boehm, 1999: 155; Robbins, 2007). Social mammals are often organized
into matrilines or coalitions in which violence by a member of one group
against a member of a second group evokes “retaliatory” violence by
another member of the second group against any member of the first group.
Captive juvenile rooks (Corvus frugilegus, in the crow family) form
partnerships both across and within sex. Compared with control periods,
after a fight between two birds that belong to different partnerships, the
victim’s partner is more likely to attack the aggressor, the victim is more
likely to attack the aggressor’s partner, and the victim’s partner is more
likely to attack the aggressor’s partner (Emery et al., 2007). Similarly, in
baboons, rhesus macaques, Japanese macaques, vervet monkeys, and
spotted hyenas, when animals from different matrilineal kin groups fight,
members of the matrilines who were not involved in the original conflict
are more likely to attack members of the other matriline in the ensuing
hours (Cheney and Seyfarth, 1992, 2007: 96–103; Engh et al., 2005). This
tit-for-tat retaliation regulates the social relationships between groups.
It appears that even human babies are naturally predisposed toward
virtuous violence before they have had much, if any, opportunities for
relevant social learning. In a series of studies, Hamlin and colleagues
(Hamlin et al., 2007, 2011) found that infants as young as 3 months
preferred “helper” blocks that aid a “struggling” block up an incline,
compared to “hinderer” blocks that push the struggling block down. Hamlin
also found that infants as young as 8 months preferred a puppet who helped
a previously helpful puppet to one who hindered a previously helpful
puppet. Critically for virtuous violence theory, Hamlin found that infants
preferred a puppet that “punished” a previously antisocial puppet to a
puppet that helped a previously antisocial puppet (Hamlin et al., 2011). In
other words, infants are predisposed toward what appears to be moralistic
third-party punishment. These findings indicate that young infants do not
have a simple aversion to harmful behavior that blocks another’s intentions,
but actually think through metarelational moralistic models that motivate
their affiliative choices.

Philosophy
Our objective in this book is primarily descriptive and explanatory, not
prescriptive. When we write that violence is morally motivated, we are not
justifying violence; we are simply describing the motives, emotions, and
judgments of perpetrators. As we stated in the previous chapter, a natural
disposition to constitute social relationships violently does not legitimate
doing so. Ubiquity is not license. The fact that violence is widely used to
constitute relationships, and the fact that human perpetrators feel and judge
that their violence is moral, does not imply that everyone must make the
same judgment. To infer ought from is would be to commit the naturalistic
fallacy (Moore, 1903). The validity of the description of the perpetrator’s
state of mind and the cultural morality in which it is embedded does not
imply the prescription that anyone else is ethically required to make the
same judgment, or feel the same way about the violence.
But our sense of right and wrong has to come from somewhere. When the
scientist claims that in spite of a natural predisposition toward violence we
should continue to work toward non-violence, the scientist is ignoring the
fact that her own belief in non-violence is itself based in natural
predispositions instantiated in the particular cultural conditions to which the
scientist is attuned. The scientist is implicitly stating that we as a society
have determined what is morally right and wrong without reflecting on why
her particular society has deemed some actions right and other actions
wrong.
Ethical naturalism refers to the position that any prescriptive ethics must
be based on the needs, desires, and goods that people are naturally
predisposed toward. From this perspective, prescriptive ethics should be
geared toward facilitating human welfare, or human flourishing, by
prescribing how best to achieve the basic goods that people are naturally
predisposed toward. Ethical naturalism denies the validity of any
prescriptive ethics based either on supernatural beliefs or on “moral realist”
approaches that rely on rules of logic independent of human experience,
such as Kant’s categorical imperative (1989/1785). Regarding deontic
moral prescriptions based on pure logic, Flanagan et al. (2008) write,
“[S]uch theories affirm a metaphysical thesis which naturalists deny –
namely, the existence of irreducible and non-natural moral facts or
properties” (p. 5). For ethical naturalists, empirical science plays a crucial
role in any prescriptive ethics because it has the power to identify the basic
human goods that people are naturally predisposed toward, as well as the
conditions that support those goods. As Flanagan et al. (pp. 15–16) put it,
“the ends of creatures constrain what is good for them,” “morality cannot
seek to instantiate behavior that no human beings have a propensity to
seek,” and “there are a limited number of goods that human beings seek
given their nature and potentialities.”
We agree wholeheartedly with the naturalist approach, and in this book
and elsewhere (Rai and Fiske, 2011, 2012), we have argued that among the
goods essential to human flourishing are in fact social-relational goods
potentiated and constrained by the four RMs. At the same time, we believe
that the insight that violence is morally motivated to regulate relationships
according to the four RMs raises a difficult set of challenges for ethical
naturalism. First, there are multiple ways to achieve what people perceive
as moral goods, some of which include violence. In this sense, violence
may be gratifying, and under certain conditions can contribute to human
welfare. As we have seen throughout the book, initiatory violence creates
long-lasting CS relationships that bind groups together; some violence is
intrinsic to the conduct of certain relationships, without which they would
cease to exist; protective and redressive violence keeps people from
violating their relational obligations; and so forth. Second – and this
problem is not unique to violence – some social-relational goods,
particularly those related to AR, are at complete odds with the prescriptive
ethics favored by Western liberals, which is strictly antiauthority and favors
equality of all. How do we satisfy needs and desires to achieve status and to
rank ourselves within a hierarchy, to follow inspiring leaders, and to wisely
guide and protect loyal followers if we are also motivated by an EM ethics
to make everyone equal? Finally, many of the problems related to violence
are exacerbated at the level of groups, as they fight to satisfy AR hierarchy
and CS unity motives. If these are the goods that humans seek, what does a
naturalized ethics prescribe?
 We don’t know the answers to these questions. We suspect that part of the
answer will require acknowledging that some sorts of AR are actually
conducive to human welfare when well implemented: parents, teachers,
officers, chairpersons, CEOs, mayors, and presidents can lead in good ways
that benefit their followers, so it can often be good to follow legitimate
leaders loyally. Another part of the answer will require faith that if and
when people can constitute the social relationships that make life
meaningful through non-violent means, they will.
Knowing that our violence is naturally predisposed, and knowing that in
many times and cultures, violence has been widely condoned, should make
us keenly aware that any current, culturally particular beliefs in the moral
superiority of non-violence are empirically tied to the socioecological
conditions within which non-violence is adaptive. Prescriptively, in order to
maintain and enhance moral motives for non-violence, we must
descriptively understand the socioecological conditions that give rise to it,
including the shifts from primarily CS and AR relationships to EM and MP
relationships, the greater relational mobility to leave unsatisfying
relationships, and the embedding of social relationships in the cross-cutting
ties of metarelationships.
Some people may see the use of empirical science as a means to inform
our prescriptive ethics as inherently wrong. They may object to the entire
enterprise. Indeed, we have seen many instances in recent years and
throughout modern history of scientists attempting to justify the superiority
of their own particular Western, liberal, secular beliefs by invoking
scientific findings that either presuppose the goods that people should
pursue or that identify universal human goods on the basis of studies of
their own particular culture. But it is precisely because science has failed on
so many occasions that we cannot give up on its potential to guide
prescriptive ethics. Everyone is using some framework to figure out how to
lead a good life – the issue is simply whether they’ve reflected deeply about
the framework they’re using or not, and whether they are aware of the
cultural and historical dimensions of moral motives. In other words,
anyone’s intuitive sense of right and wrong must come from somewhere.
We need cultural psychology and psychological anthropology to discover
where our moral intuitions come from, to identify the social-relational
goods that we are trying to satisfy, and to delineate the conditions that will
be most conducive to achieving those goods and facilitating human welfare
through non-violent means. No doubt we will make mistakes in this
process, but that’s true of any theory that people use to guide their actions,
implicit or explicit, scientific or non-scientific.

Law
The quandary comes down to this. We are morally opposed to violence, yet
we know that perpetrators of violence are morally motivated – and that
perhaps we ourselves could experience or even act on similar motives under
certain circumstances. Perhaps we, or you, have already committed morally
motivated violence on the football field, or when punishing a child, or in a
fight, or in a jury vote to condemn a defendant. So we are facing two
conflicting moral frameworks. The perpetrator (perhaps ourselves) says her
violence is right, good, and obligatory, while another person (perhaps
ourselves, as perpetrator at a later point in time, as observer, or as victim)
says that the violence is wrong – that all violence is wrong.
So while we are not legal scholars, let alone jurists, it seems to us that
virtuous violence theory has potentially far-reaching implications for the
criminal justice system, and for law itself. First, virtuous violence theory
suggests that the deterrent effect of criminal punishment will be limited if
perpetrators feel and judge that they are morally obligated to do violence,
and that merely pragmatic consequences of the action are less important.
Penal “rehabilitation” will be most effective if it changes perpetrators’
moral frameworks such that they no longer feel or believe that their
violence is right. Virtuous violence theory also appears to be relevant to
sentencing for crimes. If sincere expression of remorse is to be a mitigating
factor in sentencing, does this imply that sincerely moral motivations for
violence must be punished more severely than amoral motives, because the
sincerely moral perpetrator cannot honestly feel remorse unless he has
changed his moral framework? One cannot expect the perpetrator to feel
entirely remorseful if she did what she felt was right, and still thinks so.
Even more fundamentally, virtuous violence theory bears on the
adjudication of legal responsibility. Under the M’Naghten rules, a defendant
cannot be judged guilty if he “did not know he was doing what was wrong”
due to “a disease of the mind.” There is considerable ambiguity as to
whether the defendant must know that what he was doing was legally
wrong or morally wrong, but US courts have tended to interpret this
insanity defense in terms of knowledge that an act was morally wrong
(Packer, 2009: 36–8). Among US jurisdictions that apply the moral
standard, there are differences in whether the defendant must have the
capacity to know that her act is “objectively” wrong by “societal”
standards, or whether a defendant should be allowed to plead that, while she
recognized that her act was wrong by societal standards, it was nevertheless
morally justified by her own “subjective” standards (Packer, 2009: 38–42).
From the evidence we have collected, it certainly appears that most
perpetrators feel that their acts are morally justified with reference to the
moral code they share with their reference group, local community, and
subculture. Under another standard that prevails in many jurisdictions, the
American Law Institute (ALI)’s Model Penal Code (1985, Sec. 4.01), “a
person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct
as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity to either
appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the
requirements of the law” (this is sometimes known as the Brawner rule). Of
course, a moral framework that motivates and legitimates violence is not a
disease of the mind or a mental defect, but the M’Naghten and Brawner
rules seem to implicitly assume that there is no other possible cause for a
defendant not knowing that he was doing what was wrong. The American
Law Institute’s Model Penal Code also allows for reduction of a murder
charge to manslaughter if the homicide was

Committed under the influence of extreme mental or emotional

disturbance for which there is a reasonable explanation or excuse. The
reasonableness of such explanation or excuse shall be determined from
the viewpoint of a person in the actor’s situation under the
circumstances as he believes them to be.
(ALI, 1985, Section 210.3[1][b], quoted by Packer, 2009: 19–20)

The evidence we have collected in this book suggests that from perfectly
sane perpetrators’ viewpoints many homicides – and other forms of
violence – are morally “reasonable” within their reference group and local
community under the culturally constituted circumstances perceived by the
perpetrator.
These rules all function within the broader scope of the Anglo-Saxon
doctrine of mens rea, which boils down to the concept that a person’s guilt
or liability for a penal sentence depends not only on what they did but also
on the mental state that led to the action. The concept of mens rea grew out
of a judgment that people are guilty only if they intended to do wrong:

The first and historically original concept embodied an explicitly

normative requirement that the offender not only intentionally commit
a criminal act, but also do so out of evil motivation. The second and
currently more predominant tradition adopts an essentially
nonnormative approach that finds sufficient ground for liability in the
presence of particular states of mind without evaluating or even
appealing to the motives underlying the offender’s actions. As will be
shown, however, the “evil motive” tradition has not been totally
abandoned.
(Gardner, 1993: 640)

In practice, contemporary jurisprudence still makes guilt highly contingent

on the perpetrator’s having “the evil motive essential for moral blame”; for
most crimes, the defendant is typically guilty only if her intent is wicked –
that is, if she meant to be immoral (Gardner, 1993: 693; see also 695–750).
Mens rea doctrines have generally been concerned with the intent to
cause the effects (e.g., death), or at least the intent to do harm of some sort,
or reckless disregard of the risk that doing the intended harm could have
further harmful consequences. Jurists and legal scholars have usually taken
for granted that everyone knows that it is wrong to do harm. In the rare
instances where legal theorists have recognized that defendants might think
it right to do harm, the theorists have argued that it is impractical to allow
exculpation based on sincerely virtuous motivations embedded in moral
systems other than the one that forms the basis for the state’s criminal code
(Gardner, 1993: 687). “Furthermore, if a subjective criterion of malice were
adopted, it would seriously challenge the authority of criminal law by
allowing [each individual] to set his own standards rather than conform to a
general code of conduct applicable to all citizens” (p. 715).
 Thus, the fundamental Anglo-Saxon legal idea represented by the term
mens rea seems to be that a person is guilty and should be punished if he
thought “this is wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway,” and then acted to
cause harm. But as we’ve seen, this is not at all what’s going through the
minds of most people doing violence. So this leaves us asking both the
moral and the legal questions, “if a mentally healthy person honestly and
firmly believed that it was right to do violence – indeed, that he had a moral
obligation to be violent in this way – should that be exculpatory?” More
fundamentally, what is the moral meaning or legal purpose of punishing
people for doing what they sincerely believed they ought to do? Does it
make sense to punish people for acting on their moral convictions? The
answer, we suppose, depends on the purpose of punishment (is the aim
deterrence or retribution?), whether one believes that the perpetrator is
embedded within a metarelational model of the state and therefore must
always act within that web of interrelations, and perhaps, ultimately, on
whether punishment ever makes sense.

Psychology
In many cultures, parents and schoolteachers hit or whip children for
misconduct, and everyone feels sure that children who misbehave should be
beaten. Is the fear, the experience, or the memory of being legitimately and
properly beaten traumatic? That is, if the victim knows that the perpetrator
was truly morally motivated, is violence traumatic? In cultures where
parents are supposed to beat misbehaving children, parents have regularly
beaten billions of children – without apparently traumatic effects. Does this
suggest that the perception that the violence was evil is necessary for the
fear, experience, or memory of it to be traumatic? (Of course, it’s
conceivable that many or all children who’ve been beaten actually have
suffered traumatic effects that have simply been taken for granted as normal
aspects of personality in these many cultures.)
What are the short- and long-term effects on the victim if the victim
understands that the perpetrator was morally motivated, but the victim
herself feels that the harm was undeserved, and indeed wrong?
What about the effects on the perpetrators of their own moral motives and
judgments? Is it more traumatic for the perpetrator if she kills or injures
someone accidentally than if she does it with moral motives? What are the
effects on the perpetrator of doing violence that she perceived as immoral,
but was selfishly motivated to do? Or suppose a father beats his son because
everyone in the community, including his wife, the boy’s mother, is certain
that beatings are essential to raising a God-fearing, conscientious child –
but the father personally thinks it’s wrong. Is it traumatic for the father to do
violence that he felt was wrong, but was socially pressured to do, and was
well regarded for doing? If men and women believe that a husband is
entitled to have sex with his wife whenever he wishes, and may justifiably
use force against her if she resists – and if they both know that men often do
use force to overcome their wives’ resistance – is the violence less
traumatic in its immediate and long-term effects than a husband’s rape of
his wife in a culture in which such force is understood to be immoral and
illegal? That is, is it the violence as such that is psychologically harmful, or
does the harm largely or partly result from experiencing the violence as
transgressive?
There is a temporal dimension to these questions, because what
perpetrators or victims perceive to be moral at the moment they may later
perceive to be wrong. Does the retrospective judgment or feeling that it was
evil make the pain or suffering more traumatic, even if at the time it felt
right? If a victim of incest or child sexual abuse didn’t know at the time that
it was wrong, but later discovers that it was, does this subsequent discovery
cause additional psychological harm? Conversely, what if a person
perpetrates or experiences what he perceives at the time to be selfish,
immorally motivated violence but later comes to unequivocally believe that
it was, after all, in fact, fully justified and morally necessary? Does that
make the experience less traumatic later? People may attempt to alleviate
their guilt through self-punishment (Nielssen and Zeelenberg, 2009). So
perhaps if victims feel that they deserve punishment for a transgression they
committed, they might feel more pain, compared to the pain from harm they
experience as unjustified.
Finally, there is some suggestion that when the violence is perceived to
be morally wrong, the perpetrator’s apology, punishment, or payment of
compensation is a relief to both the perpetrator and the victim. How do such
redressive, rectificatory actions assuage the trauma? Do truth and
reconciliation reduce the traumatic effects of violence experienced as evil?
How does their effect on trauma compare with the effects of punishment, or
compensation?
Virtually all research on trauma conflates pain with evil, but if we
appreciate that inflicting pain may be morally motivated and may be
experienced as morally necessary, we have to ask whether that which is
traumatic is the fear or memory of pain as such, or is it the experience of
suffering evil that traumatizes?

Research
To understand Homo sapiens, it is crucial to begin with a comprehensive,
thorough knowledge of the natural history of the beast in its natural setting.
Until we know how humans act and interact in the wild (that is, outside the
scientific laboratory) across the full spectrum of cultures and into the depths
of time, we cannot understand their action or interaction. We can’t
understand people by only studying what they are doing in just one setting
at one time in one culture – with those blinders narrowly focusing our
investigation, we can’t understand what they are doing even in that one
setting, time, and culture. We need to appreciate the full range of human
behavior in order to understand behavior in any specific instance, whether
that instance is a particular natural practice or a response to a contemporary
psychological laboratory experiment.
Most previous theories of violence and most previous descriptive theories
of morality have been derived from the explicit or implicit folk theories of
the theorist’s specific culture, together with the theorist’s experiences in his
or her own culture. Most theorists have had very limited knowledge and
less understanding of other cultures, and none have systematically explored
their ideas across the wide range of cultures and times. Hence, in this book
we have made every effort to collect observations from around the world
and across history. Of course, our search was far from exhaustive, and
existing sources are not in any way statistically representative of the
species. Nor could we randomly sample existing sources, given that we
needed detailed, deep ethnographic accounts of perpetrators’ subjective
perspective. But in a wide selection of research on a great variety of violent
practices in diverse cultures, we found that perpetrators’ motives are so
consistently moral that we are confident about our conclusions. Since these
conclusions contrast rather dramatically with the conclusions of most other
theories of violence (except those of Pinker and Black), what are the
implications of our findings for methodology in the social and behavioral
sciences? We believe that, instead of deductively formulating theory
starting with philosophical conceptions or armchair speculation,
psychologists and other social scientists would often do better to begin by
observing natural behavior, making comparisons of human actions across
the widest spectrum of settings and cultures, and from these wide-ranging
collections of real-world behavior, searching for patterns and deriving
theory inductively.
Sometimes Western philosophy – in this case, Western folk and moral
philosophy – is a poor guide to psychology, human or even merely Western.
Armchair reasoning based on folk theory and intuition, explored though
experimentation that isolates responses to artificially constructed stimuli,
often leads away from the real world. This is especially true when the
researchers are contemporary Westerners, because in most respects
contemporary Western society and culture are unlike most other
contemporary or historical human societies or cultures, and hence are poor
foundations for understanding the sociality of Homo sapiens (Human
Relations Area Files; Murdock, 1967). Likewise, the psychology of
Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic (WEIRD) populations is
quite atypical of the psychology of the human species (Henrich et al.,
2010). Even if our goal were so limited that we only wished to understand
WEIRD humans, we must situate their psychology and sociality in the
entire spectrum of humanity, because we need to understand why their
psychology and sociality are so weird.
When we first started this project, I (TsR) was hesitant because although I
felt the thesis had merit, I could not imagine how to investigate it
experimentally. Only now, after deeply thinking through these issues and
consulting the ethnographic and historical evidence, have the experimental
directions become clear, and in fact, obvious. For the experimental
psychologist interested in running laboratory studies of violence, there are
several empirical research avenues that follow from the ethnological finding
that across cultures and throughout history, most violence is morally
motivated.
1. At the most basic level, any controlled studies of first-person
accounts of violence among either criminal or civilian populations
should reveal the presence of moral motives, and these motives will
be more prevalent than evidence of self-regulatory failure,
instrumental gain, moral disengagement, dehumanization, or
sadistic pleasure and psychopathy.
2. Meanwhile, if some violence is seen as obligatory, then doing
violence requires increased self-regulatory control. A parent who
hates to see his child in pain but knows that a good spanking is
what the child needs will be less likely to be able to carry out the
punishment when he is tired or his self-control is otherwise
diminished. We predict that support for some forms of costly
punishment, the kind of punishment that the actor believes is right
and obligatory but that requires self-control, will be reduced under
conditions of depletion, challenging the view that self-regulatory
failure always increases the likelihood of violence.
3. Regarding rationalist approaches to violence, we have already
discussed Jeremy Ginges and Scott Atran’s work (Ginges et al.,
2007; Ginges and Atran, 2009, 2011) demonstrating that the
addition of material incentives for peace can actually increase
support for violence. We propose that in the same way that the
addition of material incentives often weakens intrinsic motivation
(Deci et al., 1999; Heyman and Ariely, 2004), providing material
incentives to engage in violent action may lead participants to
consider the violence in instrumental rather than moral terms.
Hence, adding material incentives when none are currently present
may reduce the propensity to engage in violence if the material
benefits are small and the potential costs are great.
4. To the extent that dehumanization does facilitate violence, we
should expect selective dehumanization of victims to occur,
depending on the moral motives of the perpetrators, such that
different kinds of violence may be tied to different kinds of
dehumanization when it actually occurs. Thus, there is no reason to
expect victims of retributive punishment or revenge to be deprived
of mental capacities related to feeling pain, as this is necessary for
the violence to have its intended effect, nor should the victim be
deprived of capacities for reason or intention, as they are what
 make the victim deserving of punishment. Victims may, however,
be deprived of certain moral emotions, such as compassion or
empathy. But, of course, victims of initiation rites such as genital
excision or violent hazing are often beloved members of the
community, so they should be seen as capable of having moral
emotions, and to the extent that their stoic endurance of pain is a
crucial aspect of the initiation, they should be seen as capable of
feeling pain as well. Only under conditions where perpetrators
harm someone they are not morally motivated to harm (i.e., the
motivation is non-moral) or where they are a passive third-party to
harm, do we expect perpetrators to fail to perceive their victims as
experiencing pain.
5. If violence is morally motivated to satisfy relational aims, then
support for specific forms of violence will depend on the RM and
corresponding moral motive people are using. For example,
collateral damage, wherein some innocents are sacrificed in order
to bring about a greater benefit, should be seen as more morally
right when people are relating according to MP, but should be seen
as more morally reprehensible when people are relating according
to CS, wherein we are all in this together and anyone’s pain is my
own pain. Similarly, when relating according to EM, people will
feel that a person is required by equality to respond to violence
with the same violence in return, but when relating according to
AR, people will feel that violence may be committed only by
superiors toward subordinates, not vice versa.

These are just a few of the research directions that emerge only after careful
consideration of the ethnological literature on motives for violence. We
have also considered the possibility that propensities to engage in violence
may depend on the relational mobility and metarelational ties of the
partners, and in the previous section we asked whether it might be possible
that pain that the victim perceives as moral, legitimate, and deserved may
actually feel different than pain the victim perceives as immorally suffered.
Let’s find out.
 The dénouement

What do we mean by “most” violence?

Reviewing a multitude of literatures, we’ve been impressed by how much
violence seems to be morally motivated. But given the available data, there
is no way to quantify the proportion of violence, or the proportion of
specific forms of violence, such as homicide, that are morally motivated to
regulate social relationships. Some violence is just coercive force
instrumentally used in pursuit of non-social aims. As we’ve discussed,
psychopaths commit a significant proportion of the violence that is not
morally motivated, though there are few data to indicate what that
proportion is. However, we can greatly advance our understanding of
violence without waiting for an answer. Newton didn’t show what
proportion of the motion of objects his laws explained, and a general
answer isn’t very meaningful, in any case. To describe and predict the
motion of objects, we know that friction has to be taken into account in
certain cases, but in many cases can be ignored for all practical purposes.
Newton’s laws are poor descriptions of motions at relativistic velocities or
on quantum dimensions, they make the false, simplifying assumption that
objects are points in space, and they can’t provide exact analytic solutions
for the motions of three or more bodies. Still, Newton’s three laws of
motion are extremely general and useful, elegantly describing a huge range
of dynamic systems. Likewise, virtuous violence theory makes simplifying
assumptions and may not explain violence under the most extreme
conditions. But we believe that our theory parsimoniously and clearly
describes most violence under most ordinary conditions in all cultures
throughout history and prehistory. There are other, non-moral motives for
violence. But until we account for the major mechanism, we can’t identify
the minor ones, can’t understand the conditions under which each source
operates, and can’t figure out how different sources of violence interact.
Until Darwin described natural selection, it wasn’t possible to identify or
delineate sexual selection, genetic drift, population-isolation factors, and
other mechanisms of evolution. Likewise, without acknowledging that the
prevalent forms of violence are morally motivated and culturally
legitimated, we will never adequately understand differences in propensities
for violence across cultures, among individuals, across the life span, or
between genders.
Marx didn’t tell us how much of social organization was explained by the
organization of the economy, Durkheim didn’t address the question of what
proportion of social solidarity results from religious ritual, and Weber didn’t
say to what extent power relies on legitimation. We still don’t know. But
when we want to understand social systems, solidarity, or power, we know
where to focus our attention – we know where to start looking. When we
see violence, we should start by asking whether and how it was morally
motivated, which social relationships it might have been aimed to regulate,
and how it regulated them.

The need for general explanations

Our theory is simple, but we ourselves are not so simple-minded as to
believe that our theory fully accounts for the violence of any particular act,
any historical event, any individual, or any cultural practice or social
institution. No theory can reveal with any certainty the causes of any
particular event – that’s not what theory does. In the real world, there are
always myriad, complexly interacting influences on anything that happens.
Particular cases are always mysterious and unpredictable, and ultimately
not fully explicable. But it is not the aim or task of science to explain
individual cases. The goal is to explain what would otherwise be disparate,
perplexing particularities by providing elegantly parsimonious accounts for
the aggregate patterns and consistencies that obtain in a population of
observations. To theorize is to discern and describe the patterns, to
characterize the regularities of an infinitely complex world as precisely,
concisely, and validly as possible. Science is simplification.
Many anthropologists and humanists are skeptical about general accounts
and instead aim to understand particular persons, particular events, or
particular cultural practices in particular communities at particular points in
history. Many contemporary anthropologists believe that actions are so
embedded in unique contextual webs of context that no general theories are
possible or plausible. From this perspective, the best account of an event or
practice is an elaboration of the complexity of its roots and the subtle
nuances of the interactions among the contributing factors. Yet a crucial
aspect of describing human action, let alone understanding it, is providing
an account of the motivational, emotional, normative, phenomenological,
and intentional bases for action. Understanding of this sort has to build on
some foundation and to frame and explain action with respect to some
framework: in this case, foundations and framework comprising axioms
about what moves people, what constrains people, what sorts of intentions
people have. Thus, to make sense, even the most particularistic accounts
must be based on assumptions regarding the bases of human action. In
practice, these assumptions are quite often implicit, unexamined
assumptions unreflectively borrowed from the interpreter’s culturally and
historically shaped folk theories. We suggest that accounts of particular
violent persons, events, and cultural practices will be more valid, more
profound, more insightful, and more illuminating if the accounts are based
on the realization that most violence is morally motivated to regulate social
relationships.
In this book we aimed to show that moral motives to regulate social
relationships are the major factor generating most violence, but not the only
factor, and not all violence; moral motivation is not a completely exhaustive
explanation for any violence. But it’s usually fundamental. And, of course,
it is not the “truth” about violence in any final or ultimate sense. It is just
the best we can do at this point in the history of science; it will surely be
superseded sooner or later by theories with greater scope, greater precision,
or more elegant parsimony.
We acknowledge all of the complexities and uncertainties, and we look
forward to their resolution. But a good theory should be elegantly
parsimonious, capturing the most important patterns in the simplest possible
characterization. And a good book should not aim to emulate an
encyclopedia. So virtuous violence theory intentionally ignores the
messiness of violence in order to characterize its principal patterns as
elegantly as possible. The idea that most violence is morally motivated to
regulate crucial relationships is parsimonious and captures the crux of the
matter. That idea provides something else that a theory should provide: new
and fruitful questions to ask. When we encounter violence, we can ask,
 Is it morally motivated?
Which RM is the person constituting?
Which constitutive phases is the violence intended to realize?
What are the metarelationships that facilitate or inhibit the violence?
What led the perpetrator to use violence to regulate the relationship,
rather than alternative means?

Let’s ask these questions and see what we discover.

 References

Abou Zahab, M. (2008). ‘Yeh Matam kayse ruk jae?’ (‘How Could This
Matam Ever Cease?’): Muharram Processions in Pakistani Punjab. In
K. A. Jacobsen, Ed., South Asian Religious Display: Religious
Processions in South Asia and the Diaspora (pp. 104–14). Oxford:
Routledge.
Abu-Lughod, L. (1986). Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin
Society. American University in Cairo Press.
Abusharaf, R. M. (2001). Virtuous Cuts: Female Genital Circumcision in an
African Ontology. Differences, 12: 112–40.
Ahlberg, B. M., Njau, W., Kiiru, K., and Krantz, I. (2000). Gender Masked
or Self-Inflicted Pain: Female Circumcision, Eradication and Persistence
in Central Kenya. African Sociological Review, 4: 35–54.
Alperovitz, G. (1996). The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. New York:
Vintage.
Ambrumova, A. G., and Postovalova, L. I. (2010/1989). The Motives for
Suicide. Russian Social Science Review, 30: 77–89. Trans. M. Vale.
American Law Institute (1985). Model Penal Code and Commentaries
(Official Draft and Revised Comments). Philadelphia: American Law
Institute.
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edn. (DSM-5). Arlington, VA:
American Psychiatric Association.
Amnesty International (2003). Combating Torture – A Manual for Action.
London: Amnesty International Publications.
Amnesty International (2012). Facts and Figures
(http://files.amnesty.org/air12/fnf_air_2012_en.pdf).
Antoun, R. T. (1968). On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages:
A Study in the Accommodation of Traditions. American Anthropologist,
70: 671–97 (see also comments by N. M. Abu-Zahra and Antoun’s reply,
72: 1079–92)
Aquino, K., Reed, A., II, Thau, S., and Freeman, D. (2007). A Grotesque
and Dark Beauty: How Moral Identity and Mechanisms of Moral
Disengagement Influence Cognitive and Emotional Reactions to War.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(3): 385–92.
Arlachi, P. (1983). Mafia, Peasants and Great Estates: Society in
Traditional Calabria, Trans. J. Steinberg. Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, A. MacC. (1950). Trial by Combat Among the Greeks. Greece
and Rome, 19(56): 73–9.
Assadi, S. M., Noroozian, M., Pakravannejad, M., Yahyazadeh, O.,
Aghayan, S., and Shariat, S. V. (2006). Psychiatric Morbidity Among
Sentenced Prisoners: Prevalence Study in Iran. British Journal of
Psychiatry, 188: 159–64.
Atiya, N. (1982). Khul-khaal, Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)
Making of Terrorists. New York: HarperCollins.
Attili, G., and Hinde, R. A. (1986). Categories of Aggression and Their
Motivational Heterogeneity. Ethology and Sociobiology, 7: 17–27.
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo (1961) [c. 397 CE]. The Rule of Saint
Augustine, Trans.J. C. Resch. De Pere, WI: Saint Norbert Abbey.
Austin, J. L. (1956). A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57: 1–30.
Ayers, E. L. (1995). Southern Crossing: A History of the American South,
1877–1906. Oxford University Press.
Baaz, M. E. (2009). Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and
Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC). International Studies
Quarterly, 53: 495–518.
Baker, M. (1985). Cops: Their Lives in Their Own Words. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetuation of
Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3: 193–209.
Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G. V., and Pastorelli, C. (1996).
Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(2), 364–71.
Banks, C. G. (1996). “There Is No Fat in Heaven”: Religious Asceticism
and the Meaning of Anorexia Nervosa. Ethos, 24: 107–35.
Barbier, P. (1996). The World of the Castrati: The History of an
Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon, Trans. M. Crosland. London:
Souvenir Press.
Bargh, J. A., Raymond, P., Pryor, J. B., and Strack, F. (1995). Attractiveness
of the Underling: An Automatic Power → Sex Association and Its
Consequences for Sexual Harassment and Aggression. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 68: 768–81.
Barlett, C. P., and Anderson, C. A. (2012). Direct and Indirect Relations
Between the Big 5 Personality Traits and Aggressive and Violent
Behavior. Personality and Individual Differences, 52: 870–5.
Barrett, H. C., and Behne, T. (2005). Children’s Understanding of Death as
the Cessation of Agency: A Test Using Sleep Versus Death. Cognition,
96: 93–108.
Barth, F. (1965). Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans. London School
of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, No. 19. New York:
Humanities Press; London: Athlone Press.
Bartlett, R. (1986). Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Bastian, B., Denson, T. F., and Haslam, N. (2013). The Roles of
Dehumanization and Moral Outrage in Retributive Justice. PLoS ONE,
8(4): e61842.
Bastian, B., and Haslam, N. (2010). Excluded from Humanity: The
Dehumanizing Effects of Social Ostracism. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 46(1): 107–13.
Bates, D. G., and Rassam, A. (1983). Peoples and Cultures of the Middle
East. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Batey, C. E., Clarke, H. E., Page, R. I., and Price, N. S. (1994). Cultural
Atlas of the Viking World. Abingdon: Andromeda Oxford.
Bauman, Z. (2001). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Baumeister, R. F. (1996). Self-Regulation and Ego Threat: Motivated
Cognition, Self-Deception, and Destruction in Goal Setting. In P. M.
Gollwitzer and J. A. Bargh, Eds., The Psychology of Action: Linking
Cognition and Motivation to Behavior (pp. 27–47). New York: Guilford
Press.
Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence. New
York: Freeman.
Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of
Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High
Self-Esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1): 5–33.
Baumeister, R. F., and Vohs, K. D. (2004). Four Roots of Evil. In A. G.
Miller, Ed., The Social Psychology of Good and Evil (pp. 85–101). New
York: Guilford.
Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach.
Journal of Political Economy, 76: 169–217.
Beevor, A. (2002). Berlin: The Downfall 1945. New York: Penguin.
Bell, K. M., and Orcutt, H. K. (2009). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and
Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence. Journal of the American
Medical Association, 302: 562–4.
Benedict, R. (1922). The Vision in Plains Culture. American Anthropologist
(New Series), 24: 1–23.
Benedict, R. (1932). Configurations of Culture in North America. American
Anthropologist (New Series), 34: 1–27.
Benedict, R. (1959/1934). Patterns of Culture, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA:
Riverside Press.
Benn, J. A. (2007). Burning for the Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese
Buddhism. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism, vol. 19.
Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Examination and
Reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106: 59–73.
Bernstein, R. (2006). The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and
Retaliation in the NHL. Chicago: Triumph.
Bernstein, R. (2008). The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-
at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct. Chicago: Triumph.
Berry, J., and Berry, C. (1999). Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory.
Washington, DC: Howard University Press.
Besse, S. K. (1989). Crimes of Passion: The Campaign Against Wife
Killing in Brazil, 1910–1940. Journal of Social History, 22: 653–66.
Betz, J. (1977). Violence: Garver’s Definition and a Deweyan Correction.
Ethics, 87(4): 339–51.
Bissinger, B. (2011). NFL Playoffs: Why Football Needs Violence. Daily
Beast, January 17. Web, May 6, 2012
(www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/18/nfl-playoffs-buzz-bissinger-
on-why-football-needs-violence.html).
Black, D. (1998). The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, rev. edn. San
Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Black-Michaud, J. (1975). Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and
the Middle East. New York: St. Martin’s Press (Blackwell).
Blight, J. G., and Lang, J. M. (2005). The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life
of Robert S. McNamara. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Bloch, M. H. (1986). From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in
the Circumcision Ritual of Madagascar. Cambridge University Press.
Bloch, M. H. (1998). The Presence of Violence in Religion. In J. Goldstein,
Ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment (pp. 163–
78). New York: Oxford University Press.
Bloch, M., and Parry, J., Eds. (1982). Death and the Regeneration of Life.
Cambridge University Press.
Bloch, R. H. (1977). Medieval French Literature and Law. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Bloomfield, M. W. (1969). Beowulf, Byrhtnoth, and the Judgment of God:
Trial by Combat in Anglo-Saxon England. Speculum, 64: 545–59.
Blow, C. M. (2011). The Brutal Side of Hazing. New York Times, December
9, Comments (www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/opinion/blow-the-brutal-
side-of-hazing.html).
Boas, F., and Codere, F. H. (1966). Kwakiutl Ethnography. University of
Chicago Press.
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian
Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bohannan, P., Ed. (1967a). African Homicide and Suicide. New York:
Atheneum.
Bohannan, P., (1967b). Patterns of Homicide and Suicide. In Bohannan,
African Homicide and Suicide (pp. 230–66).
Bonanno, G. A., and Kaltman, S. (2001). The Varieties of Grief Experience.
Clinical Psychology Review, 21: 705–34.
Bourdieu, P. (1966). The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society. In J. G.
Peristiany, Ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society
(pp. 191–241). University of Chicago Press.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Separation: Anxiety and Anger (Attachment and Loss,
vol. II). New York: Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1989). The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. New
York: Routledge.
Brandt, R. B. (1954). Hopi Ethics. University of Chicago Press.
Brennan, P. A., Mednick, S. A., and Hodgins, S. (2000). Major Mental
Disorders and Criminal Violence in a Danish Birth Cohort. Archives of
General Psychiatry, 57: 494–500.
Brown, P. (1975). Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change.
Daedalus, 104: 133–51.
Brown, P. (1988). The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Brown, W. C. (2011). Violence in Medieval Europe. Harlow: Longman.
Buell, A. C. (1904). History of Andrew Jackson: Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier,
Politician, Soldier, vol I. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Bushman, B. J., and Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened Egotism,
Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Direct and Displaced Aggression: Does
Self-Love or Self-Hate Lead to Violence? Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 75(1): 219–29.
Butler, M. J. (2005). Elephants of a Feather? The Role of ‘Justice’ in
Canadian and American Cold War Military Interventions. Canadian
Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique,
38: 101–27.
Camilleri, J. A. (2012). Evolutionary Psychological Perspectives on Sexual
Offending: From Etiology to Intervention. In T. K. Shackelford and V. A.
Weekes-Shackelford, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary
Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War (pp. 173–96). Oxford
University Press.
Campbell, A. (1982). Female Aggression. In P. Marsh and A. Campbell,
Eds., Aggression and Violence (pp. 137–50). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Campbell, J. K. (1964). Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of
Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. New
 York: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, J. K. (1966). Honour and the Devil. In J. G. Peristiany, Ed.,
Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (pp. 141–70).
University of Chicago Press.
Canaan, T. (1931). Unwritten Laws Affecting the Arab Women of Palestine.
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 11: 172–203.
Canetto, S. S., and Lester, D. (2002). Love and Achievement Motives in
Women’s and Men’s Suicide Notes. Journal of Psychology:
Interdisciplinary and Applied, 136: 573–6.
Cantor, J. (1998). Children’s Attraction to Violent Television Programming.
In J. Goldstein, Ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent
Entertainment (pp. 88–115). New York: Oxford University Press.
Carlsmith, K. M. (2006). The Roles of Retribution and Utility in
Determining Punishment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
42(4): 437–51.
Carlsmith, K. M. (2008). On Justifying Punishment: The Discrepancy
Between Words and Actions. Social Justice Research, 21(2): 119–37.
Carlsmith, K. M., Darley, J. M., and Robinson, P. H. (2002). Why Do We
Punish?: Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(2): 284–98.
Carlsmith, K. M., Monahan, J., and Evans, A. (2007). The Function of
Punishment in the “Civil” Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators.
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 25(4): 437–48.
Carlsmith, K. M., and Sood, A. M. (2009). The Fine Line Between
Interrogation and Retribution. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 45(1): 191–6.
Carmichael, J. T., and Jacobs, D. (2002). Violence by and Against the
Police. In R. G. Burns and C. E. Crawford, Eds., Policing and Violence
(pp. 25–51). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Carroll, J. (2012). The Extremes of Conflict in Literature: Violence,
Homicide, and War. In T. K. Shackelford and V. A. Weekes-Shackelford,
 Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence,
Homicide, and War (pp. 413–34). Oxford University Press.
Castano, E., and Giner-Sorolla, R. (2006). Not Quite Human:
Infrahumanization in Response to Collective Responsibility for
Intergroup Killing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5):
804–18.
Chapleau, K. M., and Oswald, D. L. (2010). Power, Sex, and Rape Myth
Acceptance: Testing Two Models of Rape Proclivity. Journal of Sex
Research, 47: 66–78.
Chelkowski, P. J., Ed. (2010). Eternal Performance: Ta ’ziyeh and Other
Shiite Rituals. London: Seagull.
Cheney, D. L., and Seyfarth, R. M. (1992). How Monkeys See the World:
Inside the Mind of Another Species. University of Chicago Press.
Cheney, D. L., and Seyfarth, R. M. (2007). Baboon Metaphysics: The
Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Chenoweth, E., and Stephan, M. J. (2011). Why Civil Resistance Works: The
Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Chirot, D., and McCauley, R. (2006). Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic
and Prevention of Mass Political Murder. Princeton University Press.
Clarke, J. W. (1998). Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital
Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South.
British Journal of Political Science, 2: 269–89.
Clayton, S., and Opotow, S. (2003). Justice and Identity: Changing
Perspectives on What Is Fair. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
7: 298–310.
Clinton-Sherrod, A. M., and Walters, J. H. (2011). Marital Rape and Sexual
Violation by Intimate Partners. In T. Bryant-Davis, Ed., Surviving Sexual
Violence: A Guide to Recovery and Empowerment (pp. 48–57). Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Cohen, A. (1965). Arab Border-Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity
and Change in Social Organization. Manchester University Press.
Cohen, D. K. (2011). Causes of Sexual Violence During Civil War: Cross-
National Evidence (1980–2009). Prepared for the Minnesota
International Relations Colloquium, March 28.
Cohen, D. K. (2013a). Explaining Rape During Civil War: Cross-National
Evidence (1980–2009). American Political Science Review, 107: 461–77.
Cohen, D. K. (2013b). Female Combatants and the Perpetration of
Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra Leone Civil War. World Politics,
65: 383–415.
Cohen, E. (2010). The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture.
University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Y. A. (1964). The Transition from Childhood to Adolescence.
Chicago: Aldine.
Coid, J., Yang, M.,Ullrich, S., Roberts, A., and Hare, R. (2009a).
Prevalence and Correlates of Psychopathic Traits in the Household
Population of Great Britain. International Journal of Law and
Psychiatry, 32(2): 65–73.
Coid, J., Yang, M., Ullrich, S., Roberts, A., Moran, P., Bebbington, P.,
Brugha, T., et al. (2009b). Psychopathy Among Prisoners in England and
Wales. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 32(3): 134–41.
Collins, R. (1974). Three Faces of Cruelty: Towards a Comparative
Sociology of Violence. Theory and Society, 1: 415–40.
Collins, R. (2008). Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton
University Press.
Colson, E. (1953). Social Control and Vengeance in Plateau Tonga Society.
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 23: 199–212.
Connole, D. A. (2008). A “Yankee” in the “Texas Army.” Lanham, MD:
Hamilton Books.
Conroy, J. (2000). Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of
Torture. New York: Knopf.
Cooney, M. (1998). Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape
Violence. New York University Press.
Cooney, M. (2009). Is Killing Wrong?: A Study in Pure Sociology.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Copes, H. (2003). Streetlife and the Rewards of Auto Theft. Deviant
Behavior, 24: 309–32.
Copes, H., Hochstetler, A., and Forsyth, C. J. (2013). Peaceful Warriors:
Codes for Violence Among Adult Male Bar Fighters. Criminology, 51:
761–94.
Cottingham, J. (1979). Varieties of Retribution. Philosophical Quarterly,
29: 238–46.
Crachiolo, B. (2004). Seeing the Gendering of Violence: Female and Male
Martyrs in the South English Legendary. In M. D. Meyerson, D. Thiery,
and O. Falk, Eds., ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval
Violence (pp. 147–63). University of Toronto Press.
Crank, J. P. (1998). Understanding Police Culture. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth.
Crelinsten, R. D., and Schmid, A. P. (1995). In Their Own Words: The
World of the Torturer. In R. D. Crelinsten and A. P. Schmid, Eds., The
Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters (pp. 35–64). Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Cuddy, A. J., Rock, M. S., and Norton, M. I. (2007). Aid in the Aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina: Inferences of Secondary Emotions and Intergroup
Helping. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 10(1): 107–18.
Daly, M., and Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Darley, J. M., Carlsmith, K. M., and Robinson, P. H. (2000). Incapacitation
and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment. Law and Human Behavior,
24(6): 659–83.
Davis, M. W. (1922). In the Clutch of Circumstance: My Own Story (author
listed as “A Burglar”). London: D. Appleton.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., and Ryan, R. M. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review
of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic
Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6): 627–68.
Decker, S. H. (1996a). Deviant Homicide: A New Look at the Role of
Motives and Victim–Offender Relationships. Journal of Research in
Crime and Delinquency, 33: 427–49.
Decker, S. H. (1996b). Collective and Normative Features of Gang
Violence. Justice Quarterly, 13: 243–64.
Deibert, G. R., and Miethe, T. D. (2010). Character Contests and Dispute-
Related Offenses. Deviant Behavior, 24: 245–67.
DeJong, T. M., Overholser, J. C., and Stockmeier, C. A. (2010). Apples to
Oranges?: A Direct Comparison Between Suicide Attempters and
Suicide Completers. Journal of Affective Disorders, 124: 90–7.
Delaney, C. (1987). Seeds of Honor, Fields of Shame. In Gilmore, Honor
and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (pp. 35–48).
Denig, E. T. (2000/1930). The Assiniboine, Ed. J. N. B. Hewitt. Norman,
OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Originally published in the Forty-
Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
de Waal, F. (1982). Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
de Waal, F. (1992). Aggression as a Well-Integrated Part of Primate Social
Relationships: A Critique of the Seville Statement on Violence. In J.
Silverberg and J. P. Gray, Eds., Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans
and Other Primates (pp. 37–56). Oxford University Press.
DeWall, C. N., Baumeister, R. F., Stillman, T. F., and Gailliot, M. T. (2007).
Violence Restrained: Effects of Self-Regulation and Its Depletion on
Aggression. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(1): 62–76.
Dieserud, G., Gerhardsen, R. M., Van den Weghe, H., and Corbett, K.
(2010). Adolescent Suicide Attempts in Bærum, Norway, 1984–2006.
 Crisis, 31: 255–64.
Dobash, R. E., and Dobash, R. P. (1979). Violence Against Wives: A Case
Against the Patriarchy. New York: Free Press.
Dolan, T. M., Jr. (2010). Demanding the Impossible: War, Bargaining and
Honor. Paper presented at the American Political Science Annual
Meeting (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1644597).
Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., and Sears, R. R.
(1939). Frustration and Aggression. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Donne, John (1957). A Sermon Preached at White Hall, April 2,1620.
Number 1 in Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson and George Ruben Potter,
Eds., The Sermons of John Donne, vol. III. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press. Electronic reproduction by Brigham Young University
(http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/JohnDonn
e/id/3151/rec/2).
Donnelly, M. P., and Diehl, D. (2011). The Big Book of Pain: Torture and
Punishment Through History. Stroud: History Press.
Donnelly, M., and Straus, M. A. (2005). Corporal Punishment of Children
in Theoretical Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Douglas, J. D. (1967). The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton
University Press.
Dulaney, S., and Fiske, A. P. (1994). Cultural Rituals and Obsessive-
Compulsive Disorder: Is There a Common Psychological Mechanism?
Ethos, 22: 243–83.
Dumézil, G. (1959). Gods of the Ancient Northmen. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Dundas, P. (2002). The Jains. Oxford: Routledge.
Dunning, E., Murphy, P., and Williams, J. (1986). ‘Casuals’, ‘Terrace
Crews’ and ‘Fighting Firms’: Towards a Sociological Explanation of
Football Hooligan Behaviour. In D. Riches, Ed., The Anthropology of
Violence (pp. 164–83). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Durkheim, E. (1951/1897). Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Trans. J. A.
Spaulding and G. Simpson; Ed. G. Simpson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (1973/1899–1900). Two Laws of Penal Evolution, Trans.
T. A. Jones and A. T. Scull. Economy and Society, 2: 285–308 (originally
published as Deux lois de l’évolution pénal, Année Sociologique, 4: 65–
95).
Durkheim, E. (1997/1893). The Division of Labor in Society, Trans. L. A.
Coser (originally published as De la division du travail social: Étude sur
L’organisation des sociétés supérieures). New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (2008/1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
Mineola, NY: Dover.
Eckstein, J. J. (2011). Reasons for Staying in Intimately Violent
Relationships: Comparisons of Men and Women and Messages
Communicated to Self and Others. Journal of Family Violence, 26: 21–
30.
Edel, M. M., and Edel, A. (1959). Anthropology and Ethics. Springfield, IL:
Thomas.
Eidelson, R. J., and Eidelson, J. I. (2003). Dangerous Ideas: Five Beliefs
That Propel Groups Toward Conflict. American Psychologist, 58: 182–
92.
El Dareer, A. (1983). Attitudes of Sudanese People to the Practice of
Female Circumcision. International Journal of Epidemiology, 2: 38–44.
Eller, J. D. (2010). Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence
Across Culture and History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.
Ellison, C. G., Musick, M. A., and Holden, G. W. (2011). Does
Conservative Protestantism Moderate the Association Between Corporal
Punishment and Child Outcomes? Journal of Marriage and Family, 73:
946–61.
Elwin, V. (1950). Maria Murder and Suicide. Bombay: Oxford University
Press.
Emery, N. J., Seed, A. M., von Bayern, A., M. P., and Clayton, N. S.
(2007). Cognitive Adaptations of Social Bonding in Birds. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological
Sciences, 362: 489–505.
Engelstein, L. (1999). Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian
Folktale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Engh, A. L., Siebert, E. R., Greenberg, D. A., and Holekamp, K. E. (2005).
Patterns of Alliance Formation and Postconflict Aggression Indicate
Spotted Hyenas Recognize Third-Party Relationships. Animal Behaviour,
69: 209–17.
Eronen, M., Hakola, P., and Tiihonen, J. (1996). Mental Disorders and
Homicidal Behavior in Finland. Archives of General Psychiatry, 53:
497–501.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the
Azande. Oxford University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1939). Introduction to J. G. Peristiany, The Social
Institutions of the Kipsigis. London: Routledge.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer: A Description of the Models of
Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Everett, M. W. (1975). American Indian “Social Pathology”: A Re-
examination. In T. R. Williams, Ed., Psychological Anthropology
(pp. 249–85). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Fagan, J., and Chin, Ko-lin (1990). Violence as Regulation and Social
Control in the Distribution of Crack. In M. De La Rosa, E. Y. Lambert,
and B. Gropper, Eds., Drugs and Violence: Causes, Correlates, and
Consequences (pp. 8–42). National Institute on Drug Abuse Research
Monograph. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human
Services.
Falk, O. (2004). Bystanders and Hearsayers First: Reassessing the Role of
the Audience in Dueling. In M. D. Meyerson, D. Thiery, and O. Falk,
 Eds., ‘A Great Effusion of Blood’?: Interpreting Medieval Violence
(pp. 98–130). University of Toronto Press.
Fallers, L. A., and Fallers, M. C. (1967). Homicide and Suicide in Busoga.
In P. Bohannan, Ed., African Homicide and Suicide (pp. 65–93). New
York: Atheneum.
Fanon, F. (1965). The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. C. Farrington. New
York: Grove Press.
Farès, B. (1932). L’Honneur chez les Arabes avant l’Islam. Paris: Librarie
D’Amerique et D’Orient Adrien-Maisionneuve.
Faturechi, R. (2012a). Secret Clique in L.A. County Sheriff’s Gang Unit
Probed. Los Angeles Times, April 20
(http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/20/local/la-me-sheriff-clique-
20120420).
Faturechi, R. (2012b). Tattoo in Sheriff’s Deputy Clique May Have
Celebrated Shootings, Sources Say. Los Angeles Times, May 9
(http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/09/local/la-me-sheriff-clique-
20120510).
Faturechi, R. (2013). L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Intends to Fire
Seven Deputies. Los Angeles Times, February 6
(http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/06/local/la-me-jump-out-boys-
20130207).
Fehr, E., and Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-Party Punishment and Social
Norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25: 63–87.
Felson, R. B. (1982). Impression Management and the Escalation of
Aggression and Violence. Social Psychology Quarterly, 45: 245–54.
Felson, R. B. (1983). Aggression and Violence Between Siblings. Social
Psychology Quarterly, 46: 271–85.
Felson, R. B. (1993). Predatory and Dispute-Related Violence: A Social
Interactionist Approach. In R. V. Clarke and M. Felson, Eds., Routine
Activity and Rational Choice (pp. 103–26). Advances in Criminological
Theory, vol. V. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Felson, R. B. (2004). A Rational Choice Approach to Violence. In M. A.
Zahn, H. H. Brownstein, and S. L. Jackson, Eds., Violence: From Theory
to Research (pp. 71–90). Cincinnati, OH: LexisNexis and Anderson.
Felson, R. B., and Russo, N. (1988). Parental Punishment and Sibling
Aggression. Social Psychology Quarterly, 51: 11–18.
Finkel, E. J. (2007). Impelling and Inhibiting Forces in the Perpetration of
Intimate Partner Violence. Review of General Psychology, 11(2): 193–
207.
Finkel, E. J., DeWall, C. N., Slotter, E. B., McNulty, J. K., Pond, R. S., Jr.,
and Atkins, D. C. (2012). Using I³ Theory to Clarify When Dispositional
Aggressiveness Predicts Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 102: 533–49.
Finkel, E. J., DeWall, C. N., Slotter, E. B., Oaten, M., and Foshee, V. A.
(2009). Self-Regulatory Failure and Intimate Partner Violence
Perpetration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97: 483–99.
Fiske, A. P. (1990). Relativity Within Moose (“Mossi”) Culture: Four
Incommensurable Models for Social Relationships. Ethos, 18: 180–204.
Fiske, A. P. (1991). Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms
of Human Relations. New York: Free Press (Macmillan).
Fiske, A. P. (1992). The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework
for a Unified Theory of Social Relations. Psychological Review, 99: 689–
723.
Fiske, A. P. (2000). Complementarity Theory: Why Human Social
Capacities Evolved to Require Cultural Complements. Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 4: 76–94.
Fiske, A. P. (2002). Moral Emotions Provide the Self-Control Needed to
Sustain Social Relationships. Self and Identity, 1: 169–75.
Fiske, A. P. (2004). Relational Models Theory 2.0. In N. Haslam, Ed.,
Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview (pp. 3–25).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fiske, A. P. (2010). Dispassionate Rationality Fails to Sustain Social
Relationships. In A. W. Mates, L. Mikesell, and M. S. Smith, Eds.,
Discourse, Sociality, and Frontotemporal Dementia: Reverse
Engineering the Social Brain (pp. 199–241). London: Equinox.
Fiske, A. P. (2011). Metarelational Models: Configurations of Social
Relationships. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42: 2–18.
Fiske, A. P., and Haslam, N. (2005). The Four Basic Social Bonds:
Structures for Coordinating Interaction. In M. Baldwin, Ed.,
Interpersonal Cognition (pp. 267–98). New York: Guilford Press.
Fiske, A. P., and Schubert, L. (2012). How to Relate to People: The Extra-
Terrestrial’s Guide to Homo sapiens. In O. Gillath, G. Adams, and A. D.
Kunkel, Eds., Relationship Science: Integrating Evolutionary,
Neuroscience, and Sociocultural Approaches (pp. 169–95). Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Fiske, A. P., and Tetlock, P. (1997). Taboo Tradeoffs: Reactions to
Transactions That Transgress Spheres of Exchange. Political Psychology,
17: 255–94.
Flanagan, O., Sarkissian, H., and Wong, D. (2008). Naturalizing Ethics. In
W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., Moral Psychology, vol. I: The Evolution of
Morality: Adaptations and Innateness (pp. 1–26). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Flett, G. L., Goldstein, A. L., Hewitt, P. L., and Wekerle, C. (2012).
Predictors of Deliberate Self-Harm Behavior Among Emerging
Adolescents: An Initial Test of a Self-Punitiveness Model. Current
Psychology, 31: 49–64.
Flynn, A., and Graham, K. (2010). “Why Did It Happen?” A Review and
Conceptual Framework for Research on Perpetrators’ and Victims’
Explanations for Intimate Partner Violence. Aggression and Violent
Behavior, 15: 239–51.
Fogel, J. A. (2000). The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Fox, R. (1977). The Inherent Rules of Violence. In P. Collett, Ed., Social
Rules and Social Behaviour (pp. 132–49). Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Frank, R. (1988). Passions Within Reason. New York: Norton.
Freud, S. 1913/1899. The Interpretation of Dreams, Trans. J. Strachey. New
York: Macmillan.
Friedl, E. (1962). Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Friedman, R. E. (1997). Who Wrote the Bible? New York: HarperCollins.
Friedrich, P. (1977). Sanity and the Myth of Honor: The Problem of
Achilles. Ethos, 5: 281–305.
Fulton, R. (2002). From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the
Virgin Mary, 800–1200. New York: Columbia University Press.
Funk, J. B., Baldacci, H. B., Pasold, T., and Baumgardner, J. (2004).
Violence Exposure in Real-Life, Video Games, Television, Movies, and
the Internet: Is There Desensitization? Journal of Adolescence, 27: 23–
39.
Gamkrelidze, T. V., and Ivanov, V. V. (1995). Indo-European and the Indo-
Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-
Language and a Proto-Culture, Trans. J. Nichols; Ed. W. Winter. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Gandhi, M. (1998). The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, Ed. R. K. Prabhu and
U. R. Rao. Ahemadabad, India: Navajivan.
Garandeau, C. F., and Cillessen, A. H. N. (2006). From Indirect Aggression
to Invisible Aggression: A Conceptual View on Bullying and Peer Group
Manipulation. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11: 612–25.
Gardner, M. R. (1993). The Mens Rea Enigma: Observations on the Role of
Motive in the Criminal Law Past and Present. Utah Law Review, 635–
750.
Garland, R. (2001). The Greek Way of Death, 2nd edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Geertz, C. (1972). Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Daedalus:
Myth, Symbol, and Culture, Winter(1): 1–37. Reprinted in C. Geertz
(1973), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 412–53).
New York: Basic Books.
Gelles, R. J., and Straus, M. A. (1988). Intimate Violence. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
Gershoff, E. T., Miller, P. C., and Holden, G. W. (1999). Parenting
Influences from the Pulpit: Religious Affiliation as a Determinant of
Parental Corporal Punishment. Journal of Family Psychology, 13: 307–
20.
Giangreco, D. M. (2003). “A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas”:
President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan.
Pacific Historical Journal, 72: 93–132.
Gibson, J. W. (1986). The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press.
Gilmore, D. D., Ed. (1967). Honor and Shame and the Unity of the
Mediterranean. Special Publication of the American Anthropological
Association, No. 22.
Ginat, J. (1982). Women in Muslim Rural Society: Status and Role in
Family and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Ginges, J. (1997). Deterring the Terrorist: A Psychological Evaluation of
Different Strategies for Deterring Terrorism. Terrorism and Political
Violence, 9(1): 170–85.
Ginges, J., and Atran, S. (2009). What Motivates Participation in Violent
Political Action: Selective Incentives or Parochial Altruism? Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167(1), 115–23.
Ginges, J., and Atran, S. (2011). War as a Moral Imperative (Not Just
Practical Politics by Other Means). Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 278(1720): 2930–8.
Ginges, J., Atran, S., Medin, D., and Shikaki, K. (2007). Sacred Bounds on
Rational Resolution of Violent Political Conflict. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(18):
7357–60.
Ginges, J., Atran, S., Sachdeva, S., and Medin, D. (2011). Psychology Out
of the Laboratory: The Challenge of Violent Extremism. American
Psychologist, 66(6): 507–19.
Gintis, H., and Fehr, E. (2012). The Social Structure of Cooperation and
Punishment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35: 28–9.
Ginzburg, R. (1962). 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic
Press.
Giovannini, M. J. (1981). Woman: A Dominant Symbol Within the Cultural
System of a Sicilian Town. Man (New Series), 16: 408–26.
Glasenapp, H., von (1999). Jainism: An Indian Religion of Salvation. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass.
Glucklich, A. (2001). Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the
Soul. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gluckman, M. (1954). Political Institutions. In E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Ed.,
The Institutions of Primitive Society: A Series of Broadcast Talks (pp. 66–
80). Oxford: Blackwell.
Gluckman, M. (1963). Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Blackwell.
Godshalk, D. (2000). William J. Northen’s Public and Personal Struggles
Against Lynching. In J. Dailey, G. E. Gilmore, and B. Simon, Eds.,
Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights
(pp. 140–61). Princeton University Press.
Goetz, A. T., and Romero, G. A. (2102). Intimate Partner Violence: War at
Our Doorsteps. In T. K. Shackelford and V. A. Weekes-Shackelford, Eds.,
The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence,
Homicide, and War (pp. 63–76). Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, V. (1998). Death Takes a Holiday, Sort Of. In J. Goldstein, Ed.,
Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment (pp. 27–52).
 New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, J. (1998). Immortal Kombat: War Toys and Violent Video
Games. In J. Goldstein, Ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent
Entertainment (pp. 53–68). New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodyear-Smith, F. A., and Laidlaw, T. M. (1999). Aggressive Acts and
Assaults in Intimate Relationships: Towards an Understanding of the
Literature. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 17: 285–304.
Gough, K. (1972). Nuer Kinship: A Re-examination. In T. L. Beidelman,
Ed., The Translation of Culture (pp. 79–121). London: Tavistock.
Gould, R. V. (2003). Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity About Social Rank
Breeds Conflict. University of Chicago Press.
Graham, J., and Haidt, J. (2011). Sacred Values and Evil Adversaries: A
Moral Foundations Approach. In M. Mikulincer and P. R. Shaver, Eds.,
The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and
Evil (pp. 11–31). New York: APA Books.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., and Nosek, B. (2009). Liberals and Conservatives Use
Different Sets of Moral Foundations. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 96: 1029–46.
Graves, F. P. (1891). The Burial Customs of the Ancient Greeks. Brooklyn,
NY: Roche and Hawkins.
Graves, J. T. (1906). The Reign of Terror for Southern White Women, The
Atlanta Georgian, August 21
(www.gpb.org/georgiastories/docs/the_race_riot_of_1906-1).
Gray, K., Young, L., and Waytz, A. (2012). Mind Perception is the Essence
of Morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23: 101–24.
Greitemeyer, T., and McLatchie, N. (2011). Denying Humanness to Others:
A Newly Discovered Mechanism by Which Violent Video Games
Increase Aggressive Behavior. Psychological Science, 22: 659–65.
Grem, D. (2006). Sam Jones, Sam Hose, and the Theology of Racial
Violence. Georgia Historical Quarterly, 90: 35–61
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/40584885).
Greven, P. (1977). The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing,
Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. University of
Chicago Press.
Grinnell, G. B. (1923). The Cheyenne Indians. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press [cited in Benedict, 1932].
Grossman, D. (2009). On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to
Kill in War and Society. New York: Little Brown.
Gruenbaum, E. (2001). The Female Circumcision Controversy: An
Anthropological Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Guarendi, R. N. (1991). Back to the Family: Proven Advice on Building a
Stronger, Healthier, Happier Family. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Guillais, J. (1990). Crimes of Passion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Guillaumont, A. (1979). Aux origines du monachisme chrétien: Pour une
phénoménologie du monachisme. Spiritualité Orientale, No. 30.
Bégrolles en Mauges (Maine and Loire): Abbaye de Bellefontaine.
Haidt, J. (2001). The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social
Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review, 108:
814–34.
Haidt, J. (2003). The Moral Emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, and
H. H. Goldsmith, Eds., Handbook of Affective Sciences (pp. 852–70).
Oxford University Press.
Haidt, J. (2007). The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology. Science, 316:
998–1002.
Haidt, J., and Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social Intuitionists Answer Six
Questions About Moral Psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed.,
Moral Psychology, vol. II: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition
and Diversity (pp. 181–217). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haidt, J., and Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared
Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues. Daedalus, 133: 55–66.
Halawi, J. (2002). “Honour” Drenched in Blood. Al-Ahram Weekly, August
15–21 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/599/eg4.htm).
Hale, R. (1997). Motives of Reward Among Men Who Rape. American
Journal of Criminal Justice, 22: 101–19.
Hales, S. (2002). Looking for Eunuchs: The Galli and Attis in Roman Art.
In S. Tougher, Ed., Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (pp. 87–102).
London: Duckworth.
Haliburn, J. (2000). Reasons for Adolescent Suicide Attempts. Journal of
the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 39: 13–14.
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., and Bloom, P. (2007). Social Evaluation by
Preverbal Infants. Nature, 450(7169): 557–9.
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., Bloom, P., and Mahajan, N. (2011). How Infants
and Toddlers React to Antisocial Others. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(50): 19931–6.
Hamman, A. G. (1977). Les Origines du monachisme chrétien au cours des
deux premiers siècles. In C. Mayer, Ed., Homo Spiritalis: Festgab für
Luc Verheijen (pp. 217–32). Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.
Hara, M. (2009). Divine Witness. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 37: 253–
72.
Haritos-Fatouros, M. (1995). The Official Torturer: A Learning Model for
Obedience to the Authority of Violence. In R. D. Crelinsten and A. P.
Schmid, Eds., The Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters
(pp. 129–46). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Haritos-Fatouros, M. (2003). The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized
Torture. London: Routledge.
Harkavy, R. E. (2000). Defeat, National Humiliation, and the Revenge
Motif in International Politics. International Politics, 37: 345–68.
Hartnett, S. M., Bump, N., Dubois, J., Hollon, R., and Morris, D. (2008).
Evaluation of CeaseFire-Chicago. Chicago: Northwestern University.
Hartung, J. (2012). Chastity, Fidelity, and Conquest: Biblical Rules for
Women and War. In T. K. Shackelford and V. A. Weekes-Shackelford,
Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence,
Homicide, and War (pp. 77–90). Oxford University Press.
Hasday, J. E. (2000). Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital
Rape. California Law Review, 88: 1373–1505.
Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An Integrative Review. Personality
and Social Psychology Review, 10: 252–64.
Haslam, N., and Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and
Infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65: 399–423.
Hauser, M. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal
Sense of Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco Books.
Haw, C., and Hawton, K. (2008). Life Problems and Deliberate Self-Harm:
Associations with Gender, Age, Suicidal Intent and Psychiatric and
Personality Disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 109: 139–48.
Hawley, J. S., Ed. (1994). Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of
Wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press.
Headley, L. A. (1983). Suicide in Asia and the Near East. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Heald, S. (1986). The Ritual Use of Violence: Circumcision Among the
Gisu of Uganda. In D. Riches, Ed., The Anthropology of Violence
(pp. 70–85). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Henberg, M. (1990). Retribution: Evil for Evil in Ethics, Law, and
Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., and Norenzayan, A. (2010). The Weirdest People
in the World. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33: 61–83.
Herdt, G. (1987). The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Herzfeld, M. (1980). Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative
Analysis of Moral Systems. Man (New Series), 15: 339–51.
Herzfeld, M. (1985). The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a
Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton University Press.
Herzfeld, M. (1987). “As in Your Own House”: Hospitality, Ethnography,
and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society. In Gilmore, Honour and
Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (pp. 75–94).
Heyman, J., and Ariely, D. (2004). Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two
Markets. Psychological Science, 15(11): 787–93.
Hinton, A. L. (2002). The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an
Anthropology of Genocide. In A. L. Hinton, Ed., Annihilating
Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (pp. 1–40). Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Hirshleifer, J. (1987). On the Emotions as Guarantors of Threats and
Promises. In J. Dupré, Ed., The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution
and Optimality (pp. 307–26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hobbes, T. (2010/1651). Leviathan: On the Matter, Forme, and Power of a
Common-Wealth Ecclesisticall and Civill. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Homer (1950). The Iliad, Trans. E. V. Rieu. New York: Penguin.
Hood, R., and Hoyle, C. (2008). The Death Penalty: A Worldwide
Perspective, 4th edn. Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, R., and Schwartz, G. (1974). Honor, Normative Ambiguity and
Gang Violence. American Sociological Review, 39: 238–51.
Huggins, M. K., Haritos-Fatouros, M., and Zimbardo, P. G. (2002).
Violence Workers: Police Torturers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hughes, D. D. (1991). Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece. New York:
Routledge.
Human Relations Area Files. Yale University (http://www.yale.edu/hraf).
Hyams, P. R. (1981). Trial by Ordeal: The Key to Proof in the Early
Common Law. In M. S. Arnold, T. A. Green, S. A. Scully, and S. D.
White, Eds., On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of
Samuel E. Thorne (pp. 90–126). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
Iga, M. (1986). The Thorn in the Chrysanthemum: Suicide and Economic
Success in Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ingle, D. (2004). Recreational Fighting. In G. S. Cross, Ed., Encyclopedia
of Recreation and Leisure in America, vol. II (pp. 198–200). New York:
Scribner.
Jackson, L. F. (2008). The Greatest Silence. Jackson Films, Inc., in
association with The Fledgling Fund and HBO Documentary Films
(http://thegreatestsilence.org/home/). Excerpt on PBS: Congo Soldiers on
Why They Rape (www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/the-daily-
need/congo-soldiers-on-why-they-rape/4046/).
Jacobs, B. A., and Wright, R. (2006). Street Justice: Retaliation in the
Criminal Underworld. Cambridge University Press.
Jacobs, B. A., and Wright, R. (2008). Moralistic Street Robbery. Crime &
Delinquency, 54: 511–31.
James, S., director (2011). The Interrupters (documentary film).
Kartemquin Films, United States.
Jamjoom, M., and Ahmed, A. (2010). Saudi Arabia Urged Not to Paralyze
Man as Retribution Punishment. Cable News Network website, August
23
(http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/20/saudi.arabia.paralysis/index.
html?iref=allsearch).
Janoff-Bulman, R. (2007). Erroneous Assumptions: Popular Belief in the
Effectiveness of Torture Interrogation. Peace and Conflict: Journal of
Peace Psychology, 13(4): 429–35.
Jaymous, R. (1981). Honneur et Baraka: Les structures sociales
traditionelles dans le Rif. Cambridge University Press and Paris: Éditions
de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Jeffrey, P. (1979). Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah. London and
Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.
Jenkins, P. (2010). Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the
Bible’s Violent Verses. New York: HarperCollins.
Jewkes, R. (2002). Intimate Partner Violence: Causes and Prevention.
Lancet, 359: 1423–9.
Jewkes, R., Fulu, E., Roselli, T., and Garcia-Moreno, C., on behalf of the
UN Multi-Country Cross-Sectional Study on Men and Violence Research
Team (2013). Prevalence of and Factors Associated with Non-Partner
Rape Perpetration: Findings from the UN Multi-Country Cross-Sectional
Study on Men and Violence in Asia and the Pacific. Lancet Global
Health, 1(4), September 10.
Jewkes, R., Sikweyiya, Y., Morrell, R., and Dunkle, K. (2011). Gender
Inequitable Masculinity and Sexual Entitlement in Rape Perpetration
South Africa: Findings of a Cross-Sectional Study. PLoS ONE,
December 28. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029590.
Johnston, D. D. (1995). Adolescents’ Motivations for Viewing Graphic
Horror. Human Communication Research, 21: 522–52.
Jorgensen, J. G. (1972). The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless.
University of Chicago Press.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., and Nosek, B. A. (2004). A Decade of System
Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and
Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo. Political Psychology, 25:
881–920.
Joyce, R. (2007). The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Joyce, R., Edging, R., Lorenz, K., and Gillespie, S. (1991). Olmec
Bloodletting: An Iconographic Study. In V. Fields, Ed., Sixth Palenque
Roundtable, 1986. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press
(www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/RT08/Bloodletting.pdf).
Kaeuper, R. W. (1999). Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. Oxford
University Press.
Kant, I. (1989/1785). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Trans.
L. W. Beck. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Karatnycky, A. (2005). How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to
Durable Democracy. New York: Freedom House.
Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in
Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.
Kavka, G. S. (1986). Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton
University Press.
Kavka, G. S. (1987). Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Kelly, J. (2010). Rape in War: Motives of Militia in DRC. Special Report
243, United States Institute of Peace
(www.usip.org/files/resources/SR243Kelly.pdf).
Kelman, H. C. (1995). The Social Context of Torture: Policy Processes and
Authority Structure. In R. D. Crelinsten and A. P. Schmid, Eds., The
Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters (pp. 19–34). Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Kendon, A. (1988). Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural,
Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, D. M. (2002). A Tale of One City: Reflections on the Boston Gun
Project. In G. S. Katzmann, Ed., Securing Our Children’s Future: New
Approaches to Juvenile Justice and Youth Violence. Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press.
Kennedy, D. M. (2009). Deterrence and Crime Prevention: Reconsidering
the Prospect of Sanction. London: Routledge.
Kennedy, D. M. (2011). Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and
the End of Violence in Inner-City America. New York: Bloomsbury.
Kerr, M., Forsyth, R. D., and Plyley, M. J. (1992). Cold Water and Hot
Iron: Trial by Ordeal in England. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22:
573–95.
Kiefer, T. M. (1968). Institutionalized Friendship and Warfare Among the
Tausug of Jolo. Ethnology, 7: 225–44.
Kiernan, B. (2007). Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and
Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Kirby, S. L., and Wintrup, G. (2002). Running the Gauntlet: An
Examination of Initiation/Hazing and Sexual Abuse in Sport. Journal of
Sexual Aggression, 8: 49–68
(www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600208413339).
Kleeman, T. F. (1994). Licentious Cults and Bloody Victuals: Sacrifice,
Reciprocity, and Violence in Traditional China. Asia Major, 7: 185–211.
Klonsky, E. D. (2007). The Functions of Deliberate Self-Injury: A Review
of the Evidence. Clinical Psychology Review, 27: 226–39.
Knauft, B. M. (1985). Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social
Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Knauft, B. M. (1987). Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies:
Homicide Among the Gebusi of New Guinea. Current Anthropology, 28:
457–500.
Knock, M. K. (2009). Why Do People Hurt Themselves? New Insights into
the Nature and Functions of Self-Injury. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 18: 78–83.
Knox, M. (2010). On Hitting Children: A Review of Corporal Punishment
in the United States. Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 24: 103–7.
Komter, A. (2004). Social Solidarity and the Gift. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Kopytoff, I. (1988). The Cultural Context of African Abolition. In S. Miers,
Ed., The End of Slavery in Africa (pp. 485–503). Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Kopytoff, I., and Miers, S. (1977). African Slavery as an Institution of
Marginality. In S. Miers and I. Kopytoff, Eds., Slavery in Africa:
 Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (pp. 3–81). Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Korsten, F. W. (2009). Bodies in Pain and the Transcendental Organization
of History in Joost van den Vondel. In J. F. van Dijkhuizen and K. A. E.
Enenkel, Eds., The Sense of Suffering: Construction of Physical
Punishment in Early Modern Culture (pp. 377–401). Leiden: Brill.
Kramrisch, S. (1981). The Presence of Siva. Princeton University Press.
Kruger, D. J., and Fitzgerald, C. J. (2012). Evolutionary Perspectives on
Male–Male Competition, Violence, and Homicide. In T. K. Shackelford
and V. A. Weekes-Shackelford, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of
Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War (pp. 153–70).
Oxford University Press.
Kubrin, C. E., and Weitzer, R. (2003). Retaliatory Homicide: Concentrated
Disadvantage and Neighborhood Culture. Social Problems, 50: 157–80.
La Fontaine, J. (1967). Homicide and Suicide Among the Busoga. In P.
Bohannan, Ed., African Homicide and Suicide (pp. 94–129). New York:
Atheneum.
Langbein, J. H. (2006). Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England
in the Ancien Régime. University of Chicago Press.
Law, R. (1985). Human Sacrifice in Pre-Colonial West Africa. African
Affairs, 84: 53–87.
Laye-Gindhu, A., and Schonert-Reichel, K. A. (2005). Nonsuicidal Self-
Harm Among Community Adolescents: Understanding the “Whats” and
“Whys” of Self-Harm. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34: 447–57.
Lazreg, M. (2008). Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to
Baghdad. Princeton University Press.
Lea, H. C. (1996/1870). Superstition and Force: Torture, Ordeal, and Trial
by Combat in Medieval Law. Reprint. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Lebow, R. N. (2010). Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War.
Cambridge University Press.
Leeson, P. T. (2011). Trial by Battle. Journal of Legal Analysis, 3: 341–75.
Leeson, P. T. (2012). Ordeals. Journal of Law and Economics, 55: 691–714.
Lefkowitz, M. (2003). Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from
Myths. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Leidner, B., Castano, E., and Ginges, J. (2013). Dehumanization,
Retributive and Restorative Justice, and Aggressive Versus Diplomatic
Intergroup Conflict Resolution Strategies. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 39(2): 181–92.
Leitenberg, M. (2006). Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century.
Cornell University Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper #29, 3rd
edn.
(www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/deathswarsconflictsjune52006.pdf).
Leslie, A. M., Knobe, J., and Cohen, A. (2006). Acting Intentionally and
the Side-Effect Effect: ‘Theory of Mind’ and Moral Judgment.
Psychological Science, 17(5): 421–7.
Lester, D. (1996). Officer Attitudes Toward Police Use of Force. In W. A.
Geller and H. Toch, Eds., Police Violence (pp. 180–90). New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Lester, D., Wood, P., Williams, C., and Haines, J. (2004). Motives for
Suicide – A Study of Australian Suicide Notes. Crisis, 25: 33–4.
Lester, R. J. (1995). Embodied Voices: Women’s Food Asceticism and the
Negotiation of Identity. Ethos, 23: 187–222.
Levin, J., and Fox, J. A. (1996). A Psycho-Social Analysis of Mass Murder.
In T. O’Reilly-Fleming, Ed., Serial and Mass Murder: Theory, Research,
and Policy (pp. 55–76). Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
LeVine, R. A. (1961). Anthropology and the Study of Conflict. Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 5: 3–15.
Levinson, D. (1989). Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective.
Frontiers of Anthropology, vol. I. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1961/1949). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev.
edn., Trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and R. Needham. Boston:
Beacon.
Levy, R. I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands.
University of Chicago Press.
Lewis, M. E. (1990). Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Liberman, P. (2006). An Eye for an Eye: Public Support for War Against
Evildoers. International Organization, 60: 687–722.
Liberman, P. (2013). Retributive Support for War and Torture. Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 57: 285–306.
Liberman, P. (2014). War and Torture as “Just Deserts.” Public Opinion
Quarterly, 78(1): 47–70.
Liddle, J. R., Shackelford, T. K., and Weekes-Shackelford, V. A. (2012).
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? Evolutionary Perspectives on
Violence, Homicide, and War. Review of General Psychology, 16: 24–36.
Lienhardt, G. (1961). Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka.
Oxford University Press.
Lightfoot, J. L. (2002). Sacred Eunuchism in the Cult of the Syrian
Goddess. In S. Tougher, Ed., Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (pp. 71–
86). London: Duckworth.
Linder, D. O. (n.d.). Los Angeles Police Officers’ (Rodney King Beating)
Trials. Famous American Trials
(http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/lapd.html).
Lindholm, C. (1982). Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of
Northern Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lindow, J. (2002). Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals,
and Beliefs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Linhares de Albuquerque, C., and Paes-Machado, E. (2004). The Hazing
Machine: The Shaping of Brazilian Military Police Recruits. Policing
and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy, 14: 175–
92 (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1043946032000143497).
Lisak, D., and Roth, S. (1988). Motivational Factors in Nonincarcerated
Sexually Aggressive Men. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
55: 795–802.
Lison-Tolosana, C. (1983/1963). Belmonte de los Caballeros: Anthropology
and History in an Aragonese Community. Princeton University Press.
Lodge, H. C., Ed. (1904). The Works of Alexander Hamilton in Twelve
Volumes, vol. X. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Löwenheim, O., and Heimann, G. (2008). Revenge in International Politics.
Security Studies, 17: 685–724
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636410802508055).
Lowie, R. H. (1919). The Tobacco Society of the Crow Indians.
Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol.
21, part 2.
Lowie, R. H. (1922). The Religion of the Crow Indians. Anthropological
Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 25, part 2.
Luckenbill, D. F. (1977). Criminal Homicide as a Situated Transgression.
Social Problems, 25: 176–86.
Lundsgaarde, H. P. (1977). Murder in Space City: A Cultural Analysis of
Houston Homicide Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press.
MacArthur, D. (1962). Duty, Honor, Country. Thayer Award acceptance
address
(www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurthayeraward.htm
l).
MacNair, R. M. (2002). Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The
Psychological Consequences of Killing. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Malamuth, N. M. (1986). Predictors of Naturalistic Sexual Aggression.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50: 953–62.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of
Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian
New Guinea. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Mandelbaum, D. G. (1988). Women’s Seclusion and Men’s Honour: Sex
Roles in North India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Tucson, AZ: University
of Arizona Press.
Manning, J. (2012). Suicide as Social Control. Sociological Forum, 27:
207–27.
Mark, M. M., Bryant, F. B., and Lehman, D. R. (1983). Perceived Injustice
and Sports Violence. In J. H. Goldstein, Ed., Sports Violence (pp. 83–
109). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Marlantes, K. (2011). What It Is Like to Go to War. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Martin, D. D. Jr. (2009). How to Properly Spank My Kids. Message 45,
posted April 29 (http://christianblogs.christianet.com/1137709450.htm).
Marvin, C., and Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem
Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge University Press.
Marvin, G. (1986). Honour, Integrity and the Problem of Violence in the
Spanish Bullfight. In D. Riches, Ed., The Anthropology of Violence
(pp. 118–35). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Mathew, S., and Boyd, R. (2011). Punishment Sustains Large-Scale
Cooperation in Prestate Warfare. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America, 108: 11375–80.
Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les
sociétés archaïques. Paris: L’Année Sociologique. Trans. W. D. Halls as
The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
(1990). New York: W. W. Norton.
Maxfield, M. G. (1989). Circumstances in Supplementary Homicide
Reports: Variety and Validity. Criminology, 27: 671–95.
Maybury-Lewis, D. (2002). Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples. In A. L.
Hinton, Ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide
(pp. 43–53). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mayhew, J. (2009). Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals
(ca. 1550–1650). In J. F. van Dijkhuizen and K. A. E. Enenkel, Eds., The
 Sense of Suffering: Construction of Physical Punishment in Early
Modern Culture (pp. 299–322). Leiden: Brill.
Maynard Smith, J. (1979). Game Theory and the Evolution of Behaviour.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological
Sciences, 205: 475–88.
Mazur, A., and Both, A. (1998). Testosterone and Dominance in Men.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21: 353–97.
McCall, N. (1995). Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in
America. New York: Random House Digital.
McCauley, C. R. (2000). How President Bush Moved the U.S. into the Gulf
War: Three Theories of Group Conflict and the Construction of Moral
Violation. Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict, Annual Edition
(2000–1): 32–42.
McKenna, N. D., and Howarth, J. (2009). The Cutting Tradition
(documentary film). Annual Program, Without Frontiers. Commissioned
by the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology. A
SafeHands for Mothers production.
McKnight, D. (1986). Fighting in an Australian Aboriginal Supercamp. In
D. Riches, Ed., The Anthropology of Violence (pp. 136–63). Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
McLoughlin W. G. (1971). Evangelical Childrearing in the Age of Jackson:
Francis Wayland’s Views on How and When to Subdue the Willfulness
of Children. Journal of Social History, 9: 20–34.
McNamara, R. P. (2002). From Report Takers to Report Makers:
Understanding the Police and Violence. In R. G. Burns and C. E.
Crawford, Eds., Policing and Violence (pp. 52–72). Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
McVicar, J. (1982). Violence in Prisons. In P. Marsh and A. Campbell, Eds.,
Aggression and Violence (pp. 200–14). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Medieval Sourcebook: Charters Relating to Judicial Duels, 11th–12th
Century. Fordham University
(www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/12Cduels.asp).
Meeker, M. E. (1976). Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples
from the Black Sea Turks and the Levantine Arabs. International Journal
of Middle East Studies, 7: 243–70, 383–422.
Meinardus, O. (1969). The Upper Egyptian Practice of Making Eunuchs in
the XVIIIth and XIXth Century. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 94: 47–58.
Meisel, A. C., and del Mastro, M. L. (1975). The Rule of St. Benedict. New
York: Doubleday.
Meloy, J. R., Hempel, A. G., Kris Mohandie, Shiva, A. A., and Gray, B. T.
(2001). Offender and Offense Characteristics of a Nonrandom Sample of
Adolescent Mass Murderers. Journal of the American Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40: 719–28.
Melton, G. B., Petrila, J., Poythress, N. G., and Slobogin, C. (1997).
Psychological Evaluations for the Courts: A Handbook for Mental
Health Professionals and Lawyers, 2nd edn. New York: Guilford Press.
Menand, L. (2013). The Color of Law: Voting Rights and the Southern Way
of Life. New Yorker, July 8 and 15, pp. 80–9.
Metamura, T. (1970). Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics,
Trans. C. A. Pomeroy. Rutland, VT: Tuttle.
Middleton, J., and Tait, D., Eds. (1954). Tribes Without Rulers: Studies in
African Segmentary Systems. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Middleton, M. L. (1994). Cop: A True Story. Chicago: Contemporary
Books.
Miethe, T. D., and Regoeczi, W. C. (2004). Rethinking Homicide: Exploring
the Structure and Process Underlying Deadly Situations. Cambridge
University Press.
Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence, and the
Future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11: 143–52.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New
York: Harper and Row.
Miller, J. D., Zeichner, A., and Wilson, L. F. (2012). Personality Correlates
of Aggression Evidence from Measures of the Five-Factor Model, UPPS
Model of Impulsivity, and BIS/BAS. Journal of Interpersonal Violence,
27: 2903–19.
Millon, T., Simonsen, E., Birket-Smith, M., and Davis, R. D. (1998).
Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior. New York:
Guilford Press.
Moio, J. A. (2007). Torture: Advances and Limitations in Explanatory
Theories and Implications for Cross Cultural Social Work. Journal of
Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 15: 1–30.
Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press.
Morinis, A. (1985). The Ritual Experience: Pain and the Transformation of
Consciousness in Ordeals of Initiation. Ethos, 13: 150–74
(www.jstor.org/stable/639985).
Muehlenkamp, J., Brausch, A., Quigley, K., and Whitlock, J. (2013).
Interpersonal Features and Functions of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury. Suicide
and Life-Threatening Behavior, 43: 67–80.
Muir, J. (2009/1913). The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. In J. Muir,
Journeys in the Wilderness: A John Muir Reader. Edinburgh: Birlinn.
Muller, E. N. (1979). Aggressive Political Participation. Princeton
University Press.
Munger, M. (2013). Munger on Sports, Norms, Rules, and the Code. May
31 interview on EconTalk by host Russ Robert; podcast posted July
1,2012 (www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/07/munger_on_sport.html).
Murdock, G. P. (1967). Ethnographic Atlas. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Nader, L. (1990). Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec
Mountain Village. Stanford University Press.
Naimark, N. M. (1995). The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet
Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Nanda, S. (1998). Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Nansel, T. R., Overpeck, M., Pilla, R. S., Ruan, W. J., Simons-Morton, B.,
and Scheidt, P. (2001). Bullying Behaviors Among US Youth: Prevalence
and Association with Psychosocial Adjustment. Journal of the American
Medical Association, 25(16): 2094–2100.
Negron, R., Piacentini, J., Graae, F., Davies, M., and Shaffer, D. (1997).
Microanalysis of Adolescent Suicide Attempts and Ideators During the
Acute Suicidal Episode. Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry, 36: 1512–19.
Nelissen, R., and Zeelenberg, M. (2009). When Guilt Evokes Self-
Punishment: Evidence for the Existence of a Dobby Effect. Emotion,
9(1): 118–22.
Nesse, R. M., Ed. (2001). Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press.
Nevels, C. S. (2007). Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through
Racial Violence. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Nicolson, A. (2005). Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of
Trafalgar. New York: HarperCollins.
Nisbet, R. A. (1993). The Sociological Tradition, 2nd edn. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Books.
Nisbett, R. E., and Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of Honor: The Psychology of
Violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Nivette, A. E. (2011). Violence in Non-State Societies: A Review. British
Journal of Criminology, 51: 578–98.
Olivola, C. Y., and Shafir, E. (2013). The Martyrdom Effect: When Pain
and Effort Increase Prosocial Contributions. Journal of Behavioral
Decision Making, 26(1), 91–105.
Opotow, S., Ed. (1990). Moral Exclusion and Injustice: An Introduction.
Journal of Social Issues, 46 (Special Issue): 1–20.
Otterman, M. (2007). American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib
and Beyond. London: Pluto.
Overing, J. (1986). Images of Cannibalism, Death and Domination in a
‘Non-Violent’ Society. In D. Riches, Ed., The Anthropology of Violence
(pp. 86–102). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Packer, I. K. (2009). Evaluation of Criminal Responsibility. Oxford
University Press.
Paige, J. M. (1971). Political Orientation and Riot Participation. American
Sociological Review, 36: 810–20.
Pailing, A., Boon, J., and Egan, V. (2014). Personality, the Dark Triad and
Violence. Personality and Individual Differences, 67: 81–6.
(www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886913013767).
Papachristos, A. V. (2009). Murder by Structure: Dominance Relations and
the Social Structure of Gang Homicide. American Journal of Sociology,
115: 74–128.
Parkes, C. M. (1996). Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life.
Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.
Parsons, A. (1969). Is the Oedipus Complex Universal? In A. Parsons,
Belief, Magic, and Anomie: Essays in Psychological Anthropology
(pp. 3–66). New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan.
Patai, R. (1971). Society, Culture and Change in the Middle East, 3rd edn.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Patrick, C. J., Ed. (2005). Handbook of Psychopathy. New York: Guilford
Press.
Petee, T. A., Padgett, K. G., and York, T. S. (1997). Debunking the
Stereotype: An Examination of Mass Murder in Public Places. Homicide
Studies, 1: 317–37 (http://hsx.sagepub.com/content/1/4/317).
Peters, E. (1985). Torture. New York: Blackwell.
Petersen, R., and Zukerman, S. (2010). Anger, Violence, and Political
Science. In M. Potegal, G. Stemmler, and C. Spielberger, Eds.,
 International Handbook of Anger: Constituent and Concomitant
Biological, Psychological, and Social Processes (pp. 561–81). New
York: Springer (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-
89676-2_32).
Petit, O., and Thierry, B. (1994). Aggressive and Peaceful Interventions in
Conflicts in Tonkean Macaques. Animal Behaviour, 48: 1427–36.
Phang, S. E. (2008). Roman Military Service: Ideologies of Discipline in the
Late Republic and Early Principate. Cambridge University Press.
Piaget, J. (1965/1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child, Trans. M. Gabain.
New York: Free Press.
Pinault, D. (1992). The Shiites: Ritual and Popular Piety in a Muslim
Community. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined. New York: Viking.
Pisani, A. L. (1982). Identifying Arson Motives. Fire and Arson
Investigator, 32(4): 18–
25(www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=84265).
Pitt-Rivers, J. G. (1966a). Honour and Social Status. In J. G. Peristiany,
Ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (pp. 19–
78). University of Chicago Press.
Pitt-Rivers, J. G. (1966b). Honour and Shame in a Cypriot Highland
Village. In J. G. Peristiany, Ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of
Mediterranean Society (pp. 173–90). University of Chicago Press.
Pitt-Rivers, J. G. (1977). The Fate of Shechem or The Politics of Sex:
Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Plate, T. G., and Darvi, A. (1981). Secret Police: The Inside Story of a
Network of Terror. New York: Doubleday.
Plato (380 BCE). Gorgias, Trans. B. Jowett. Internet Classics Archive,
MIT. (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html).
Polanyi, K. (2001/1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and
Economic Origins of Our Time, rev. edn. Boston: Beacon Press.
Polk, K. (1993). Observations on Stranger Homicide. Journal of Criminal
Justice, 21: 573–82.
Polybius (second century BCE). Histories
(http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html#
36).
Poole, F. J. P. (1982). The Ritual Forging of Identity; Aspects of Person and
Self in Bimin-Kuskusmin Male Initiation. In G. H. Herdt, Ed., Rituals of
Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea (pp. 99–154). Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Potegal, M. (2006). Human Cruelty Is Rooted in the Reinforcing Effects of
Intraspecific Aggression That Subserves Dominance. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 29: 236–7.
Press, I. (1979). The City as Context: Urbanism and Behavioral Constraints
in Seville. Urbana. IL and London: University of Illinois Press.
Pritchard, J. (1954). The Ancient Near East in Pictures Relating to the Old
Testament. Princeton University Press.
Quebedeaux, M. (2012). Interviews for class research, Los Angeles, May–
June 2012 (personal communication, A. P. Fiske).
Rae, D. W., and Taylor, M. (1970). The Analysis of Political Cleavages.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rai, T. S., and Fiske, A. P. (2011). Moral Psychology is Relationship
Regulation: Moral Motives for Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and
Proportionality. Psychological Review, 118: 57–75.
Rai, T. S., and Fiskek A. P. (2012). Beyond Harm, Intention, and Dyads:
Relationship Regulation, Virtuous Violence, and Metarelational Morality.
Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 189–93.
Raine, A. (2013). The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.
New York: Pantheon.
Rapoport, A., and Chammah, A. M. (1966). The Game of Chicken.
American Behavioral Scientist, 10(3): 10–28.
Rappaport, R. A. (1967). Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a
New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Richters, J., De Visser, R. O., Rissel, C. E., Grulich, A. E., and Smith,
A. M. A. (2008). Demographic and Psychosocial Features of Participants
in Bondage and Discipline, “Sadomasochism” or Dominance and
Submission (BDSM): Data from a National Survey. Journal of Sexual
Medicine, 5: 1660–8.
Ricks, T. E. (1997). Making the Corps. New York: Touchstone.
Ringrose, K. M. (2003). The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social
Construction of Gender in Byzantium. University of Chicago Press.
Robachek, C., and Robachek, C. (2005). Waorani Grief and the Witch-
Killer’s Rage: Worldview, Emotion, and the Anthropological
Explanation. Ethos, 33: 206–30.
Robbins, M. M. (2007). Gorillas: Diversity in Ecology and Behavior. In
C. J. Campbell, A. Fuentes, K. C. MacKinnon, and M. Panger, Eds.,
Primates in Perspective (pp. 305–21). Oxford University Press.
Roberts, A., and Ash, T. G., Eds. (2011). Civil Resistance and Power
Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the
Present. Oxford University Press.
Roberts, J. M. (1965). Oaths, Autonomic Ordeals, and Power. American
Anthropologist, 67: 186–212.
Robertson, C. C., and Klein, M. A. (1983). Women and Slavery in Africa.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Roosevelt, T. (1889). The Winning of the West: From the Alleghenies to the
Mississippi 1769–1776, vol. I. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and
Social Life. Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, R. (1980). Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society
and History. Stanford University Press.
Rosaldo, R. (1984). Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force
of Emotions. In S. Plattner and E. Bruner, Eds., Text, Play and Story: The
Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society (pp. 178–95).
Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.
Rosenblatt, P. C., Walsh, R. P., and Jackson, D. A. (1976). Grief and
Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New Haven, CT: HRAF Press
(Yale University).
Rosenfeld, R. and Messner, S. F. (1991). The Social Sources of Homicide in
Different Types of Societies. Sociological Forum, 6: 51–70.
Ross, M. H. (1993). The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in
Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Rosselli, J. (1988). The Castrati as a Professional Group and Social
Phenomenon, 1550–1850. Acta Musicologica, 60: 143–79.
Rousseau, P. (1985). Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth
Century Egypt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Royal Navy Articles of War. The 1749 Naval Act
(www.pdavis.nl/NDA1749.htm).
Ruggiero, G. (1985). The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in
Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rule, J. B. (1988). Theories of Civil Violence. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Ruthven, M. (1978). Torture: The Grand Conspiracy. London: Weidenfeld.
Sahlins, M. (1965). On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange. In M. Banton,
Ed., The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. Association of
Social Anthropologists, Monograph 1. London: Tavistock. Reprinted in
Marshall Sahlins (1972), Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine.
Sanday, P. R. (2007). Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and
Privilege on Campus, 2nd edn. New York University Press.
Sansom, B. (1982). The Sick Who Do Not Speak. In D. Parkin, Ed.,
Semantic Anthropology (pp. 183–96). London and New York: Academic
Press.
Schelling, T. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Schieffelin, E. L. (2004). The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the
Dancers, 2nd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schlegel, A., and Barry, H., III (1979). Adolescent Initiation Ceremonies: A
Cross-Cultural Code. Ethnology, 18: 199–210.
Schneider, J. (1971). Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access
to Resources in Mediterranean Societies. Ethnology, 10: 1–24.
Schubel, V. J. (1993). Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shi’a
Devotional Rituals in South Asia. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press.
Scott, A. O., Dargis, M., Stanley, A., and Suellentrop, C. (2013). Big Bang
Theories: Violence on Screen. New York Times, February 28
(www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/03/arts/critics-on-violence-in-
media.html?ref=arts#/#introduction).
Scully, D. (1990). Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted
Rapists. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Scully, D., and Marolla, J. (1985). “Riding the Bull at Gilley’s”: Convicted
Rapists Describe the Rewards of Rape. Social Problems, 32: 251–63.
Sehgal, S. (1999). Encyclopaedia of Hinduism: C–G, vol. II (pp. 491–2).
New Delhi: Sarup and Sons.
Sen, M. (2001). Death by Fire: Sati, Dowry Death, and Female Infanticide
in Modern India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Senechal de la Roche, R. (1996). Collective Violence as Social Control.
Sociological Forum, 11: 97–128.
Serres Güiraldes, A. M. (1979). La Estrategia de General Roca. Buenos
Aires: Pleamar [quoted passage translated by D. Maybury-Lewis].
Sharma, S. K. (1989). Hijras: The Labelled Deviants. New Delhi: Gian.
Shils, E. A., and Janowitz, M. (1948). Cohesion and Disintegration in the
Wehrmacht in World War II. Public Opinion Quarterly, 12: 280–315.
Shover, N. (1996). Great Pretenders: Pursuits and Careers of Persistent
Thieves. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Shover, N., and Honaker, D. (1992). The Socially Bounded Decision
Making of Persistent Property Offenders. Howard Journal of Criminal
Justice, 31: 276–93.
Shweder, R. A. (2002). “What About Female Genital Mutilation?” and Why
Understanding Culture Matters in the First Place. In R. A. Shweder, M.
Minow, and H. Rose Markus, Eds., Engaging Cultural Differences: The
Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (pp. 216–51). New
York: Russell Sage.
Sidanius, J., and Pratto, F. (1999). Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory
of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Silk, J. (2003). Practice Random Acts of Aggression and Senseless Acts of
Intimidation: The Logic of Status Contests in Social Groups.
Evolutionary Anthropology, 11: 221–5.
Simão, C., and Seibt, B. (2014). Gratitude Depends on the Relational Model
of Communal Sharing. PLoS ONE, 9(1): e86158.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086158.
Simmel, G. (1955). Conflict, and the Web of Group-Affiliations. “Conflict,”
Trans. K. H. Wolff; “The Web of Group-Affiliations,” Trans. R. Bendix.
Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Singer, A. (film maker) and Ryle, J. (anthropologist) (1981). Witchcraft
Among the Azande (film). Disappearing Worlds Series (UK).
Singer, P. (1981). The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Slack, A. T. (1988). Female Circumcision: A Critical Appraisal. Human
Rights Quarterly, 10: 437–86.
Slotter, E. and Finkel, E. (2011). I³ Theory: Instigating, Impelling, and
Inhibiting Factors in Aggression. In P. R. Shaver and M. Mikulincer,
Eds., Human Aggression and Violence: Causes, Manifestations, and
Consequences (pp. 35–52). Herzilya Series on Personality and Social
Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Smith, P., Stager, L. E., Greene, J. A., and Avishai, G. (2013). Age
Estimations Attest to Infant Sacrifice at the Carthage Tophet. Antiquity,
87: 1191–9.
Spencer, B., and Gillen, F. J. (1904). The Northern Tribes of Central
Australia. London: Macmillan.
Spencer, P. (1965). The Samburu: A Study of Gerontocracy in a Nomadic
Tribe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Stark, R. (1972). Police Riots: Collective Violence and Law Enforcement.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Staub, E. (1989). The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other
Group Violence. Cambridge University Press.
Staub, E. (1990). Moral Exclusion, Personal Goal Theory, and Extreme
Destructiveness. Journal of Social Issues, 46: 47–64.
Staub, E. (2000). Genocide and Mass Killings: Origins, Prevention,
Healing, and Reconciliation. Political Psychology, 21: 367–82.
Staub, E. (2006). Reconciliation After Genocide, Mass Killing, or
Intractable Conflict: Understanding the Roots of Violence, Psychological
Recovery, and Steps Toward a General Theory. Political Psychology, 27:
867–94.
Stephan, M. J., and Chenoweth, E. (2008). Why Civil Resistance Works:
The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. International Security, 33:
7–44.
Stevenson, W. (1995). The Rise of Eunuchs in Greco-Roman Antiquity.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5: 495–511.
Stevenson, W. (2002). Eunuchs in Early Christianity. In S. Tougher, Ed.,
Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (pp. 123–42). London: Duckworth.
Stouffer, S. A. (1949). The American Soldier: vol. I, Adjustment During
Army Life. Princeton University Press.
Strasser, M. (2013). Social Motives and Relational Models: Empirical
Studies on Drivers and Structures. Ph.D. dissertation, Faculty of
Economics, Technische Universität München
(http://mediatum.ub.tum.de?id=1166695).
Straus, M. A. (1980). The Marriage License as a Hitting License: Evidence
from Popular Culture, Law, and Social Science. In M. A. Straus and G. T.
Hotaling, Eds., Social Causes of Husband–Wife Violence (pp. 39–50).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Straus, M. A.(2000). Corporal Punishment by Parents: The Cradle of
Violence in the Family and Society. Virginia Journal of Social Policy and
the Law, 8: 7–60.
Straus, M. A., and Donnelly, D. A. (2001). Beating the Devil Out of Them:
Corporal Punishment in American Families and Its Effects on Children.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Stroebe, W., and Stroebe, M. S. (1987). Bereavement and Health: The
Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss. Cambridge
University Press.
Swidler, A. and Watkins, S. C. (2007). Ties of Dependence: AIDS and
Transactional Sex in Rural Malawi. Studies in Family Planning, 3: 147–
62.
Tam, T., Hewstone, M., Cairns, E., Tausch, N., Maio, G., and Kenworthy, J.
(2007). The Impact of Intergroup Emotions on Forgiveness in Northern
Ireland. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 10(1): 119–36.
Tatai, K. (1983). Japan. In L. A. Headley, Ed., Suicide in Asia and the Near
East. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Tatar, M. (1998). “Violent Delights” in Children’s Literature. In J.
Goldstein, Ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment
(pp. 69–87). New York: Oxford University Press.
ter Haar, B. J. (2011). Violence in Chinese Religious Culture. In A. R.
Murphy, Ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence
(pp. 249–62). New York: Blackwell.
Thalmann, W. G. (2004). “The Most Divinely Approved and Political
Discord”: Thinking About Conflict in the Developing Polis. Classical
Antiquity, 23: 359–99.
Thatcher, M. (1993). Downing Street Years. New York: HarperCollins.
Throop, C. J. (2010). Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of
Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Thurston, R. W. (2011). Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global
Perspective. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Tiedens, L. Z., Unzueta, M. M., and Young, M. J. (2007). An Unconscious
Desire for Hierarchy? The Motivated Perception of Dominance
Complementarity in Task Partners. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 93: 402–14.
Tolnay, S. E., Glenn, D., and Beck, E. M. (1996). Vicarious Violence:
Spatial Effects on Southern Lynchings, 1890–1919. American Journal of
Sociology, 102: 788–815.
Toohey, P. Death. In M. Gagarin, Ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient
Greece and Rome, vol. II (pp. 363–7). Oxford University Press.
Tougher, S. F. (1997). Byzantine Eunuchs: An Overview, with Special
Reference to Their Creation and Origin. In L. James, Ed., Women, Men
and Eunuchs (pp. 168–84). New York: Routledge.
Tougher, S. F. (2008). The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society.
London: Routledge.
Traninger, A. (2009). Whipping Boys: Erasmus’ Rhetoric of Corporeal
Punishment and Its Discontents. In J. F. van Dijkhuizen and K. A. E.
Enenkel, Eds., The Sense of Suffering: Construction of Physical
Punishment in Early Modern Culture (pp. 39–58). Leiden: Brill.
Trigger, B. G. (2003). Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative
Study. Cambridge University Press.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. Quarterly
Review of Biology, 46: 35–57.
Tsai, Shih-shan H. (1996). The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Tsang, J. A. (2002). Moral Rationalization and the Integration of Situational
Factors and Psychological Processes in Immoral Behavior. Review of
General Psychology, 6(1): 25–50.
Turiel, E. (1983). The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and
Convention. Cambridge University Press.
Turner, B. J., Chapman, A. L., and Layden. B. K. (2012). Intrapersonal and
Interpersonal Functions of Non Suicidal Self-Injury: Associations with
Emotional and Social Functioning. Suicide and Life-Threatening
Behavior, 42: 36–55.
Tyler, T., and Lind, E. (1992). A Relational Model of Authority in Groups.
In M. Zanna, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 25
(pp. 115–91). New York: Academic Press.
Tzu, Han Fei (1964) (original c. 235 BCE). Basic Writings, Trans. B.
Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ullrich, S., Paelecke, M., Kahle, I., and Marneros, A. (2003). Kategoriale
und dimensionale Erfassung von “psychopathy” bei deutschen
Straftätern. Nervenarzt, 74: 1002–8.
Valdez, A., Cepeda, A., and Kaplan, C. (2009). Homicidal Events Among
Mexican American Street Gangs: A Situational Analysis. Homicide
Studies, 13: 288–306.
Valeri, V. (1985). Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient
Hawaii, Trans. P. Wissing. University of Chicago Press.
Vandello, J. A., and Cohen, D. (2003). Male Honor and Female Fidelity:
Implicit Cultural Scripts that Perpetuate Domestic Violence. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 997–1010.
Vandello, J. A., and Cohen, D. (2008). Culture, Gender, and Men’s Intimate
Partner Violence. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 31: 652–
67.
van Dijkhuizen, J. F. (2009). Partakers of Pain: Religious Meanings of Pain
in Early Modern England. In J. F. van Dijkhuizen and K. A. E. Enenkel,
Eds., The Sense of Suffering: Construction of Physical Punishment in
Early Modern Culture (pp. 189–220). Leiden: Brill.
van Gennep, A. (1960/1909). The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago
Press.
Varshney, A. (2003). Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in
India. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Veblen, T. (2007/1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford University
Press.
Veilleux, Armand (1986). Monasticism and Gnosis in Egypt. In B. A.
Pearson and J. E. Goehring, Eds., The Roots of Egyptian Christianity
(pp. 271–306). Studies in Antiquity and Christianity. Philadelphia:
Fortress Press.
Vera Institute of Justice (1977). Felony Arrests: Their Prosecution and
Disposition in New York City’s Courts. New York: Vera Institute of
Justice.
Viki, G. T., Osgood, D., and Phillips, S. (2013). Dehumanization and Self-
Reported Proclivity to Torture Prisoners of War. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 49(3): 325–8.
Vittrup, B., and Holden, G. W. (2009). Children’s Assessments of Corporal
Punishment and Other Disciplinary Practices: The Role of Age, Race,
SES, and Exposure to Spanking. Journal of Applied Developmental
Psychology, 31: 211–20.
Volk, A., Camilleri, J. A., Dane., A., and Marini, Z. (2102). If, When, Why
Adolescent Bullying Is Adaptive. In T. K. Shackelford and V. A. Weekes-
Shackelford, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives
on Violence, Homicide, and War (pp. 270–88). Oxford University Press.
Vossekuil, B., Fein, R., Reddy, M., Borum, R., and Modzeleski, W. (2002).
The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications
for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States. Washington,
DC: United States Secret Service and United States Department of
Education.
Waegel, W. B. (1984). How Police Justify the Use of Deadly Force. Social
Problems, 32: 144–55.
Waldron, J. J., Lynn, Q., and Krane, V. (2011). Duct Tape, Icy Hot &
Paddles: Narratives of Initiation Onto US Male Sport Teams. Sport,
Education and Society, 16: 111–25.
Walker, J. S. (2004). Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of
Atomic Bombs Against Japan, rev. edn. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press.
Waller, A. L. (1988). Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in
Appalachia, 1860–1900. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.
Watkins, C., Ed. (2000). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-
European Roots, 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Waytz, A., and Epley, N. (2012). Social Connection Enables
Dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1): 70–
6.
Weekes-Shackelford, V. A. (2012). Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War. Review of
General Psychology, 16: 24–36.
Weinberg, T. S., Ed. (1995). S and M: Studies in Dominance and
Submission, rev. edn. New York: Prometheus Books.
Welch, D. A. (1993). Justice and the Genesis of War. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Westermarck, E. (1908). The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2
vols. London: Macmillan.
Westley, W. A. (1953). Violence and the Police. American Journal of
Sociology, 38: 34–41.
Whitman, J. Q. (2012). The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the
Making of Modern War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilcox, M. B. (2004). Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes
Fathers and Husbands. University of Chicago Press.
Wilkinson, D. L., and Fagan, J. (1996). The Role of Firearms in Violence
“Scripts”: The Dynamics of Events Among Adolescent Males. Law and
Contemporary Problems, 59: 55–90.
Wilkinson, S. J. (2009). Riots. Annual Review of Political Science, 12: 329–
43.
Wilson, M. (1951). Good Company and Violence: A Study of Nyakyusa
Age-Villages. Boston: Beacon.
Wilson, M. (1957). Rituals of Kinship Among the Nyakyusa. Published for
the International African Institute. London: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, T. A. (2002). Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius. History
of Religions, 41: 251–87.
Winerip, M. (2012). When a Hazing Goes Very Wrong. New York Times,
April 12 (www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/education/edlife/a-hazing-at-
cornell.html?partner=rssandemc=rss).
Winkler, G. (1982). The Origins and Idiosyncrasies of the Earliest Forms of
Asceticism. In W. Skudlarek, Ed., The Continuing Quest for God:
Monastic Spirituality in Tradition and Transition (pp. 9–43).
Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Witt, R. (2002). The Other Castrati. In S. Tougher, Ed., Eunuchs in
Antiquity and Beyond (pp. 235–60). London: Duckworth.
Wong, L., Kolditz, T. A., Millen, R. A., and Potter, T. M. (2003). Why They
Fight: Combat Motivation in the Iraq War. Carlisle Barracks, PA:
Strategies Studies Institute of the United States Army War College.
Wood, E. J. (2009). Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime
Rape Rare? Politics and Society, 37: 131–61.
Woodworth, M., and Porter, S. (2002). In Cold Blood: Characteristics of
Criminal Homicides as a Function of Psychopathy. Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 111: 436–45.
Wright, R. T., and Decker, S. H. (1997). Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups
and Street Culture. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Wyatt-Brown, B. (1982). Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old
South. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wyman, L., and Thorne, B. (1945). Notes on Navaho Suicide. American
Anthropologist, 47: 278–88.
Xella, P., Quinn, J., Melchiorri, V., and van Dommelen, P. (2013).
Phoenician Bones of Contention. Antiquity, 87: 1199–1207.
Xygalatas, D., Mitkidis, P., Fischer, R., Reddish, P., Skewes, J., Geertz,
A. W., Roepstorff, A., et al. (2013). Extreme Rituals Promote
Prosociality. Psychological Science, 24: 1602–5.
Yamagata, N. (1994). Homeric Morality. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill.
Young, F. (1985). Initiation Ceremonies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Status
Dramatization. New York: Macmillan.
Yu, J. (2012a). Self-Inflicted Violence. In R. L. Nadea, Ed., The Wiley-
Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions (pp. 461–80). Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Yu, J. (2012b). Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions,
1500–1700. Oxford University Press.
Yuki, M., and Schug, J. (2012). Relational Mobility: A Socioecological
Approach to Personal Relationships. In O. Gillath, G. Adams, and A.
Kunkel, Eds., Relationship Science: Integrating Evolutionary,
Neuroscience, and Sociocultural Approaches (pp. 137–51). Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Zaibert, L. (2006). Punishment and Retribution. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Zeid, A. A. M. (1966). Honour and Shame Among the Bedouins of Egypt.
In J. G. Peristiany, Ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of
Mediterranean Society (pp. 243–59). University of Chicago Press.
Ziegler, V. L. (2004). Trial by Fire and Battle in Medieval German
Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
Zillmann, D. (1998). The Psychology of the Appeal of Portrayals of
Violence. In J. Goldstein, Ed., Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent
Entertainment (pp. 179–211). New York: Oxford University Press.
 Index
25th Infantry Division 99
503rd Infantry Division 100

Abou Zahab 130

Abraham (Bible) 107–8
Abu Ghraib prison 102
Abu-Lughod 80
Abusharaf 185–6
accidents. See misfortune, explanation of
Achilles 86–8, 90, 223, 245–6
adolescents 220–1
Afghanistan 57, 77, 95, 102, 129
Africa 7, 55, 113, 115, 137–8, 163, 173, 184, 201, 220, 238, 246
Agamemnon 86–7, 89–90, 245–6
aggression 2
Ahlberg 185
Ahmen 256
Alcheringa (Dreamtime) 226
alcohol 149, 161
Algeria 80
Alperovitz 99
Al-Qaeda 57, 210
alternative means to regulate a relationship 260, 267–8, 277
alternative relationships 260, 267–8
altruism 6
altruistic suicide 219
Amalekites 209
Ambrumova 221
America x–xi, 19–21, 25, 44–6, 49, 54, 71–2, 80, 83, 96, 98–9, 102–3, 106,
109, 116, 123, 137, 144–5, 157, 170, 181, 195, 198, 200, 203, 206–8,
210–11, 215, 219, 226, 232, 234, 237, 247, 252, 259, 262–3, 267, 278–
80, 282–4, 293
 see also Indians, American; South, US; and specific states and cities
American Indians 219
American Psychiatric Association 226
Amnesty International 191
Andalusia 79
animals, non-human 287–8
antisocial personality disorder. See psychopathy
Antoun 79–80
Apache 221
Aphrodite 88–9, 223
Apollo 86, 89
Aquino 156
Arabs 77–80, 95, 130
Aragon 79
Arapaho 125
arbitrary conventional symbolism 257
Argentina 96, 211
Ariely 299
Arjuna 113
Arlachi 68
Armenian genocide 208
Armstrong 55
arson 198
Articles of War, British Royal Navy 47–8
Arunta 227, 237
asceticism 121, 126–8, 251
Ash 278, 280
Ashanti 118, 218
Assadi 151
Assiniboine 125, 234, 237
Assyria 187
Atargatis 121
Athena 89–90
Atiya 185
atomic bombs 99, 252
Atran 14, 104–5, 299
attention to a constitutive transformation 260
attention to a transformation 260–4
Attractiveness of Sexual Aggression scale 170
audience for civil disobedience 280
Augustine 127
Aunt Polly (character in Tom Sawyer) 3
Auschwitz 213
Austin 9
Australia 181, 184, 198, 210, 221, 226, 230
Australian Aboriginals 181, 226–31
authority ranking xii, 18–25, 28–9, 31–3, 39–40, 42–52, 56, 58–9, 61–3,
65–6, 69–73, 75–6, 84, 88, 90–1, 94, 96–7, 100–2, 105, 107–19, 123,
126–8, 160, 163–4, 167–78, 181, 185–6, 195–6, 198–200, 206–8, 211,
215, 218–20, 240, 244–6, 248–50, 254–5, 260, 267, 280, 291, 300
automatic. See impulsivity
aversion to committing violence 3–4
Avishai 119
Ayers 207
Azande 55
Aztecs 44, 94, 117–18, 123, 265

badass 247
Bahá’í 120
Bahrain 130
Baker 49
Baltimore 197
Banaji 19
Bandura 156–7
Bangladesh 172
Banks 120
Bargh 169
Barry 180
Barth 80
Bartlett 53–5
Bastian 158
Bates 80
Batey 69, 118
Bauman 212–13
Baumeister 4, 13–14, 150, 152–6
BDSM – bondage and dominance or sadomasochism 167
beating in 181
Bedouins 79
Beevor 174
Belgium 212
Bell 226
Benedict 123–5, 234–6
benge poison oracle 55
Benin 44, 94
Benn 121
Berbers 80
bereavement 234–42
Berkeley 49
Bernstein 71
Betz 36
Bhagavad-Gita 62, 113
Bhairava 51
Bible 44, 51, 110–12, 116, 163, 255, 278
see also Christianity
Billy the Kid (William Henry McCarty) 247
Bimin-Kuskusmin 181
Birmingham, Alabama 279
Bissinger 70
Bjorklund 14
Black 13, 29, 61, 164–5, 198, 206, 219–20, 273, 297
Blackfoot 125, 234, 237
Black-Michaud 61, 77
Blight 98
Bloch 55, 181
Bloom 288–9
Bloomfield 53, 55
Boas 234–5, 246
Boden 13, 154
bodies 253–4
Boehm 288
Bohannan 118, 201, 219–20
Bohemian immigrants to Texas 208
Bonanno 224
Bonnie and Clyde 247
Boston 197
bo’s’n 31, 47
Bouazizi, Mohammed 217
Bourdieu 80
Bowlby 224–5
Boyd 4
Brahma 51
Brandenburg 45
Brawner rule 293–4
Brazil 193
Brazos County, Texas 208
Brennan 152
Briseis 86, 90, 223, 245
Britain 47–8, 62–3, 72–3, 85, 95–6, 101, 200, 209–10, 219, 262, 264
Brothers of the Blood 129
Brown 54, 64–5, 112, 120, 245, 279
Bryant 76
Buddhism 120–1, 217, 219
bullying 72, 203
burglary 244
Burkina Faso. See Moose
Burr, Aaron 83
Bush, George H. W. 96
Bushman 13
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 247
Byzantine Empire 187–9

Cesar 211
Calabria 67
California 199
Calley, William 102
Cambodia 172
Cambodian genocide 209
Campbell 79, 82
Canaan 79
Canaanites 111
Canada 151, 217
Capone Al 247
Carlsmith 36, 194
Carmichael 49
Carthaginians 119
cartoons 263
Castano 158
caste systems 206
castration 121, 187–9
catharsis 232
Catholicism 77, 210
cattle raiding 246
Caucasus 95
cercopithecine 287
Chammah 266
Chapleau 169
Chapman 218
Charlemagne 54
Chelkowski 129–30
Cheney 288
Chenoweth 280–1
Cheyenne 124
Chicago 248, 283
chimpanzees 287
China xi, 38–9, 42–4, 81, 94, 113, 115–16, 120–3, 172, 187, 189, 208, 217,
220
Chirot 4, 14, 208–11
Chou dynasty, China 117
Christianity xi, 46, 53–4, 56, 111–12, 120–1, 126–30, 188, 209, 261–2
Christians 44, 68, 120, 127–9
Chryseis 86, 89
Chryses 86, 89
Cillessen 72
civil disobedience 278–81
Civil Rights Bill 279
civil rights movement 278–80
Clark 207
Clayton 18, 288
Clinton-Sherrod 170
Coast Salish 237
Cohen 10–11, 14, 79, 84, 128, 159, 164, 174–6, 181
Coid 151
Colleen 69, 118
Collins 4, 42–3, 62, 111, 128, 181, 192
Colson 270
combat, trial by 55–6
combinations of relationships. See metarelational models
commitment 240
common knowledge 285–6
communal sharing xii, 18–19, 21–4, 31–3, 40, 50, 52, 54, 63, 65–7, 69–71,
73, 75, 77, 79, 81–2, 86, 88, 91–2, 97, 100–3, 105, 114–16, 118–20,
126–8, 130, 161, 164, 167, 175–82, 184, 186, 189, 192, 195–6, 201,
205–10, 214–17, 219, 231, 246, 248, 253–4, 260, 267, 277, 280, 290–
1, 300
comparison across cultures 297
complementarity 17
concentration camps 94
concrete ostensive operations 255–6
conduct of a relationship 23
conflicting relationships 40
conformation systems 252–7
Confucianism 38
Confucius 117
Congo 45, 174–5, 182, 215
Congo Free State 208
Connole 103
Connor 279
Conroy 191
Constantinople 187
constitution versus conduct of a relationship 266–7
constitutive phases xxiii, 22–5
consubstantial assimilation 253–4
ConSysts. See conformation systems
controlling violence 276–86
Cooney 13, 43, 49, 201, 268, 270, 273
Coote 210
Copes 80, 83–4, 248
Coptic monks 187
Corbett 221
corporal punishment 43–5, 71
costs and benefits 21, 98, 100, 153, 155, 161, 257
Cottingham 39
Court-martial 47–8
Crachiolo 129, 262
Crank 50
creation of a relationship 23, 75
Crelinsten 192
Crete 79, 246
crime 57–8
Crimean War 96
criminal cultures 85–6
criticality of a relationship 260–1
cross-cutting ties 269–70, 283–4
Crow 124–5, 234, 237
crucifixion 262
Crusades 112, 209
Cuddy 158
cultural implementations xxii, 21–2, 25, 136–45, 258–9, 284, 286
culture xxiii–iv, 2, 7–8
Cure Violence program 283
Cybele 121
Cyprus 79

Dahomey 118
Dakota 124
Daly 198
Darley 36
Darvi 193
Davis 243–4
death. See misfortune, explanation of
Deci 299
Decker 67, 181, 199, 246, 248–9
defense of a relationship. See protection of a relationship
dehumanization 156–9, 210, 214
see also null relationship
Deibert 199
deities. See supernatural beings
DeJong 220
del Mastro 120
Delaney 79
Denig 234
Denmark 152
depression 220
Desert Storm 143
deterrence 292
de Waal 28, 287
DeWall 155
Diehl 191
Dieserud 221
Dijkhuizen 129
Dillinger John 247
disengagement 156–9
dishonor. See honor
diversity of moral motives 8–9
Dobash 14
Dolan 95
Dollard 155
dominance 28 see authority ranking
Dominance in Sex scale 172
Dominicans 129
Donnelly 44, 191
Douglas 93, 219
dueling 83, 144, 251
Dukakis 132–3
Dulaney 180
Dumézil 68
Dundas 120
Dunkle 173
Dunning 62
Durkheim 38, 43, 218–19, 227, 260, 302
duty 93

East Asia 62, 219

Eburones 211
Ecuador 236
Edel 7
Edging 123
Egypt 21, 37, 51, 79, 94, 114, 117, 126, 187, 220
Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom 44
Eidelson 95
einherjar 69
Eckstein 166
El Dareer 186
Eller 112, 128–9, 181
Ellison 44
Elwin 221
Emery 288
emotions xxiii, 136, 146–7, 158
enacting a relationship. See conduct of a relationship
ending violence 276–86
enforcing a relationship. See conduct of a relationship
Engelstein 121
Engh 288
England 48, 55, 129, 151, 262
enhancement of a relationship. See conduct of a relationship
Enlil 51
Entfernung (removal) 213
Epley 157
equality matching xii, 18, 20–2, 29, 32–3, 40, 56, 61, 69, 71, 75, 83, 90, 96–
7, 100–1, 105–6, 161, 167, 194–6, 205, 214–15, 240, 244–6, 249, 255–
6, 260, 267, 280, 290–1, 300
equality motive. See equality matching
eris 62
Eronen 152
ethics. See prescriptive ethics
ethnic cleansing. See genocide
eunuchs 121, 187–9
Europe x, 10, 13, 19, 25, 28, 44–5, 53–5, 62, 64, 72, 83, 94, 100, 112, 120,
129, 137, 208, 212, 215, 218, 259, 262
Evans-Pritchard 55, 143, 205, 270
Everett 221
evil motive 294–5
evolution xxiv
excuses. See justifications
executions 262
experience of violence xxiii
experiments to do 298–300
explosiveness 274
eye for eye, tooth for tooth 255

Falklands War 95–6

Fallers 220
Fanon 193
Farès 78, 80
Fast and the Furious, The 247
fasting 120, 123, 129, 140
Faturechi 50
Felsen 153, 198
Feuding 61
filial slicing, gegu 122
Finkel 14, 155
Finland 152
Fiske xv–vii, 1, 4, 6–7, 13, 18–19, 22, 25, 28, 43, 75, 105, 109, 119, 130,
135, 145–6, 161, 169, 180, 202, 252, 276, 288, 290
Flagellation 129–30, 251
Flanagan 290
Flett 217
flogging 48, 144
flood 51
flossing 248
flower wars, xochiyaoyotl 118
Flynn 166, 264
Fogel 174
football (American) 70, 144, 265
football hooligans 62–3
Forer 176
Forester 47
Forsyth 53, 80, 83
Fox 203
France 95
Franciscans 129
Franco-Prussian War 95
Frank 135, 241, 266
fraternities 176, 182
French Revolution 262
French wars of religion 209
Freyja 69
Friedman 116
Friedrich 86
Fulton 128
Funk 263
fustuarium 103

Gallonio 129, 262

gammona (mother’s brothers) 226–7
Gandhi 281
gang rape 175–7
gangs 62, 65–8, 80, 176, 181, 282–4
Garandeau 72
Gardner 294
Garland 224
Geller 49
general explanation, in contrast to particularism 302–4
genital modification (circumcision, excision, infibulation) 180–1, 184–7
genocide 208–12, 252
Georgia 207
Gerhardsen 221
Germans 94
Germany xviii, 95–6, 102, 151, 209, 211–12
Gershoff 44
gestalt 17
Giangreco 98–9
Gibson 99–100
Gillen 226–8, 230
Gillespie 123
Gilmore 78–9, 82
Ginat 79
Giner-Sorolla 158
Ginges 14, 104–5, 158, 299
Ginzburg 207
Giovannini 78–9
girls, fighting among 72–3
Gisu 220
Glasenapp 120
Glucklich 120, 127, 180
Gluckman 270
gods. See supernatural beings
Godshalk 207
Goldberg 262
Goldstein 217, 263
Goodyear-Smith 165
Gorgias 191
gorillas 288
Gough 205
Gould 13, 28, 198
Graham 14, 166, 264
Grand Theft Auto V 247
Graves 206, 224
Gray 10, 156
Great Mutiny of 1857 209
Great Plains 123–6, 234
Greece xxv, 12, 55, 62, 79, 82, 86, 88–91, 94, 115, 118, 121, 126, 163, 189,
223–5, 272
Greenberg 288
Greene 119
Greitemeyer 158
Grem 207
Greven 44
Grey, Lord 210
grief 234–42
Griggs 207
Grinnell 234
Grossman 4
Gross-Ventre 125
Gruenbaum 187
guardian spirit 123–6
Guarendi 44
guest–host relationship (xenia) 81–2, 86, 90
Guillaumont 126
Gulf Wars 96, 103

Haidt 7, 9, 14, 147

Haines 221
Hakola 152
Halawi 38
Hale 171–2
Hales 121
Haliburn 221
Hamas 105
Hamilton, Alexander 83
Hamlet xxii, 216
Hamlin 288–9
Hamman 126
Hara 53, 55
hari-kari 117
Haritos-Fatouros 151, 192–4
Harkavy 95
harm. See pain and suffering
Hartnett 283
Hartung 110
Hasday 170
Haslam 18, 156, 158
Hauser 156
Haw 225
Hawaii 117–18
Hawley 218, 238
Hawton 225
Headley 220
Heald 181
Heat (movie) 247
Hector 87
Heimann 97
Heine 298
hell 51
Henberg 39
Henrich 298
Hera 89–90
Herat 211
Herdt 180
Herero 211
Herzfeld 79, 82, 246
Hewitt 217
Heyman 299
Hidatsa 125
hierarchy motive. See authority ranking
high stakes. See raising the stakes
hijras 189
Hinduism 12, 51, 62, 80, 120–1, 137, 219
Hindus 270
Hinton 209–10
Hiroshima 21, 99, 252
Hirshleifer 58
Hispanic societies 62
history xxiii–iv
Hitler 210–12
Hizbullah 97
Hobbes, Thomas 270
Hochstetler 80, 83
Hodgins 152
Holden 44
Holekamp 288
Holocaust, the 212–13
Homer 62, 223–4
homicide 29, 39, 66–8, 77, 151–2, 154, 196–205, 240, 282–4
see also lynching
honor 62–6, 77–93, 95, 106, 198, 251, 265
honor killing 79, 88, 251
hooligans. See football hooligans
Horowitz 65
host–guest relationship (xenia). See guest–host relationship
Houston 199
Howarth 185
Huggins 192–4
Hughes 118
Huguenots 209
Human Relations Area Files 298
human sacrifice 12 see sacrifice
humiliation 97, 118, 169, 200, 234, 242
Husain ibn Ali 129
Hutu 95, 208–10, 212
ten commandments 210
Hyams 54–5
hyenas, spotted 288

iconic physics of magnitudes and dimensions 254–5

iconography, Christian 262
Iga 220
ikuntera (sister’s son) 226–7
Iliad, the i, 33, 86–92, 223, 245–6, 261
illegitimate violence 15–16, 75–6, 145–6, 284–6, 296
illness. See misfortune, explanation of
Ilongot 232, 237
immoral violence. See illegitimate violence
impulsivity xxiii, 145–9, 154–5
Inca 44, 94, 114, 117
indexicality 253–4
India 53, 55, 129, 189, 209, 218, 220–1, 238
Indians, American 71, 120, 123–6, 211, 221, 234–7
Indonesia 105, 173
inductive search for patterns 297–8
inevitability of violence not implied 276
infanticide 12
infants 288–9
Ingle 69, 71, 116
inhibition of violence by metarelational models 269–74
initiation 144, 179–87, 251
Injun Joe (Tom Sawyer character) 35
injury. See misfortune, explanation of
Inquisition 112
insanity defense 292–5
instrumentality xxvi, 249
see also rationality
Interrupters, The, documentary 65, 196, 283
intimate partner violence 163–7
intoxication. See alcohol
Iran 151
Iraq 96, 103, 129
Ireland 71, 210
Irish 210
Irish immigrants to Texas 208
Isaac (Bible) 107–8
Islam xi, 77–80, 105, 112, 120, 127, 129–30
Israel 96–7, 104, 111, 153, 157
Israelites 51, 108, 110, 112, 209
Italian immigrants to Texas 208
Italy 29, 67, 79

Jackson 175, 224

Jackson, Andrew 83
Jacobs 49, 66, 245, 247–8
Jains 120, 140, 219
James, Jesse 247
Jamjoom 256
Jamous 80
Janoff-Bulman 194
Janowitz 103
Japan 94, 98–100, 117, 220
Japanese 24, 98–9, 215
Japanese macaques 288
Jeffrey 80
Jenkins 110, 112
Jerusalem 158
Jewkes 14, 172–3
Jews 32, 54, 102, 112, 184, 186, 209–10, 212
Johnson, Lyndon 279
Johnston 263
Jordan 79, 220
Jost 19
Joyce 123, 135
judicial combat. See combat, trial by
judicial ordeal. See ordeal, trial by
Jump Out Boys 50
justifications 9–10

Kaeuper 64–5
Kahle 151
Kaitish 226, 237
Kaltman 224
Kaluli 231–2, 237
Kant, Immanuel 290
Karatnycky 281
Katz 66–7, 200–1, 246, 248
Kavka 266, 270
Kbyles 80
Keifer 80
Kelly 46, 174, 183
Kelman 192–3
Kendon 227
Kennedy, David M. 197, 282–4
Kennedy, John F. 279
Kerr 53
Khmer 210
Kiernan 210
King, Rodney 49
Kirby 182
Kleeman 115–17
Klein 163
Klonsky 217
Knauft 202
knights 64–5
Knobe 159
Knox 44
Koestner 299
Kohistani 80
Komter 243
Kopytoff 163
Koran 51, 110
Korsten 128
Kramrisch 51
Krane 182
Krishna 113
Kubrin 199–200
Kurdistan 95
Kuwait 96
Kwakiutl 234–6, 237
Kyushu 98

La Fontaine 220
laboratory research to do 298–300
Laidlaw 165
Lang 98
Langbein 54
Lardil 230, 237
Las Vegas 199
Latin America 77, 80
law xxiii, 292–5
Law, Robin 115
law, scientific 301–4
Layden 218
Laye-Gindhu 217
Lazreg 191
Lea 54
Leahy 98
Lebanon 97
Lebow 94
Leeson 54–5
Lefkowitz 89–91
legitimacy of non-violence 281
legitimacy of violence, perception of 282–4
Lehman 76
Leidner 157
Leitenberg 94, 208
Leslie 159
Lester 49–50, 120, 221
Leviathan, The 270
Levin 203
LeVine 270
Levinson 44, 165, 180
Lévi-Strauss 243
Levy 231
Lewin 116
Lewis 38–9, 81, 94, 115–17, 211, 215, 264
liberal ideology 291
Liberman 96
Libya 96
Lienhardt 274
liget (anger) 232
Lightfoot 121
Lind 19
Linder 49
Lindholm 80
Lindow 68–9
Linhares de Albuquerque 181
Lisak 170–2
Lison-Tolosana 79
Lodge 83
Lorenz 123
Los Angeles 49–50, 198, 247
Löwenheim 97
Lowie 124
Luckenbill 198–9
Lucretia 217
Lundsgaarde 199, 201
lynching 206–8, 251
Lynn 182

M’Naghten Rules 292–3

MacArthur, Douglas 93
MacNair 4
Mafia 67–8
magic 202
Mahākāla 51
Maharashtra, India 221
Mai Mai 46, 174–5, 182–3
Malinowski 243
Mandan 125
Mandelbaum 80, 82
Manning 219–20
Maria 221
Mark 76
market pricing 18, 20–2, 33, 39–40, 97, 99, 105, 124, 126, 161, 193, 195,
212–13, 252, 256–7, 260, 267, 273, 280, 291, 300
Marneros 151
Marolla 171–2, 176
Marshall 99
Martin 44
martyrs 128–9, 262, 264
Marvin 77, 116
mass murder 202–4
matam, chest beating 129
Mathew 4, 278
matrilines, non-human 288
Matthew (New Testament) 221, 278
Mauritius 183
Mauss 244
Maxfield 197
Maya 44, 94, 114, 117
Mayans 118, 123
Maybury-Lewis 214
Mayhew 11
Maynard Smith 266
McCall 243, 248
McCauley 4, 14, 94, 96, 208–11
McKenna 185
McLatchie 158
McLoughlin 44
McNamara, Robert 50, 98, 214
McVicar 86
meaningful life 291
mediation 273
Mediterranean 55, 61–2, 77–8, 80, 82, 85, 114, 126
Mednick 152
Meeker 79
Meinardus 187
Meisel 120
Melchiorri 119
Meloy 202–3
Menand 279
Menelaus 86, 88, 246
mens rea 294–5
mental illness 204
Mesopotamia 44, 51, 94, 117, 126
Messner 165
Metamura 187
metarelational models xxiii, 25–33, 39–40, 56–8, 61–4, 67, 73–4, 97, 106,
109–10, 119, 122, 153, 187, 205, 261, 269–74, 277, 283–4, 288–9
methodology 297–8
Mexico 118
Middle Ages x, 10, 53–5, 64, 100, 102, 111–12, 120, 127, 129, 245
Middle East 61
Middleton 49, 274
Midianites 110, 209
Miers 163
Miethe 198–9
Mikhail 10, 156
Milgram 4, 108
military 42, 47–9, 57, 81, 94, 101–6, 142, 144, 173, 180, 187, 191–3, 201,
216, 218, 252, 257, 280
military officers 219
Miller 44
Millon 151
Ming dynasty 187–8
misfortune, explanations of 52–3, 90–1, 201–2, 238–9
mobbing. See bullying
mobility, relational. See alternative relationships
Model Penal Code, American Law Institute 293–4
modulation of a relationship. See conduct of a relationship
Moio 193
monasticism 112, 121, 126–7
Moore 289
Moose (“Mossi”) 8, 114–16, 119, 137, 186
moral disengagement. See disengagement
moral, definition of 7
Mornington Island 230
Morocco 80
Mortal Kombat (video game) 263
Moses 51, 110–11
motives, multiplicity of 5, 8
mourning 234–42
mourning a relationship 24
movies 247, 263
Mozi 81
Muehlenkamp 218
Muharram 129–30
Muir 25, 45–6, 72
Muller 104
Munger 71
murder. See homicide
Murdock 298
Murphy 62–3
Muslims 270
see also Islam
My Lai 102

Nader 270
Nagasaki 21, 99, 252
Naimark 174
Nanda 189
Naples 79, 101
Napoleonic Wars 95
Native Americans. See Indians, American
natural selection. See evolution
naturalistic fallacy 289
Navaho 221
Nazis 102, 211, 213
Near East 62, 189
Negron 220
Nelson, Horatio 48, 101
Nesse 58
Nevels 208
New Mexico 129
New York City 169, 198, 220
New Zealand 165
Newton’s laws of motion 301
Nicolson 47–8, 101
Nielssen 296
Nietzsche 249
Nisbet 19
Nisbett 14, 80, 84
Nivette 96
Noah 51
Nock 217
nomothetic approach 302–4
non-suicidal self-injury 122, 217–18, 223–31, 234, 251
non-violent protest. See civil disobedience
Norenzayan 298
Normans 55
norms xxii
Norse 68–9
Northern Ireland 95
North Korea 208
North Vietnamese 215
Norway 221
Nosek 19
Nuer 142–3, 205
null relationship 212–15
see also dehumanization
Nyakyusa 232–4, 237

O’Brian 47
obedience. See authority ranking
Odin 68–9
Olivola 182
Olmec 123
Omaha 234, 237
Opotow 18
Orcutt 226
ordeal, trial by 53–5
Oslo 221
ostentatious display 248
Oswald 169
Otterman 191
Ottoman Turkey 189
Overholser 220
Overing 201

Packer 293
Padgett 202
Paelecke 151
Paes-Machado 181
pain and suffering 10–12
pain games 72
Pakistan 77, 80, 129–30, 220
Palestine 79, 96, 104–5, 153, 157
Papachristos 66–7
Papua New Guinea 173, 181, 231
parents i, 8, 19, 25, 42, 44–6, 49, 58, 71, 82, 122, 137, 153–4, 179, 181,
186–7, 203, 221, 234, 255, 259, 274, 291, 295, 298
Paris (Trojan prince) 86
Parkes 225
Parsons 79
partner violence 163–7, 199, 251
Patai 80
Patroclus 223
Pawnee 234, 237
Petee 202
Peters 54, 191
Petersen 106
Petit 288
Phang 103
Philippines 232
pïïnti (homicidal rage) 236
Pinault 129
Pinker xv, 12, 38, 259, 267, 273, 286, 297
Pisani 198
Pitt-Rivers 77, 79
Plate 193
Plato 191, 261
Plyley 53
Pol Pot 210
Polanyi 244
police 37, 48–50, 144, 258
Polk 198
Polybius 103
Polynesia 219
Porter 151
Poseidon 90
Postovalova 221
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 225, 263, 295
Pratto 19
pre-emptive violence. See protection of a relationship
preos. See cultural implementations
prescriptive ethics xv, xxiii, 1, 5, 276, 285, 289–92
presidents, US 279
Press 79
Priam 87
Price 266
primates, non-human 287–8
prisons 178
Pritchard 21, 58, 142, 201–2
proportionality motive. See market pricing
protection of a relationship 23, 35–40, 57, 260
Pryor 169
psychoanalytic theory 225
psychopathy 150–2, 301
punishment 23, 35–40, 139–40, 219, 243, 289, 292
see also redress of a relationship
Punjabis 130

Qin 39
Quakers 272
Quebedeaux 70
questions to ask to understand violence 304
Quinn 119

racial violence, US. See lynching

Rae 270
Ragnarök 68–9
Rai xv–vii, 1, 4, 6, 18, 43, 75, 109, 136, 146, 276, 290
raising the stakes 240, 260, 264–6
Rank 58
rape 86, 154, 168–78
Rapoport 266
Rassam 80
rationality 148, 152 see reflectivity
Raymond 169
rectification of a relationship. See redress of a relationship
recursion 29, 32, 88
redress of a relationship 13, 23–4, 25, 30, 35–40, 57, 76, 200, 250, 260, 296
reducing violence 276–86
reflectivity 146–9
Regoeczi 198–9
relational models xvi–xvii, xxiii, 5–6, 18–21
religion. See supernatural beings
remorse 292
reputation 65
Reservoir Dogs 247
respect 65
restorative violence 24
retaliation 23
see also redress of a relationship
retribution, retributive justice. See redress of a relationship
revenge 23
see also redress of a relationship
Richters 167
Ricks 180
Ringrose 121, 187–8
Robarchek 236–7
robbery 243–50
Robbins 288
Roberts 55, 278, 280–1
Robertson 163
Robinson 36
Roman Empire 189, 262
rooks 288
Rosaldo 232
Rosenblatt 224
Rosenfeld 165
Ross 270
Roth 170–2
Rousseau, Phillip 126
Royal Navy, British 47–8
Rudra 51
Ruggiero 79
Rule 104, 106
Rules of Engagement 143
Russia 96, 121, 221
Russo 153
Ruthven 54
Rwanda 152, 212
Rwandan genocide 208, 212, 277
Ryan 299
Ryle 55

sacrifice 12, 107–8, 113–19, 122, 238, 251, 264

sadism 150
Sahih 51
Sahlins 244
sailors 19, 31, 47–8, 254
saints 128–9
Sanday 176–7, 182
Sansom 227
Sarakatsani 79, 82
Sarkissian 290
Saudi Arabia 256
scarification 182
Schelling 58
Schieffelin 96, 202, 231
Schlegel 180
Schneider 14, 77, 270
school shootings 203
schoolmasters 19, 25, 44–5, 58, 71, 139, 295
Schubel 130
Schubert 130, 169, 252
Schwartz 65
Scotland 56, 72, 75
Scott 14, 104, 262
Scottish 210
scourging. See flagellation
Scully 171–2, 176
Second Lebanon War 97
Seed 288
Sehgal 51
Seibt 146
self-control 298
self-injury. See non-suicidal self-injury
self-mutilation, shouzie 122
self-regulation. See impulsivity
self-sacrifice to supernatural beings 119–31
Selma, Alabama 279
Senechal de la Roche 207
sentencing 292
Sextus 217
sexual abuse of children 178
sexual assault. See rape
Seyfarth 288
Shafir 182
Shakespeare xxii–iii, 216
shame. See honor
Shang dynasty 44, 94, 115, 117, 122
Sharma 189
Shia Islam 129–30, 210
Shils 103
Shiva 51, 219
Shover 248–9
Sicily 78–9, 101
Sidanius 19
Siebert 288
Sierra Leone 174–5
signaling. See raising the stakes
Sikh 80
Sikweyiya 173
Simão 146
Singapore 220
Singer 18, 55
Skoptsky 121
Slack 185
slasher films 263
slavery 163–4, 187, 215
Slotter 14
Smart 13, 154
Smith 119, 165
social control 13, 219
social relationship, definition 17
Soga 220
soldiers 219
Sontag 261–2
Sood 194
Sophocles 191
sorcery 52–3, 58, 201–2, 221, 229, 235, 239, 242
South Africa 173
South America 193
South Asia 80, 189, 206
South, US 80, 83–5, 170, 172, 206–8, 278–80
Soviet Union 208
Spain 79
Spartans 86
Spencer 226–8, 230, 246
sports 69–71
sports team initiations 182
spousal violence. See partner violence
Spring and Autumn Period, China 116
Sri Lanka 173, 220
SS, Nazi 212
St. Louis, Missouri 181, 199, 245
Stager 119
stakes in a relationship. See raising the stakes
Stark 49–50
state 57, 270
Staub 18, 152, 209, 212, 277
Stephan 280–1
Stevenson 121, 187
Stockmeier 220
Stouffer 103
Strack 169
Straus 44, 165
Stroebe 225
structural violence 15
Sudan 55, 142–3, 185, 187
suffering. See misfortune, explanation of; pain and suffering
suicide 12, 117, 216–17, 218
suicide bombers 105
suicide, moralistic 219
Sun Dance 123–4
Sung dynasty 187
supernatural beings 6, 17, 50–7, 68–9, 86, 88–91, 93, 107–31, 140, 186,
209, 219, 224, 238–9, 251
Swat Pukhtun 80
Swidler 138
swift and certain sanctions 282
Syria 121, 126–7, 220

tackling 70
Tahitians 231, 237
Tait 274
Taiwan 220
Taliban 57
Tam 158
Tanzania 232
Tatai 117
Tatar 263
Taylor 270
teachers. See schoolmasters
television 263
ter Haar 115, 117, 122
termination of a relationship 24
terrorism 104–5, 251
Texas 208
Thalmann 62
Thatcher, Margaret 95
Thelma and Louise 247
Thetis 90
Thierry 288
Thorne 221, 278
Throop 12
Thurston 207
Tibetan monks 217
Tiedens 19
Tiihonen 152
Toch 49
Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of 3–4, 35, 60–1
Toohey 224
torture 154, 157, 191–5, 251
Tougher 187–8
Traninger 45
transformation of a relationship. See conduct of a relationship
trauma. See post-traumatic stress disorder
trial by combat 251
trial by ordeal 252
Trigger 44, 51, 68, 94, 117, 123
Trojan War 86–92, 245–6, 269
Truman, Harry 21, 98–9, 214
truth and reconciliation 296
Tsai 187
Tsang 9
Tunisia 217
Turiel 156
Turkey 79, 189
Turks 79
turn the other cheek 278
Turner 218
Tussaud, Madame 262
Tutsis 95, 208–10, 212
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) 4, 35, 61
Tyler 19
Tzu 42

Uganda 212
UK 224
Ullrich 151
United States. See America
utilitarian moral reasoning 98
unity motive. See communal sharing
universals xxii
Unmatjera 226, 237
Unzueta 19
Uruguay 193
Usual Suspects, The 247

Valdez 39, 66–7

Valeri 117–18
Valhöll 69
Vandello 164
Van den Weghe 221
van Dommelen 119
Van Gennep 184
Varshney 270
Veblen 244
Veilleux 127
vengeance 37–9
see also redress of a relationship
Venice 71, 79
Vera Institute 170, 201
vervet monkeys 288
Victoria, Australia 198
video games 247, 263
Vietnam War 99
Vietnamese 210
Viki 158
Vikings 118
violence
definition of 3
Virginia 171
Vittrup 44
Vohs 14
von Bayern 288
von Trotha 211
Vossekuil 203
voter-registration drives 278

Waegel 49
Waldron 182
Wales 151
Walsh 224
Walters 170
Waorani 236–7
war 93–103, 118, 143, 174–5, 245, 262, 264
Warramunga 227–30, 237
Warring-States Period in China 39, 81
Watkins 138
Waytz 157
Weber, Max 212, 302
Weinberg 167
WEIRD people 298
Weitzer 199–200
Wekerle 217
Welch 96
Westermarck 12, 120–1, 219–20
Westley 49
Whitman 94, 245
Widow Douglas (Tom Sawyer character) 35
Wilcox 44–5
Wilkinson 106, 198
William of Auvergne 11
Williams 62–3, 221
Wilson 115, 198, 232, 234
Winkler 126
Winnebago 125
Wintrup 182
witchcraft xvi, 52–5, 58, 201–2, 221, 239, 242, 251–2
Wong 103, 290
Wood 221
Woodworth 151
World War I 95–6
World War II 21, 95–6, 98, 102
Wright 66, 245–9
Wyatt-Brown 80
Wyman 221
Wynn 288–9

Xella 119
xenia. See guest–host relationship
Xygalatas 183

Yamagata 86
Yap 11, 120
York, Thomas S. 202
Yoruba 44, 94, 117
Young 19, 180–1
youths, fighting among 71–3
Yu 121–3
Yugoslavia 95

Zaibert 39
Zeelenberg 296
Zeid 80
Zeus 89–90
Zhou 42, 115–16
Zhou dynasty 42
Ziegler 55
Zillmann 262–3
Zimbardo 192–4
Zukerman 106