Tage Rai on "Why people think their violence is morally justified"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 235 - Tage Rai on "Why people think their violence is morally justified"

"'Most acts of violence that people commit are motivated by moral feelings; that people feel, when they commit violence, most of the time, that what they're doing is defending morality. Their violence is righteous, basically.'...

'Examples that I would come up with would be… intimate partner violence might be a good example. And tied to that, things like sexual assault.So you know, I think a standard approach in the literature might have considered that, "Well, really what's driving that is an instrumental desire for sexual satisfaction," or something. And in fact you might think that if the perpetrator doesn't even necessarily recognize this victim as a human being and therefore they're morally disengaged from the act, they're just trying to get sexual satisfaction or something like that.Instead, that's actually not what we find at all.

What we find is that perpetrators really do ascribe a lot of mental and emotional states to their victims, a lot of moral considerations into their actions.And what they're trying to do is rectify what they see as a violated social relationship between them and the victim. Or between them and the victim's social category in general. So these men are trying to get back at women, or they're trying to get back at this particular woman. And they're trying to create what they believe to be the morally correct relationship between the two individuals.

And if you took that away, actually, if you did sort of strip away the humanness of the victim then actually the satisfaction of it would go away too, so the morality is totally tied to the act...

When we look at robbery… here's something where if I was really just thinking about it from an instrumental point of view I might have thought, "Oh, well, I should be robbing strangers out of convenience," let's say. So whoever's the easiest target, and I don't know them or anything like that.And that's just not really what we see. What we see is that actually a lot of times the robbery victims are people that you know'...

'If the goal of someone is to excuse their behavior and to mitigate blame, moral justifications are really bad in this context, right? Violent perpetrators shouldn't be making moral claims. They should be saying, "Oh, I didn't do it. It was an accident. I wouldn't do it again. I'm sorry." That's not what we see. We see they're owning their actions and saying, "Yes, I did it. I'd do it again. That person deserved it." These are all things that are going to make their situation worse not better.'...

The Iliad... We have this character, Achilles, who, basically, he's the greatest fighter, he's half-god. And the leader of the Greek army, Agamemnon, takes away his slave girl, right? And Achilles basically sulks in his tent and refuses to fight because his slave girl was taken away. He was given the second-best slave girl, when he thought he deserved the best slave girl. That’s your main hero on the Greek side.And the main hero on the Trojan side is this guy, Hector. And Hector is the brother of Paris. Paris is the one who kidnapped Helen and brought her to Troy, and caused this war to happen in the first place. And Hector's basically the older brother, and he's just trying to clean up this mess. And all Hector cares about is his family. He cares about his wife and his son or something, and he cares about his dad, and he cares about Troy and saving Troy and all of his people. And he doesn't have any special powers. He's just this really brave leader of the Trojans.And as a modern reader, reading this, who are you rooting for here?...

2,000 years ago, or 2,500 years ago, whatever, the ancient Greeks cheered in that moment. Achilles was the hero. Because he had sort of divine right and he was just naturally morally good. It was a completely different set of moral standards, that essentially makes Achilles the hero. And it was right for him to sulk in his tent. Of course he should have! He deserved that slave girl! And it would have been wrong for him to fight, because he had been offended... It shows this is a perfect example of how wildly different moral forms and values can be throughout cultures.'

'I increasingly feel, the more I read history, that the two main lessons I draw from it are, one, "Wow, people in the past were so similar to me. I didn't realize that people in the past could think and feel the same things I think and feel."And the other lesson being, "God, these are like aliens! How are these humans? I don't relate to these people at all!"...

I feel the same thing every time we read the Haggadah, on... I don't know if you've been to a Seder, a Jewish Seder on Passover. But there's this passage in the Haggadah, which is the thing we all read, where we're thanking God for all the things he did for us, including killing the firstborn children of the Egyptians. We're like, "Oh, it would have been enough if you had only done these things, but also you killed all these innocent babies! Thank you so much! That was such a lovely thing to do!"'"


Of course, there're people who claim morality is universal and timeless, and that we today know what virtue is, and that people in the past were wrong and immoral (and presumably, though they don't reply when I ask this, that people in the future who think differently from us will be wrong)