Virtuous Violence Quotes

“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.”
― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

“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).”
― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

“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.”
― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social 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.”
― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

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― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

“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.”
― Alan Page Fiske, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships