Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships

Alan Page Fiske · Tage Shakti Rai

Nov 2014 · Cambridge University Press

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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.

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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, WHO 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 independent of sociality, and that diversity in moral judgments and behaviors are driven by patterns in the social relationships within which they occur.