Violence in word and action

Bernard Wuellner’s always-useful Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy defines violence as “action contrary to the nature of a thing.”  Readers of Aristotle and Aquinas will be familiar with this usage, which is reflected in their distinction between natural and violent motion.  Some of their applications of this distinction presuppose obsolete science.  For example, we now know that physical objects do not have motion toward the center of the earth, specifically, as their natural end.  Hence projectile motion away from the earth is not, after all, violent.  But the distinction itself is not obsolete.  For example, trapping or killing an animal is obviously violent in the relevant sense.  It is acting contrary to the natural ends of the animal.

 
Violence is not per se bad.  When a lion kills a gazelle, it acts violently insofar as it frustrates the natural ends of the gazelle.  But it thereby fulfills rather than frustrates its own natural ends.  It is good for the lion to do this, even if it is bad for the gazelle.  Indeed, to prevent the lion from acting violently toward other things would itself be an act of violence toward the lion, insofar as it would be preventing the lion from doing what its nature prompts it to do.  This violence toward the lion can itself be a good thing – for example, if you’ve got a pet gazelle you want to protect.

Notice that there is nothing special about animals here, even if the violence they inflict and suffer is especially vivid.  Even herbivores act violently when they eat plants.  After all, to eat a plant is to frustrate its natural ends.

You might ask: “But doesn’t natural law theory say that it’s always bad to act contrary to nature?”  No, that’s not what it says.  It says that it’s bad for human beings to act contrary to their own nature.  But like a lion, a human being can do something good by acting contrary to another thing’s nature, as we do any time we kill a plant or animal in order to eat it and thereby nourish ourselves.  What is good for a thing is determined by its own nature, not “nature” in some larger abstract sense. 

Having said that, since human beings are social animals, what is natural for other human beings is part of what is constitutive of any one human being’s good.  For example, parents realize their own natural ends precisely by helping their children to realize theirs.  The human race is a kind of extended family, and part of what is good for us is to act in a way consistent with everyone else’s realizing what is good for them (though our positive obligations to help others flourish are in general less strong the farther removed they are from us, as I have explained elsewhere).  Hence it is contrary to natural law for us to act toward other human beings the way we might be permitted to act toward plants and non-human animals.

Now, chief among our natural ends are those that follow from our being rational animals, possessing intellect and free will.  Hence, killing or otherwise physically harming other human beings is not the only way of acting violently toward them, in the sense of acting contrary to their nature.  There is also a kind of violence involved when we act contrary to their rational nature, by refusing to engage them at the level of rational discourse or frustrating their lawful free choices.

Hence, as rational, social animals, it is constitutive of what is good for each of us to engage with other human beings in a way that respects their intellects and free wills.  When dealing with other human beings, there is a moral presumption that when we want them to think or to do something, we have to secure this outcome by persuading them rationally rather than resorting to force, threats or other kinds of intimidation, psychological manipulation, or the like.

This presumption can be overridden.  For example, children often do not want to do what their parents tell them to do, even when what the parents are asking of them is perfectly reasonable and good for them.  Such children are acting contrary to reason, and parents have the authority to coerce them or punish them for disobedience by reasonable methods (verbal rebukes, spankings, taking away privileges, or whatever). 

An insane person may also be coerced, precisely because he is incapable of rational action and may be a danger to himself or others.  Those guilty of crimes have also thereby forfeited their rights to certain goods, which might include their property, their liberty, or in some cases even their lives, and they may be coerced accordingly.  Indeed, as Aquinas argues, our inclination to punish evildoers is itself a natural and good human inclination, necessary for our well-being as rational social animals.  (See chapter 1 of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed for a detailed explanation and defense of the natural law account of punishment.) 

So, punishing wrongdoers is not a morally objectionable form of violence – and indeed, in one sense it is arguably not really a form of violence at all, since their nature as rational social animals entails that they can be punished for wrongdoing, so that to punish them is not to act contrary to their nature.  In fact, to prevent lawful authorities from ever inflicting just punishments would itself be a kind of “violence” in the sense we are considering, because it would be contrary to what the natural law requires them to do.

One of the implications of all this is that blanket condemnations of violence are muddleheaded and, indeed, immoral.  Some violence is bad, but not all of it is, and sometimes it can even be morally required. 

(Gandhi is reputed to have defended an ethic of nonviolence by saying that taking an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind.  It seems he may never actually have said it, which is a good thing for him, because it is a pretty stupid thing to say.  The lex talionis principle does not hold that you should inflict on just anyone a harm proportional to the one he has inflicted.  It holds that you should inflict on wrongdoers, specifically, harms proportional to the ones they have inflicted on the innocent.  But lawful authorities who inflict harms on the guilty are not wrongdoers, so a consistent application of the lex talionis principle does not entail that they too should be harmed.  Hence, if the pseudo-Gandhian quote were rephrased in such a way that it was not aimed at a caricature, it would instead say something like “Taking an eye for an eye would make blind everyone who has unjustly taken both of some other person’s eyes.”  Or, since most defenders of lex talionis don’t think that literally gouging out eyes is a good idea all things considered, a better paraphrase would be “Inflicting proportional harms on wrongdoers would leave all wrongdoers proportionally harmed.”  But then the obvious response to this corrected pseudo-Gandhian one-liner is: “Yes, it would.  That’s the point.”)

What has been said also casts light on why torture is morally objectionable.  The problem with torture is not that it involves inflicting pain or something otherwise unpleasant.  A child can deserve a spanking or the loss of some privilege, and a criminal can deserve much worse, and inflicting such punishments is not wrong.  The problem with torture is also not that it involves coercing the will.  When a parent threatens a child with punishment, or a policemen threatens to shoot a bank robber if he does not lay down his weapon, or a victim punches an attacker in order to get him to stop the attack, the will is coerced, but entirely justly.

The problem with torture is that it involves completely subverting the intellect and will altogether, essentially attempting to reduce the rational animal to a non-rational animal.  In that way, it is contrary to the victim’s nature in a way that merely inflicting pain or coercing him is not.  (I would tentatively suggest that it amounts to the perversion of a faculty.  For it is essentially a matter of trying to get someone’s intellect and will to a certain result by means of a method that subverts the proper functioning of the intellect and will.)

Yet another implication of the analysis of violence given above is that to respond to an opponent who attempts to engage with you in a rational way with vituperation, ad hominem attacks, intimidation, and the like is also a morally objectionable kind of violence.  For it involves acting contrary to the person’s rational nature.

Notice that I am not saying that polemical engagement with just any opponent is necessarily wrong.   As I have argued several times over the years (e.g. here, here, and here), it can be legitimate to respond to an opponent with polemical harshness – in particular, when the opponent is himself hell-bent on flinging vituperation and the like.  There is no inconsistency whatsoever in responding with rhetorical harshness to those who are rhetorically harsh, any more than there is in police firing back at bank robbers who fired first.  In both cases, self-defense or the defense of others can justify a harsh response.

What I am talking about is the case where your opponent is not being vituperative, but is trying to present you with rational arguments, and instead of responding in kind, you fling abuse at him, attribute bad motives to him, mock him, and otherwise refuse to treat him as a fellow rational agent.  This is a kind of violence in the sense I have been describing, insofar as what is by nature good for him, for you, and for the community of rational social animals to which you both belong, is for you to engage with one another at the level of reason, and you are acting in a way that is contrary to that.

Now, blog comboxes, Facebook discussion threads, Twitter feeds, and the like are often snake pits of violence in this sense of the word.  In many of them, rational arguments, where they are given voice at all, are met with little more than attributions of bad motives and other ad hominem attacks, mockery, and other forms of sophistry.  The irony is that it is often precisely those who most loudly profess to be rational and/or non-violent who are the most prone to this kind of verbal violence.  For example, the staunchest opponents of capital punishment and other advocates of non-violence often evince an appalling inability to construct rational arguments, to restrain their emotions, or to refrain from heaping abuse on those who disagree with them.  New Atheists and proponents of other forms of self-congratulatory pseudo-rationalism are often guilty of the same.

Further irony can be seen in those prone to accusing others of “micro-aggressions.”  If someone calmly attempts to give a rational argument for some conclusion, even a politically incorrect one, that is precisely the opposite of “aggression” or violence, because it is an appeal to reason.  And if someone attempts to shut down rational debate because of hurt feelings, that is itself a kind of aggression or violence, precisely because it is contrary to reason.

Then there is the irony of those ostensibly committed to peace and human dignity whose favored tactics are publicly to harass those who disagree with them, to prevent them from speaking, to stir up mob violence, and otherwise to disrupt the law and order that are the precondition of calm and rational discourse.

There is no clearer manifestation of respect for the human dignity of a person with whom one disagrees than to reason with him – and no clearer insult to that dignity than to try to shout him down, intimidate him, or otherwise treat him as something incapable or unworthy of rational engagement.  Such are the Orwellian times we live in that those who most loudly claim to be against violence are the ones most likely to resort to it.

Related posts:

The voluntarist personality

What is an ad hominem fallacy?

The ad hominem fallacy is a sin

Meta-bigotry

Wrath and its daughters