A new book, Virtuous Violence, by Alan Page Fiske, UCLA professor of anthropology and Tage Shakti Rai, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, proposes the controversial theory and will be published in January 205 by Cambridge University Press.
In an article from the UCLA newsroom, Fiske says that “When someone does something to hurt themselves or other people, or to kill somebody, they usually do so because they think they have to. They think they should do it, that it’s the right thing to do, that they ought to do it and that it’s morally necessary.”
Co-author Rai explained Fiske’s claim. Killings and physical attacks, said Rai, are often committed in retribution for wrongs, either real or perceived, or as an effort to teach lessons and instill obedience or even in an attempt to rectify a relationship that in the perpetrator’s mind has gone wrong and cannot be corrected in any other way.
“We’re not talking just about the way perpetrators excuse or justify their behavior afterwards,” said Rai. “We’re talking about what motivates them to do it in the first place. When we say that violence is morally motivated, we mean that it is so in the mind of the perpetrator. We don’t mean that we think that violence is good.”