Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and (...) primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions – high arousal and strong affect – evoked by the pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control. Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence. Key Words: compassion; cruelty; entertainment industry; evolutionary psychology; intraspecific killing; pain; predation; punishment; torture; violence prevention. Correspondence:c1 Correspondence to: West Hill House, 6 Swains Lane, Highgate, London N6 6QS, United Kingdom. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Cephalus and Socratic Piety Plato's New Gods Platonic Piety Forms and Gods Gods and Souls.

Chimpanzee and hunter-gatherer intergroup aggression differ in important ways, including humans having the ability to form peaceful relationships and alliances among groups. This paper nevertheless evaluates the hypothesis that intergroup aggression evolved according to the same functional principles in the two species—selection favoring a tendency to kill members of neighboring groups when killing could be carried out safely. According to this idea chimpanzees and humans are equally risk-averse when fighting. When self-sacrificial war practices are found in humans, therefore, they (...) result from cultural systems of reward, punishment, and coercion rather than evolved adaptations to greater risk-taking. To test this “chimpanzee model,” we review intergroup fighting in chimpanzees and nomadic hunter-gatherers living with other nomadic hunter-gatherers as neighbors. Whether humans have evolved specific psychological adaptations for war is unknown, but current evidence suggests that the chimpanzee model is an appropriate starting point for analyzing the biological and cultural evolution of warfare. (shrink)

In recent years, much has been learned about the strategic and organizational contexts of suicide attacks. However, motivations of the agents who commit them remain difficult to explain. In part this is because standard models of social learning as well as Durkheimian notions of sacrificial behavior are inadequate in the face of the actions of human bombers. In addition, the importance of organizational structures and practices in reinforcing commitment on the part of suicide recruits is an under-explored factor in (...) many analyses. This essay examines the potential applicability of evolutionary models of altruism to the understanding of commitment to suicide on the part of terrorist organizational recruits. Three evolutionary models of sacrificial behavior in nonhuman species and many categories of human behavior are explored cross-organizationally: reciprocity, inclusive fitness theory, and induced altruism. Reciprocal altruism is unlikely to be a major motivator in suicide attacks because the costs exhibited by attackers are too high to be adequately compensated. However, the role of evolved self-deception in perceptions of personal death, and thus of rewards in the afterlife, is potentially illuminating. Inclusive fitness theory can help explain the motivations of attackers because rewards to kin often are offered by organizations to suicide recruits. However, suicide bombers also often act out of revenge for the loss of or injury to relatives, and inclusive fitness theory generally, as well as more specific theoretical models of retaliatory aggression, may not adequately account for the bombers' actions. Predictions from induced altruism theory appear to be well supported because suicide terror organizations tend to be tightly structured around practices intended to maintain and reinforce commitment though the manipulation of kinship-recognition cues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Maimonides and the Rise and Fall of the Sabians:Explaining Mosaic Laws and the Limits of Scholarship Jonathan Elukin The Koran mentions the Sabi'un three times (II 6-2, V 69, XXII 17). "Believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabi'un—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord; they have nothing (...) to fear or to regret." This language is repeated in the second citation. The third appearance is slightly different: "As for true believers, the Jews, the Sabi'un, the Christians, the Magians, and the pagans, Allah will judge them on the Day of Resurrection. He bears witness to all things." 1 Early Islamic commentators often disagreed on the identity of the Sabi'un, and the confusion continued throughout the medieval Islamic period. 2 The term Sabi'un was applied by some early Koranic commentators to the survivors of an ancient Jewish-Christian sect, the Elchasites in southern Iraq. 3 One minority group of ethnic Arab "pagans" with a hellenized elite in Harran, in Arabia, also took the Koranic name Sabian in the third/ninth century to claim the status of a "people of the book" and therefore avoid persecution. It is this group that some later Muslims identified as Sabi'. 4 The scholarly consensus now suggests that [End Page 619] the term Sabian refers to some kind of Gnostic identity that can encompass "the disciples of Judeo-Christian baptizing sects... and, on the other, Harranian astrolators, the last representatives of decadent Greco-Roman paganism." 5The mysterious Sabians would play a key role in attempts by early modern European scholars to understand the origins of the Mosaic legislation. It was through Maimonides, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, that the Sabians were transmitted to Christian scholars. By the seventeenth century, the Sabians of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed had become a fixture in how scholars understood or at least debated the history of the origins of Mosaic law. Increasingly perceived as a diffuse paganism rather than a specific ethnic identity or subsumed by the more tangible reality of Egypt, Sabianism drifted to the margins of scholarship by the end of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century the Sabians became superfluous to scholarly efforts to understand the origins of Israelite monotheism. This study is an attempt to understand the growth of the enthusiasm for the Sabians by early modern scholars and then its precipitous decline. In a large degree it was the nature of the evidence itself regarding the Sabians that shaped and ultimately undermined the survival of the Sabians in European thinking. Still, both Christian and Jewish scholars well into the twentieth century lived with the ghosts of the Sabians as they sought to explain otherwise mysterious Mosaic commandments.In the Guide Maimonides argued that the sacrificial system legislated by Moses was an example of God's mercy. It would have been impossible for the Israelites to abandon suddenly the style of idolatrous worship learned in Egypt, and so Moses crafted the sacrificial system gradually to replace false gods with the true God. Maimonides still needed to explain the particular details and reasons for the sacrifices and the other ritual laws. 6 To that end he claimed to have read various texts, particularly the so-called Nabataen Agriculture, which purported to describe Abraham's education among and flight from the Sabians as well as a summary of the practices of the Sabians. 7 (The Sabians had made one brief appearance before Maimonides's discussion in the Guide; the tenth-century Karaite Jew, Qirqisani, declared in his Kitab al anwar, "the modern Christian philosophers assert that the laws of the Torah were given to the Children of Israel only because of God's wrath; and that they [Israel] have chosen these laws for themselves only on account of their resemblance to the laws of the Sabians, which was due to the fact that they became... (shrink)

Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist feminists (...) like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate (...) a new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacrificial "As-If" and Avuncular HilarityLiving by MéconnaissanceWiel Eggen (bio)INTRODUCTION: THE CURIOUS QUESTIONAt my departure for anthropological fieldwork in the Central African Republic (RCA), just after Girard's seminal work La Violence et le sacré had come to upset my structuralist tutors in Paris, I was given a list of penetrating questions to probe in the field, since my research was to be conducted in an area known for its (...) a-cephalous traditions with little or no political or religious centralization.1 The prime critique concerned Girard's apparent return to a bluntly utilitarian vision of myth and religion as the mental framework of society's ritual foundations, in line with Durkheim's functionalist analysis of archaic religion, which was finely reworded in Lord Raglan's recent preface to a cluster of Hocart's articles titled The Life-Giving Myth.2 The approach had come to dominate, as a way of unraveling outdated transcendentalist claims, and also underpinned Freudian and Marxist attacks on religion. After Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had given the lie to any claims of access to transcendent realms, the deontological view of religion as society's functionalist toolbox for orderly [End Page 69] conduct became dominant. But, inspired also by such "masters of suspicion" in human sciences, structuralism had set out even beyond that utilitarian perspective. In a decisive bolt of relativism, it took myths to be a mere mental ordering of daily observations into a logical frame, independent of any ritual or social utility. So, how could Girard once again declare social control via rituals to be religion's true aim, allot a prime role to sacrificial rites, and, most alarmingly, thereby raise the suspicion of aiming to rehabilitate Christian dogmas?I was urged to go and check this theory on sacrifices, scapegoating, social rivalry, and on the shaping of archaic society, its forms of authority, and even sacred kingship. Reflecting on the questions, though, I noted that they overlooked a critical point in Girard's hypothesis, which I read as reverse functionalism. In fact, Girard viewed religion's social function and the issuing cultural regulations as rooted in a radical "lie," or in what he labels méconnaissance. Worded in evolutionary terms, he hypothesized not so much a kind of Darwinian utilitarian adaptation, but rather the alternative of "exaptation," or what has been called an oblique functionalism.After I had learned enough of the Banda language to start my research, though, my schedules were thrown in disarray on my first evening in the village that was to be my starting point. It presented me with a curious quandary. The village of Wademi, some 25 km north of Ippy, in the sparsely populated wooded savannah, was home to two exogamous patrilineal clans that straddle a little river and sit on a dirt road constructed by the colonial power for the collection of cotton. To oversee this two-clan unit a chief had been appointed with the title of makonji, a loanword from the national Sango language. This gentle, friendly man had offered to host me in his own cemented house and organized a welcome for me in the customary way of staging a pleasant storytelling session, punctuated with joyous songs and dances, lasting well into the night. Most of the stories and songs figured Tere, the famous trickster figure, who resembles Ture in neighboring Azande-land, well documented by E. Evans-Pritchard.3 The enjoyable, moonlit session was shot through with outbursts of laughter. It brought the two clans together, including the women and children. Before turning in, the makonji's junior son, who had been assigned my assistant and interpreter, came to convey his father's sincere but puzzling query, whether Tere actually was the same as Jesus Christ. Actually, his French name in Banda phonetics implied so: Christ Jésu = Tre se te jesu; and "Jesu Christ = Jesu Tre."4 Taken by surprise and much in need of some rest after a rather demanding day, I politely asked to let the issue rest till the morning.This question was all the more disturbing, as Christians were wont to call Jesus the Lord, and relate this to chieftaincy... (shrink)

Religion has become a vital resource for attempts to rethink the meaning of the political. This article rehearses the efforts of two recent figures, René Girard and Giorgio Agamben, to transform the political by renewing its connection to religion. Both thinkers struggle to escape politics as defined by Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. Girard and Agamben do clash ideologically, but their inquiries into sacrifice and messianism take similar courses. Regarding origins, Girard argues for the sacrificial crisis as the common parent (...) to religion and politics. Conversely, for Agamben, the Roman figure of homo sacer distinguishes politics from religion. With respect to the future, Girard's messianism installs Christian belief as the only way to move beyond violence. By contrast, Agamben steers Pauline messianism toward the efforts to displace sovereignty and reopen the political. I conclude that Agamben breaks with Schmitt while Girard reinscribes his politics at a higher level. Key Words: Giorgio Agamben • Rey Chow • Christianity • René Girard • homo sacer • messianism • politics • sacred • sacrifice • Carl Schmitt. (shrink)

The experience of a reward appears to enhance memory for recent prior events, adaptively making that information more available to guide future decision-making. Here, we tested whether reward enhances memory for associative item-location information and also whether the effect of reward spreads to other categorically-related but unrewarded items. Participants earned either points (Experiment 1) or money (Experiment 2) through a time-estimation reward task, during which stimuli-location pairings around a 2D-ring were shown followed by either high-value or (...) low-value rewards. All stimuli were then tested for location memory or recognition (yes/no), immediately and after a 24-hour delay. Across both experiments (combined analysis), there was a robust improvement in location memory following high-value rewards, even though evidence supporting this effect was reliable in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1. The memory-enhancing effect of reward was observed on both the immediate and delayed location-memory tests. Reward-enhanced memory for both directly rewarded stimuli and categorically related stimuli that were not directly rewarded. No reliable effect of reward value on yes/no recognition-memory performance was observed in either experiment. We hypothesise that reward enhances the consolidation of recent experience and conceptually related memories to make these more available for future decisions. (shrink)

For thousands of years people have saved their loudest praise for individuals who made ?the ultimate sacrifice.' Recently, however, many people have begun to equate suicide terrorism with sacrificial heroism. These assertions benefit from a general lack of conceptual clarity regarding the nature of sacrificial heroism itself. Therefore, this paper aims to explore, describe, and define sacrificial heroism, arguing that it requires two primary things: the risk of something highly valued; and the attempt to achieve a directly (...) morally positive result. The paper then reviews four representative scenarios, including two types of suicide terrorism and two types of sacrificial heroism, in order to highlight several critical differences between those actions that deserve to be praised as supremely heroic and those which clearly do not. (shrink)

Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. However, it has been previously shown that some sacrificial dilemmas fail to present a genuine contrast between utilitarian and deontological (...) options. Here, I raise deeper problems for this research paradigm. Even when sacrificial dilemmas present a contrast between utilitarian and deontological options at a philosophical level, it is misleading to interpret the responses of ordinary folk in these terms. What is currently classified as “utilitarian judgment” does not in fact share essential features of a genuine utilitarian outlook, and is better explained in terms of commonsensical moral notions. When subjects deliberate about such dilemmas, they are not deciding between opposing utilitarian and deontological solutions, but engaging in a richer process of weighing opposing moral reasons. Sacrificial dilemmas therefore tell us little about utilitarian decision-making. An alternative approach to studying proto-utilitarian tendencies in everyday moral thinking is proposed. (shrink)

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic (...) bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. (shrink)

Sacrifice as a practice aimed at honoring deities by offering them something as a sign of propitiation or worship is usually studied from the viewpoint of numerous disciplines and religious cultures, from which equally numerous interpretations follow. However, the view of sacrifice as able to shape life in its entirety, which means that every act taken by believers may be seen in sacrificial terms, does not seem to be sufficiently considered. This is a view that I believe emerges from (...) various reflections on sacrifice, especially the ones offered by thinkers of the past such as Augustine and Aquinas. In this essay, I first focus on these reflections and more specifically on Augustine’s and Aquinas’s view that religious believers should order everything to God. I then argue—in the footsteps of Aquinas—that this view applies to important acts taken by believers. These acts are prayer, faith, and intellectual activity. (shrink)

:The theme of sacrifice appears in Jean-François Lyotard's writings on cinema not in terms of any representational content but in terms of the economy of the images from which a film is formally constructed. Sacrifice is here understood in a sense derived from Bataille, and related to his notions of general economy, and of sovereignty. Lyotard's writings on cinema have received some attention in English-language scholarship, but so far this attention has been focused almost exclusively on two essays which have (...) appeared in English translation: “Acinema” and “The Unconscious as Mise-en-Scène.” I offer an analysis which also incorporates his two other important essays on cinema, “Deux métamorphoses du séduisant au cinéma” [Two Metamorphoses of the Seductive in Cinema] and “Idée d'un film souverain” [The Idea of a Sovereign Film]. The interest of the former is that it makes most explicit the aesthetic politics – evident in many of Lyotard's writings on art – specific to cinema. In the latter, Lyotard gives his most extensive treatment of cinema, and frames it in terms of Bataille's notion of sovereignty. I offer an interpretation of Lyotard's philosophy of cinema which links these quite disparate essays, foregrounding the political dimension of the sacrificial economy of images he proposes: films of any variety, even commercial cinema, may include some sequences and images which are “sacrificial” in that they are “other” to the chronological narrative of the whole. These images liberate us from the seductive effects of the narrative, and the invitation to fantasise, which act as means of imposing and reproducing dominant social and cultural norms. (shrink)

Drawing on social exchange theory, this study examines a mechanism, namely organizational social capital, through which self-sacrificial leadership is related to two types of employee behaviours: organizational citizenship behaviours and counterproductive behaviours. The results of two different studies in Egypt showed that self-sacrificial leadership is positively related to OSC which, in turn, is positively related to OCBs and negatively related to CPBs. Overall, the findings suggest that self-sacrificial leaders are more likely to achieve desirable employee behaviours through (...) improving the quality of social relationships among employees. (shrink)

1. Introduction 2. Reward-Guided Decision Making 3. Content in the Model 4. How to Deflate a Metarepresentational Reading Proust and Carruthers on metacognitive feelings 5. A Deflationary Treatment of RPEs? 5.1 Dispensing with prediction errors 5.2 What is use of the RPE focused on? 5.3 Alternative explanations—worldly correlates 5.4 Contrast cases 6. Conclusion Appendix: Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms.

Can an agent's intelligence level be negative? We extend the Legg-Hutter agent-environment framework to include punishments and argue for an affirmative answer to that question. We show that if the background encodings and Universal Turing Machine (UTM) admit certain Kolmogorov complexity symmetries, then the resulting Legg-Hutter intelligence measure is symmetric about the origin. In particular, this implies reward-ignoring agents have Legg-Hutter intelligence 0 according to such UTMs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacrificial and Nonsacrificial Mass NonviolenceJohn Roedel (bio)Have been awake since 2 a.m. God’s grace alone is sustaining me. I can see there is some grave defect in me somewhere which is the cause of all this. All round me is utter darkness.—M. K. Gandhi, diary entry, dated January 2, 1947.1During the last few years of Gandhi’s life, massive rioting verging on civil war tore India apart, despite Gandhi’s (...) best efforts to calm the situation and despite repeated, widespread, politically successful mass nonviolent actions by large segments of the Indian populace in the previous decades. There have been many analyses of the violent births of India and Pakistan, but none that I know of have taken seriously Gandhi’s intuitions of his own responsibility. At most, intuitions such as these have been taken as further evidence of the Mahatma’s profound humility.I will not suggest that Gandhi bore some moral responsibility for this violence, but I will suggest that his (and others’) ignorance of what I will term the sacrificial aspects of mass nonviolence did have a role to play. I will model my distinction between sacrificial and nonsacrificial nonviolence on Girard’s [End Page 221] distinction between sacrificial and nonsacrificial Christianity as presented in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, and will attempt to use this distinction to suggest how violence might arise out of the practice of mass nonviolence, using the example of the nonviolent movement for Indian independence as an example. I hope that my speculations may also shed light on other puzzling aspects of mass nonviolence, such as the reason why, despite the many political successes of nonviolence, nonviolent movements have never become more widely established, and have for the most part been limited to ad hoc movements.2In Girard’s view, sacrificial practices such as I am proposing as part of mass nonviolence are ubiquitous, destructive, and mostly invisible. Girard writes, “every negation of the other leads... towards expulsion and murder. The basis for all of this lies in the fundamental human situation of a mimetic rivalry that leads to a destructive escalation.”3 That is, every negation of the other contributes to widening cycles of escalation that would lead to the extinction of humanity, were it not for sacrifice, which allows the rivalries to be discharged without consequences onto an individual outside the community—a scapegoat.There is not much agreement about how nonviolence functions or even about what the word “nonviolence” refers to. It will be defined here as a refusal to submit to or inflict violence, where “violence” includes not just physical violence but also verbal and structural violence, such as imperialism and poverty. Within such a definition, fleeing physically or otherwise from violence is a form of submission to the violence, and allows violence the last word, so to speak. Nonviolence is perhaps clearest in a face-to-face encounter with physical violence, as in the many civil disobedience actions of Gandhi’s career. But like violence, nonviolence also occurs in common, even subtle, situations, as in a conversation between friends.Beginning with Gandhi, a distinction has often been made between “strategic” and “principled” nonviolence. Strategic nonviolence is the contingent embrace of nonviolence as a tactic. Principled nonviolence is the unconditional embrace of nonviolence, on the basis of a moral or religious commitment. Gandhi spoke of principled nonviolence as a refusal to submit to or inflict violence out of unselfish love for the opponent. He spoke of strategic nonviolence as a means for achieving one’s goals; in his opinion, this was not really nonviolence at all, but a simulacrum of it. An individual may even sometimes be unable to distinguish the extent to which his own nonviolence is strategic or principled.To distinguish between strategic and principled nonviolence, according to Gandhi, it is necessary to explore the motivations and character formation of the nonviolent practitioner in question. For Gandhi, principled nonviolence [End Page 222] arises out of one’s “relationship to God” and a “deep sense of the intercon-nectedness of all beings.” Gandhi believed that in defense of truth, or in defense of the honor of oneself... (shrink)

Abstract.Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic‐like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. (...) While Roman Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic-like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. (...) While Roman Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

This article explores the allusive strategy of the late second-century cento-tragedy Medea attributed to Hosidius Geta, which recounts Medea's revenge against Jason using verses from the works of Virgil. It argues that the text's author recognized a consistent strand of characterization in earlier treatments of the Medea myth, whereby the heroine's filicide is presented as a corrupted sacrifice. Geta selectively uses verses from thematically significant episodes in the Aeneid—the lying tale of Sinon and the death of Laocoön; the murder of (...) Priam; the suicide of Dido—at key points to foreground the theme of pseudo-sacrificial violence. Geta's use of Virgil evinces a keen appreciation both of the symbolism of the broader mythic tradition in which his text is situated and of the original narrative contexts of the verses he recycles. The article's findings contribute to a growing recognition of the creative potential afforded by the cento technique. (shrink)

This article proposes that the French performance artist Orlan, has, by undertaking a series of surgical interventions on her face and body, radically challenged current standards of beauty. By engaging with Judeo-Christian iconography, Greek mythology and French literature in her operations/performances, she has established an oeuvre that aligns her not only with corporeality and the abject body through images of the sacrificial, but also with aberrant body forms associated with the carnival. Although seduced by the rhetoric that surrounds the (...) body in technology, she has turned to excess as a strategy against the benign and controlled nature of the screen, and the media's homogenization of body images. Her new identity, although not extreme, is a site of resistance in a society bent on eliminating forms that threaten the status quo. (shrink)

This qualitative study of 27 women animal activists examines the risks and rewards that accompany a commitment to animal rights activism. One of the common beliefs about animal rights activists is that their political choices are fanatic and unyielding, resulting in rigid self-denial. Contrary to this notion, the women in this study experienced both the pain and the joy of their transformation toward animal activism. Activism took an enormous toll on their personal relationships, careers, and emotional well being. They struggled (...) as friendships ended and family relationships suffered; some experienced harassment and abuse as a result of their efforts. Yet the women were just as likely to extol the rewards and pleasure gained from their participation in the cause of animal liberation. These included a heightened awareness of political issues, greater self-confidence, the feeling that they were making a difference in the world, and the joy of living a “more meaningful life.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacrificial Nationalism In Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders William Mishler University ofMinnesota Even during his lifetime, the ambiguity essential to Henrik Ibsen's dramatic method gave rise to considerable interpretive debate. In the near century since his death new approaches to his work have steadily continued to arise in accord with the changes in critical and literary theory. We have had, writes Charles Lyons in a recent survey, Ibsen "the (...) realist, the iconoclast, the successful or failed idealist, the poet, the psychologist, the romantic, the antiromantic" (4). The extraordinary "hermeneutic generativity" evinced by Ibsen's plays cannot be attributed, in my view, solely to their aesthetic excellence or to changes in critical fashion, but as much or even more to the fact that they touch in a prescient way on conundrums inherent in modern life that are both fundamental and particularly intractable. In The Pretenders, for example, Ibsen composed an artistic meditation on the nature of nationalism which, seen from today's vantage point, can be called prophetic. The question the work implicitly poses might be formulated as follows: Is it possible for modern people to create a nation-state on a basis other than the threat of reciprocal violence? In other words, can a modern state attain to a condition ofpeace that would amount to something other that the mere stasis of fear? And if the answers to this question is negative—the work clearly asks—what will prevent the modern nation-state, which lacks the safeguards and restraints formerly supplied by various institutions of transcendent authority, from falling into desperate conditions? These are questions that are easy, even unavoidable, to pose today when we witness with horror the fires ignited by nationalism around the world. In mid-nineteenth century, however, when Ibsen wrote The Pretenders, the situation was vastly different. Then was the high noon of nationalistic optimism in Europe and America and elsewhere, the euphoric cultural moment when in the wake of the French and American Revolutions small 128William Mishler elites in numerous countries were shifting their spiritual and philosophical allegiance from outmoded agencies of order (religious, humanistic, transnational ) to the ethnically ordered collective. The story of this shift is a familiar one, no doubt, but one whose lessons only now are becoming fully apparent. In mid-nineteenth century Norway, nationalist enthusiasm was the order of the day. Accorded its independence from Denmark in 1814, and with it the end to 400 years of subjugation, Norway had good grounds to be enthusiastically self-preoccupied. Its historians engrossed themselves in the fervent recital of the national past, its artists worked to create works that celebrated the Norwegian spirit and projected images of future national greatness. In short, as the literary histories designate it, this was Norway's period of National Romanticism, and it was in this atmosphere that Ibsen in 1850, age 21, began composing plays. For the first dozen years of his career all of his plays were written in the National Romantic mode. It is true that his first play, Catalina, takes its subject matter from Roman history, but it is a Roman history largely stripped of its specificity and adapted for purposes ofpsychological allegory. Ibsen's next four plays all use material drawn from Norway's history and folklore. The Pretenders, begun in 1858 and completed in 1864, was the last and by common consensus the greatest of these. The most Shakespearean of Ibsen's plays, its plot material was taken from Norwegian historian P. A. Munch's account of Norway's civil wars in the thirteenth century. Ibsen chose the climactic moment when several of the deceased King Sverre's heirs were laying claim to the throne, directing his attention to the two major contenders, Sverre's grandson Hâkon and his rival Duke Skule, his maternal uncle and former guardian. The play traces the course of their rivalry from its inception to the final confrontation in which Skule is killed and Norway is united under King Hâkon. From the early days of Ibsen criticism the biographical approach, later amplified by various thematic readings, has been the dominant one to The Pretenders. In this view Skule and Hâkon are seen as vehicles... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacrificial Ram and the Swan QueenMimetic Theory Fades to BlackBrian Collins (bio)“We speak of a ‘black’ mirror. But where it mirrors, it darkens, of course, but it doesn’t look black, and that which is seen in it does not appear ‘dirty’ but ‘deep.’”—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on ColorThis paper explores the ways in which male and female bodies become the sites of mimetic desire and ritual violence in (...) Darren Aronofsky’s two companion films The Wrestler (109 min, Wild Bunch, 2008, DVD) and Black Swan (108 min, Fox Searchlight, 2010, DVD). Both films (which were originally intended to be one film, explaining their thematic consistency)1 share three elements. First, both explore cultural forms, wrestling and dance, respectively, that punish the body of the performer in a spectacular way. Second, both films end with the ritualistic dying (if not the death) of the main character. Third, in both films, this dying is accompanied by a kind of transformation that can only be called “becoming-animal.”2 Though this last point is much easier to demonstrate [End Page 207] in the case of Black Swan, I will argue that this is also true for The Wrestler. In interpreting these films, I will rely mainly on René Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and the surrogate victim mechanism, supplemented by Slavoj Žižek’s notion of symbolic death. Symbolic death or “second death” is Žižek’s Hegelian appropriation of the psychoanalytic death drive. The death drive holds a special place for Girard, since he considers Freud’s formulation of the death drive his admission that the Oedipal complex cannot explain the compulsion to repetition, an admission for which he credits Freud’s honesty. In this paper, I demonstrate that pseudo-masochism, Girard’s alternate theory of repetition, and the Žižekian second death are both present in Black Swan and The Wrestler, and that each film plays on the animal/human distinction and ritual transformations of the body to explore these themes.Part One: The Sacrificial Ram“The function of the wrestler is not to win: it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.”—Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” MythologiesThe Pseudo-Masochistic Body I: Becoming-RamWilliam Golding’s novel Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956) follows a bitter, selfish, and intransigent sailor who finds himself clinging to a rock in the middle of the ocean, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, only to slowly learn that he is not a survivor at all, but is rather trapped like a character from The Twilight Zone in the utter loneliness of the timeless time between his titular “two deaths.” The first death comes when Martin goes down with his ship and the second comes when he is annihilated (possibly; the ending is ambiguous) by the “black lightning,” which Terry Eagleton identifies in his analysis of the book as “the fire of God’s ruthless love, which burns up those who cannot bear it.” Martin’s misotheism is his last defense against the terrifying power of love, and he continues to defy God as the black lightning engulfs him.3 Why the two deaths? Martin is unable to die properly the first time, Eagleton argues, “because he is incapable of love. Only the good are capable of dying. Martin cannot yield himself up to death because he has never been able to yield himself up to others in life.”4 [End Page 208]Randy “The Ram” Robinson, born Robin Ramzinski, (Mickey Rourke), the protagonist of The Wrestler, is, like Pincher Martin, between two deaths, isolated from the rest of humanity because of his inability to connect with others. But while Pincher Martin is defiant and bound for a self-created Hell because of his deliberate rejection of love, Ram is a much more sympathetic character—though no less doomed—because he tries but fails time after time to accept the love of those who could save him. Pincher Martin’s self-created internal obstacle is his hatred of God, externalized through his encounter with the black lightning. But in Ram’s case... (shrink)

When faced with intertemporal choices, which have consequences that unfold over time, we often discount the future, preferring smaller immediate rewards often at the expense of long-term benefits. How psychologically connected one feels to one’s future self-influences such temporal discounting. Psychological connectedness consists in sharing psychological properties with past or future selves, but connectedness comes in degrees. If one feels that one is not psychologically connected to one’s future self, one views that self like a different person and is less (...) likely to wait for the future reward. Increasing perceived psychological connectedness to one’s future self may lead to more far-sighted decisions. Episodic prospection may help in this regard. Episodic prospection is our ability to ‘pre-experience’ the future by mentally simulating it, drawing on information from episodic memory and other sources. Episodic memory and prospection are thought to involve a special form of consciousness, which underpins the capacity to appreciate the connection between one’s past, present, and future selves. Simulating the future self through prospection may increase felt psychological connectedness and support future-oriented decision-making. Yet this is where a puzzle arises. The imagery of episodic memory and prospection is perspectival: often one views the visualised scenario from a detached perspective, seeing oneself from-the-outside as if viewing another person. The aim of this paper is to characterise how the perspectival imagery of prospection relates to psychological connectedness, and to show that even though such imagery involves a detached perspective it can still be used to help reward one’s future self. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FROM SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE TO RESPONSIBILITY: THE EDUCATION OF MOSES IN EXODUS 2-4 Sandor Goodhart Purdue University When toward the end of his life Moses tried to stave off death, God said to him: "Did I tell you to slay the Egyptian?" (Midrash in Plaut 383) I. Education in Plato and Judaism The word "education", of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning "to lead out" or "to bring (...) up," and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To "lead out" implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between one designated as a "leader" and another (or others) designated as the "led." The notion of leadership also entails a movement through which the leader propels the led, namely from a region designated as "inside," to another designated as "outside." Within the Western context, which is to say, within the Western European historical experience which traces itselfback through the romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece, the primary articulator ofthe notion of education we have inherited is, of course, Plato. Although Plato's Republic is nominally about justice, and even more specifically the "just" state, commentators have long pointed out that it is really about education (see, for example, Havelock). How shall the guardians ofthe state that we shall term "just" be educated?, Plato's interlocutors ask themselves. In this regard, of course, Plato was challenging the educational system already in place at the time at the head of which was Homer and the Homeric epics, and substituting for an older oral culture founded on an elaborate system of mnemonics another founded more decisively upon writing and the alphabet. Some have argued that in place of a aural or Sandor Goodhart1 3 hearing-centered culture Plato was inaugurating a visual or video-centric cultural organization, and much work is currently being done in this area (see, for example, Ong). What was Plato's educational solution? It was an appeal, in short, to the true, to the language of reason, and to the realm of the ontological as the context in which the true could be defined. The true, as the phenomenological tradition has taught us, may be regarded as the separation of that which has being from that which does not have being, that which only appears or seems to be from that which truly is. Reason in this context is the method or modality ofthinking by which such difference or distinction between the true and the false becomes articulated. Education may then be said to be the process by which all of this occurs, by which one learns to separate appearances from reality, the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, and thereby the process by which one avoids slavery. For at bottom the enemy for Plato remains slavery and the goal remains freedom from its ravages. Plato, for one, defines his program in specific opposition to Greek tragedy, which he takes among the species ofmimesis or of mimetic poesis that he cites to be the worst threat to his program of absolute difference. The tragic poets leave us without an antidote, he tells us, to its irresistible seductions. Even the best of us—by which he would certainly include Socrates, who has been educating these young men about the processes of education—go to the theater, follow the theatrical performance with enthusiasm, beat their breasts along with the players, and finally praise as most worthy those playwrights who most enable this enthusiasm to take place. The distinction between the true and the mimetic, between the true and the imitational or representational, between that which has being and that which only shadows being, is always on the verge of collapsing in this context. And as a consequence the only safe state, Plato tells us, is the one that excludes theatrical performance from its premises. There is no place in the present context to develop any further the complicated relationship Plato has with his predecessors, and I have hinted at this relationship elsewhere (see Goodhart 261). Suffice it to say that Plato remains in this regard the master in Western circles ofall... (shrink)

Many proponents and opponents of the Corrida de Toros agree in describing the practice as a sacrifice. This surprising agreement is compounded by a further agreement that the sacrificial victim is the bull. In what follows, I contest both points. Beginning with the later, I argue that the victim is not the bull but the torero, especially the matador. Rather than seeing the corrida as the sacrifice of the bull, it is the deferred sacrifice of the torero, and the (...) crowd is on the side of the victim. Moreover, I argue that once the victim status of the matador has been appreciated, it can serve as the foundation for a new interpretation of... (shrink)

In book 10 of City of God, Augustine appeals to the notion of true sacrifice in order to counteract the attraction of pagan worship. This appeal to the concept of sacrifice gives a distinct shape to the Christology and ecclesiology he develops in this book. Set against this polemical horizon, and within the context of his wider thought, it becomes clear that sacrifice is itself soteriological motif for Augustine. The work it does in this context is to serve as another (...) way of describing the return of humanity to God through the Incarnate Christ. The cross, the Eucharist, the moral life, and the church itself are all identified as instances of the one true sacrifice of Christ. In this way, sacrifice provides an integrative motif for discussing Augustinian Christology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and soteriology. (shrink)

Rewards are reinforcement mechanisms that organizations use to shape desirable employee behaviors. However, rewards may also have unintended consequences, such as building expectations for receiving extra benefits and weakening employee barriers to unethical acts. This article investigates the dark side of the reward–behavior association, and exploring what is referred to as the reward–theft parity effect (RTPE). The authors hypothesize that receiving rewards induces a corresponding type of theft. In Study 1, survey results (n = 634) show initial support (...) for the RTPE between rewards and same‐category theft, and that perceptions of procedural justice attenuate this association. Study 2 involved a 2 (reward) × 2 (theft opportunity) between‐subjects experimental design (n = 300) and provides further support for the RTPE by revealing greater theft under a reward–theft parity condition than under a reward–theft disparity condition. Study 3 replicates these findings in a field experiment (n = 285) and finds that the RTPE is exacerbated when the reward–behavior task is perceived as unjust. Collectively, these findings provide new theoretical insights while also giving managers a more complete understanding of the dark side of behavioral reinforcement mechanisms. (shrink)

Unlike other creatures, humans developed the ability to cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers and a tendency to comply with social norms. However, humans deviate from social norms in various situations. This study used the modified ultimatum game to explore why humans deviate from social norms and how their prosocial behavior can be promoted. In Study 1, participants were asked to imagine working with an anonymous counterpart to complete a task and obtain a certain amount of money (e.g., ¥10). The computer (...) divided the money randomly in favor of the participant (e.g., 9:1 or 8:2). Participants should decide whether to accept or reject such a self-benefiting division. In the non-risk condition, an absolutely fair redivision of money would take place if participants reject self-benefiting division (e.g. 5:5 or 6:4). By contrast, in the risk condition, other-benefiting redivision of money (e.g., 1:9 or 2:8) would take place if participants rejected the self-benefiting division. Results involving 40 college students showed the main effect of condition. The frequency of accepting self-benefiting division in the risk condition was higher than that in the non-risk condition. As such, compliance with social norms is based on the preservation of material resources. In Study 2, we used economic or moral rewards to compensate for economic loss following compliance with the norm. Results involving 28 college students revealed a significant effect of compensation. The rewards, including moral praise, effectively decreased selfish choices. These findings extend previous studies on social norm compliance by emphasizing the importance of internal, fairness-based balance between material and moral needs, as well as the role of moral praise in promoting prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Can humans get arbitrarily capable reinforcement learning agents to do their bidding? Or will sufficiently capable RL agents always find ways to bypass their intended objectives by shortcutting their reward signal? This question impacts how far RL can be scaled, and whether alternative paradigms must be developed in order to build safe artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we study when an RL agent has an instrumental goal to tamper with its reward process, and describe design principles that (...) prevent instrumental goals for two different types of reward tampering. Combined, the design principles can prevent reward tampering from being an instrumental goal. The analysis benefits from causal influence diagrams to provide intuitive yet precise formalizations. (shrink)