This book examines the history of violence and terrorism while showing how fragmentation is accelerating to such proportions that it now threatens to annihilate all of humanity. Though no different today than it was centuries ago, violence is now aided by modern technology and its promotion of destructive weapons.

Both Mahāyāna and mainstream Buddhism agree that a buddha's compassion is “great” when compared with ordinary compassion. The Western study of Buddhist ethics has focused on how selflessness, emptiness, interconnection, or a matrix of interrelativity serve as more compelling ontological perspectives for compassion. However, Mahāyāna and Abhidharma sources agree that higher philosophical perspectives contribute to compassion by revealing more subtle types of suffering, providing the wisdom necessary to relieve suffering, and enabling the ability to remain in samsāra. Concepts such (...) as the universal desire to avoid suffering, svaparārtha, and merit‐making, richly elaborated in narrative literature, are the primary bases of Buddhist ethics. The power of Western fantasies of Buddhist pacifism has obscured a far more nuanced ethics of violence than has yet been explicated. (shrink)

Marx and Engels's thought—combined with the way in which it has been interpreted—has tended to militate against discussion of an ethics of violence in revolt. Along with Sorel and Fanon, their attitude towards violence is often seen simply as one where the ends justify the means and where violence in pursuit of a just society is necessarily defensible. However, we can (and should) look to certain sources within Marx and Engels for inspiration for an ethics (...) of violence in revolt, which places emphasis on the humanizing aspects of their work, on the core ideas of freedom, moving beyond dehumanization and moving beyond violence. I argue that this approach suggests an abhorrence of any violence and can thus be combined with a pacifist-influenced approach to the ethics of violence in revolt. This is compatible with Ernst Bloch's interpretation of Marxism, which he describes as “concrete utopianism.” Classical Marxism can, then, offer fruitful pointers to an ethics of violence in political change, although Marx and Engels's texts must be used with considerable care and must be combined with the work of other thinkers, in particular those who display more explicit moral objection to violence of any kind. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse the theory and practice of interventions in foreign civil wars to assist rebels fighting against violently oppressive government. I argue that the indirect nature of this kind of intervention gives rise to political complications that are either absent from or less obvious in humanitarian interventions aimed chiefly at defending human rights from imminent threats. An adequate theory must therefore accommodate three additional components. First, it requires a theory of indirect warfare accounting for how the ends (...) of the interveners’ added violence relate to those of the rebels’ violence. Second, it requires a theory of indirect political leadership, paying careful attention both to the political status of the rebel leaders vis‐à‐vis the people on whose behalf they fight and to the relationship between those leaders and the interveners. Third, the peculiarities of indirect military intervention mean that the violence it introduces isn’t easily explained purely in terms of defensive goals. An adequate account needs additionally to pay attention to the role of violence in shaping new political movements and institutions. The value of such goals is less easily quantified than those of humanitarian intervention, making it harder to set upper limits on permissible ‘proportionate’ harm. (shrink)

Video game players sometimes give voice to an “intuition” that violently harming nonhuman animals in video games is particularly ethically troubling. However, the moral issue of violence against nonhuman animals in video games has received scant philosophical attention, especially compared to the ethics of violence against humans in video games. This paper argues that the seemingly counterintuitive belief that digital animal violence is in general more ethically problematic than digital human violence is likely to be (...) correct. Much video game violence against animals has at least some potential, even if only a modest one, to contribute to moral indifference toward animals and to their routine mistreatment. These possible effects have ethical implications for animals, society, players, and video game designers. (shrink)

In opposition to the absolutist ethics of non-violence, the author argues that in response to aggression and violence one has to use every means possible to prevent them. To resist violence is a moral duty of the individual. It would be desirable for violence to be prevented by strength of mind, but if strength of mind is not enough or the aggressor is insensitive to intellectual, spiritual and psychological impacts, one has to employ by accretion (...) all necessary means. Ethics is called upon to set limits to the employment of the means of countering violence. (shrink)

Georges Bataille agrees with numerous Christian mystics that there is ethical and religious value in meditating upon, and having ecstatic episodes in response to, imagery of violent death. For Christians, the crucified Christ is the focus of contemplative efforts. Bataille employs photographic imagery of a more-recent victim of torture and execution. In this essay, while engaging with Amy Hollywood's interpretation of Bataille in Sensible Ecstasy, I show that, unlike the Christian mystics who influence him, Bataille strives to divorce himself from (...) any moral authority external to the ecstatic episode itself. I argue that in his attempt to remove external authority he abandons the only resources that could possibly protect his mystical contemplation from engendering sadistic attitudes. (shrink)

This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers. Surveying such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida, Avelar also offers a discussion of theories of torture and confession, the work of Roman Polanski and Borges, and a meditation on the rise of the novel in Colombia.

Exploring a variety of ways of thinking ethically about drone violence. The violent use of armed, unmanned aircraft is increasing worldwide, but uncertainty persists about the moral status of remote-control killing and why it should be restrained. Practitioners, observers and potential victims of such violence often struggle to reconcile it with traditional expectations about the nature of war and the risk to combatants. Addressing the ongoing policy concern that state use of drone violence is sometimes poorly understood (...) and inadequately governed, the book's ethical assessments are not restricted to the application of traditional Just War principles, but also consider the ethics of artificial intelligence, virtue ethics, and guiding principles for forceful law-enforcement. This edited collection brings together nine original contributions by established and emerging scholars, incorporating expertise in military ethics, critical military studies, gender, history, international law and international relations, in order to better assess the multi-faceted relationship between drone violence and justice. Christian Enemark is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. (shrink)

Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But, should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve (...) the issue. -/- Focusing on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies, Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy advances debates about the ethical criticism of art, not only by shining light on the interesting and under-examined case of virtual fantasies, but also by its novel application of a virtue ethical account. Video games are works of fiction that enable players to entertain a fantasy. So, a full understanding of the ethical criticism of video games must focus attention on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies. -/- Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy engages with debates and critical discussions of games in both the popular media and recent work in philosophy, psychology, media studies, and game studies. (shrink)

Barely seventeen years into the twenty-first century, our world continues to be plagued by endless wars and violence. Africa is not immune from these crises. As many countries in Africa celebrate more than fifty years of independence from colonial rule, Africa is still the poorest continent in the world. Religious wars, genocides, ethnic and tribal cleansings have come to define the continent’s contemporary history. Corruption, nepotism, dictatorship, disregard for human life, tribalism, and many social vices are normalized realities in (...) many parts of the continent. Rather than despair, a radical refocusing on Africa’s rich history of hospitality that affirms the flourishing of all life ought to be embraced. This article aims to do exactly this by exploring Africa’s role and place in the history of three Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While celebrating Africa’s unique role as the gateway for the realization of divine hospitality, this article aims to serve as a witness to an ethic of life that is relevant for the global church’s vision and mission to a pluralistic world and for the mission of the churches of Africa to addressing the social, cultural, and political crises faced by the continent. To achieve these, this work appropriates a comparative theological method that sheds light on the centrality of Africa in these three Abrahamic religions with a bias for the flourishing of life. Keywords: Africa, Hospitality, Life, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. (shrink)

It may be thought that the ethics of care has developed important insights into the moral values involved in the caring practices of family, friendship, and personal caregiving, but that the ethics of care has little to offer in dealing with violence. The violence of crime, terrorism, war, and violence against women in any context may seem beyond the ethics of care. Skepticism is certainly in order if it is suggested that we can deal (...) with violence simply by caring. Violence seems to call for the harsh arm of law and enforcement, not the soft touch of care. Elsewhere I have discussed how the ethics of care would recommend respect for international law and how it would thus approach issues of military intervention. I will concentrate here on how the ethics of care can contribute guidance in dealing with family violence and in confronting terrorism. (shrink)

The paper first demonstrates the ability to provode objective data and analyses during war and then examines the need for such objective gathering of data and analysis in the context of mass violence and war, specifically in the 2009 Gaza War. That data and analysis is required to assess compliance with just war norms in assessing the conduct of the war, a framework quite distinct from human rights norms that can misapply and deform the application of norms such as (...) proportionality and obligations not to target civilians. (shrink)

I argue for two theses. First, many arguments against violent gaming rely on what I call the contamination thesis, drawing their conclusions by claiming that violent gaming contaminates real world interactions. I argue that this thesis is empirically and philosophically problematic. Second, I argue that rejecting the contamination thesis does not entail that all video games are morally unobjectionable. The violence within a game can be evaluated in terms of the values the game cultivates, reinforces, denigrates, or disrespects. Games (...) which present violence in ways that disrespect objects of values are more objectionable than violent games that reinforce or cultivate those values. The resulting analysis evaluates games on a case-by-case basis and pays particular attention to the representational context of the violence. (shrink)

Despite his final call for peace and "the wisdom of love", Emmanuel Levinas inevitably spoke of violence, and perhaps spoke even more of it. His call for infinite responsibility is actually crystallized through discourse on violence and suffering. We may say that these themes served as catalysts to the standing theory and, ethically, to any responsible Self. Violence, at least as a concept, poses itself as a significant presence to Levinas' plantilla while it reaches unexplored dimensions that (...) await phenomenology and vital thought. As a part of his ethical proposal, understanding violence becomes important so that the Self may go beyond it while reaching the Other. (shrink)

This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of violence from his Notebooks for an ethics constitutes an attempt to go beyond an instrumental view of violence. An “instrumental view of violence” essentially assumes that violent behavior is a form of pragmatic behavior whose distinguishing feature consists in the kind of means one employs for reaching one’s goals (violent behavior resorting to means that are harmful for others, whereas non-violent behavior does not). For his part, Sartre attempts (...) to provide a stronger demarcation between violent and pragmatic behaviors. First, violent behavior is, for Sartre, not necessarily characterized by the use of particular means, but by a particular manner of using means, one that involves a certain “forcing” or “straining” of the means. Second, I argue that, according to Sartre, in contrast with pragmatic behavior, violent behavior involves a modification of one’s attitude towards one’s goals. Three such modified attitudes with respect to one’s goals are detailed here, namely the non-productive attitude (the assumption that the goal is not to be produced or that it is not to be produced by means that are under our control), the counter-productive attitude (the exacerbation of one’s proximate goal at the expense of more distant goals) and the anti-productive attitude (the active refusal of one’s previously set goal). Moreover, I show that Sartre’s view that violence involves the “straining” of one’s means is undergirded by his idea that violent behavior presupposes the modification of one’s attitude with respect to one’s goals. (shrink)

Moving beyond the traditional feminist ethics of care, Linda A. Bell places an existentialist conception of liberation at the heart of ethics and argues that only an ethics of freedom sufficiently allows for feminist critique and opposition ...

This volume examines the distinctive and highly problematic ethical questions surrounding conflict archaeology. By bringing together sophisticated analyses and pertinent case studies from around the world it aims to address the problems facing archaeologists working in areas of violent conflict, past and present. Of all the contentious issues within archaeology and heritage, the study of conflict and work within conflict zones are undoubtedly the most highly charged and hotly debated, both within and outside the discipline. Ranging across the conflict zones (...) of the world past and present, this book attempts to raise the level of these often fractious debates by locating them within ethical frameworks. The issues and debates in this book range across a range of ethical models, including deontological, teleological and virtue ethics. The chapters address real-world ethical conundrums that confront archaeologists in a diversity of countries, including Israel/Palestine, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina, Rwanda, Germany and Spain. They all have in common recent, traumatic experiences of war and dictatorship. The chapters provide carefully argued, thought-provoking analyses and examples that will be of real practical use to archaeologists in formulating and addressing ethical dilemmas in a confident and constructive manner. (shrink)

Poverty, inequality, violence, environmental degradation, and tyranny continue to afflict the world. Ethics of Global Development offers a moral reflection on the ends and means of local, national, and global efforts to overcome these five scourges. After emphasizing the role of ethics in development studies, policy-making, and practice, David A. Crocker analyzes and evaluates Amartya Sen's philosophy of development in relation to alternative ethical outlooks. He argues that Sen's turn to robust ideals of human agency and democracy (...) improves on both Sen's earlier emphasis on 'capabilities and functionings' and Martha Nussbaum's version of the capability orientation. This agency-focused capability approach is then extended and strengthened by applying it to the challenges of consumerism and hunger, the development responsibilities of affluent individuals and nations, and the dilemmas of globalization. Throughout the book the author argues for the importance of more inclusive and deliberative democratic institutions. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren berichteten mehr und mehr Frauen von Gewalt und Respektlosigkeit in der Geburtshilfe. Inzwischen hat sich auch die Forschung verstärkt dieses Themas angenommen. Prävalenzschätzungen sind jedoch aufgrund erheblicher methodischer Schwächen noch nicht hinreichend genau zu beziffern. Die Vielzahl und Vielfalt der bestehenden Forschungsergebnisse lassen dennoch den Schluss zu, dass es in der Geburtshilfe in fast allen Regionen der Erde regelmäßig zu Gewalt und Respektlosigkeit und damit zu Menschenrechtsverletzungen kommt. Die Folgen reichen bis hin zu Posttraumatischen Belastungsstörungen, was (...) nahelegt, dass dieser Missstand sowohl aus Menschenrechts-Gründen als auch aus Gründen der öffentlichen Gesundheit nicht übergangen werden darf. Daher ist es außerordentlich besorgniserregend, wenn geburtshilfliche Fachpersonen im Angesicht solcher Berichte und Forschung in einen Modus der Selbstverteidigung verfallen und die Erfahrungen der Frauen in Frage sowie Abrede stellen, anstatt zuvorderst mit Empathie zu reagieren. Der vorliegende Text wendet sich einigen dieser Reaktionsmuster seitens geburtshilflicher Fachpersonen zu: einem falsch verstandenen Objektivitätsanspruch und der mithin abwegigen Forderung, die subjektiven Erfahrungen der Frauen zu objektivieren, einer leugnenden und herablassenden Wortwahl sowie einer mangelnden Anerkennung des von den Frauen Geschilderten und einer aus berufsethischer Perspektive unzureichend fürsorglichen Haltung. Solcherlei Reaktionen sind nicht nur unzulässig, sondern lassen ebenjenen Respekt vermissen, den die betroffenen Frauen sich während der Geburt wünschten und dessen Abwesenheit sie verletzte oder gar traumatisierte. Schließlich sollten Gewalt und Respektlosigkeit in der Geburtshilfe sowie die beschriebenen Reaktionen darauf vor dem Hintergrund geschlechtsspezifischer Machtverhältnisse und Gewalt an Frauen generell diskutiert werden. (shrink)

The book offers a philosophical analysis of violence as a global problem and its challenges to ethics. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. The contributors examine the problems of structural and direct violence, war and peace, human rights, toleration, and the ethics of international relations and co-responsibility in a globalized world.

Traditional disciplinary guidelines are inadequate to address some of the ethical dilemmas that emerge when conducting research on violence against women and girls. This article is organized according to the ethical principles of respect for persons, privacy and confidentiality, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. In the article, I describe dilemmas involved in cross-cultural research, research on children, informed consent, voluntariness, coercion, deception, safety, mandated reporting, and dissemination. In the article, I include examples from qualitative and quantitative studies in many nations. (...) I also offer suggestions for researchers and institutional review boards. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to assert that any moral critique or political censorship of sexually violent imagery cannot be justified with reference to participants nor matters of taste. Rather, the present paper seeks to distinguish objectification and alienation and apply this distinction to the issue of the representation of sexual violence. Alienation is the morally problematic category because systems of domination and control determine the expressions and consumption of desires, but this means that the violence in (...) such material may well be a red herring. (shrink)

According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power—the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these (...) colonial relations and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective. At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are (...) made along the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)

Zemyarska MS. Is it ethical to provide IVF add-ons when there is no evidence of a benefit if the patient requests it? J Med Ethics 2019;45:346–50. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2018-104983. The Acknowledgements section of ….

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Biting the Bullet:The Ethics and Aesthetics of ViolenceJonathan AllenThe Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia, by William Pfaff. New York. Simon & Schuster, 2004, 368 pp.Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag. New York, Picador, 2003, 131 pp.In the nineteenth century a broadly influential branch of Romantic philosophy insisted that goodness and beauty were intimately related. The goals of ethical and aesthetic education were taken to (...) be one and the same—the cultivation of the kalokagathos or "noble-and-beautiful" individual.1 This robust view of the relation between ethical and aesthetic education is now rarely defended; it was dealt a mortal wound by the inconvenient fact that highly cultured or Gebildete individuals have been implicated in the twentieth century's worst political crimes.This does not mean, however, that connections between ethical and aesthetic projects are no longer made. One such attempt to relate ethics and aesthetic—a bleak, somber, and deeply chastened attempt—is presented in the late Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. In this small but dense book, Sontag assesses the hope that the reproduction of images, especially photographic images, of violence and atrocity might help to abolish war, or at least to play a role in combating genocide or the commission of gross violations of the laws of war. While she evidently wishes to find "an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war," Sontag is doubtful that photography is equal to this moral burden.2Sontag's work concentrates on the aesthetic and ethical challenges that confront any attempt to convey the horrors of war to uninvolved observers. Her focus is thus trained on an attempt to exorcise what she refers to as the "seductiveness of war"; she is not primarily concerned to identify the source of war's allure (though she does have some interesting observations to make on the issue).3 William Pfaff, by contrast, is both repelled and fascinated by the modern embrace of violence. The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia offers an enthralling account of the intellectual and aesthetic forces that provoked the feverish modern love affair with violence and war. Pfaff is at least as doubtful as Sontag, however, that that love affair [End Page 100] is over and that we are in a position to forge a more pacific sensibility. Nevertheless, he insists that if we are to have the slightest hope of avoiding a full-scale repetition of the twentieth-century's "carnival of inhumanity," we need to understand the nature of its romance with violence.So how did that romance come about? The central theme of The Bullet's Song is the consequences of the loss of "chivalry." This, according to Pfaff, was a code that "held that what an individual or society could licitly do to another was limited by a morality linked to the essential values of Western civilization."4 Within this framework, it was expected that states would sometimes go to war with one another, but war was seen merely as an extreme means of settling disputes, not of eliminating entire societies or remaking the world. For individuals, war was presented as "a test of valor, rewarded by 'honor'"—in other words, it was seen as an occasion to test oneself in the light of a set of ideals of conduct that operated as constraints on permissible behavior in war.5 All of this came to a sticky end in the trenches of World War I, replaced by a morally nihilistic idea of total war. Pfaff claims that this moral vacuum proved intolerable to many individuals. They reacted in several different ways. Some attempted to construct "codes of individual transcendence" and "collective will," while others gave themselves over to "utopias based on historical fictions."6This is a very large story, and it is in fact too bulky for the confines of this book. First, it must be said that Pfaff fails to present his central claims clearly. He is unclear, for example, as to exactly what was lost with the destruction of the chivalric code, as well as what caused its destruction. At times, he seems to be suggesting that the rise of... (shrink)

What is war? -- The ethical arguments -- The history of war ethics -- Can war be justified? -- Lawful authority -- Humanitarian intervention -- With good intention? -- A last resort? -- A good chance of success -- Waging war -- Pre-emptive strikes -- Proportionality -- Weapons -- War and religion -- Holy wars -- Pacifism -- Non-violence -- Aftermath -- War crimes.

The fifteen new essays collected in this volume address questions concerning the ethics of self-defense, most centrally when and to what extent the use of defensive force, especially lethal force, can be justified. Scholarly interest in this topic reflects public concern stemming from controversial cases of the use of force by police, and military force exercised in the name of defending against transnational terrorism. The contributors pay special attention to determining when a threat is liable to defensive harm, though (...) doubts about this emphasis are also raised. The legitimacy of so-called "stand your ground" policies and laws is also addressed. This volume will be of great interest to readers in moral, political, and legal philosophy. (shrink)

What do we do when a beloved comedian known as "America's Dad" is convicted of sexual assault? Or when we discover that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" also enslaved hundreds of people? Or when priests are exposed as pedophiles? From the popular to the political to the profound, each day brings new revelations that respected people, traditions, and institutions are not what we thought they were. Despite the shock that these disclosures produce, this state of affairs (...) is anything but new. Facing the concrete task of living well when our best moral resources are not only contaminated but also potentially corrupting is an enduring feature of human experience. In this book, Karen V. Guth identifies "tainted legacies" as a pressing contemporary moral problem and ethical challenge. Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions, and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of age-old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism, and sexual violence. (shrink)

Religion is one of the most powerful forces running through human history, and although often presented as a force for good, its impact is frequently violent and divisive. This provocative work brings together cutting-edge research from both evolutionary and cognitive psychology to help readers understand the psychological structure of religious morality and the origins of religious violence. Introduces a fundamentally new approach to the analysis of religion in a style accessible to the general reader Applies insights from evolutionary and (...) cognitive psychology to both Judaism and Christianity, and their texts, to help understand the origins of religious violence Argues that religious violence is grounded in the moral psychology of religion Illustrates its controversial argument with reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the response to the attacks from both the terrorists and the President. Suggests strategies for beginning to counter the divisive aspects of religion Discusses the role of religion and religious criticism in the contemporary world. Argues for a position sceptical of the moral authority of religion, while also critiquing the excesses of the “new atheists” for failing to appreciate the moral contributions of religion Awarded Honourable Mention, 2010 Prose Awards. (shrink)

The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of human harming; second, that it is troubling in a (...) special way that makes acts of violence peculiarly hard to justify. This paper defends a narrow understanding of violence and a special ethics governing its use by arguing that a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category while partly accounting for the fearful connotations of the term. Violent Agency is defined first by a double intention (1) to inflict harm using a technique chosen (2) to eliminate or evade the target’s means of escaping it or defending against it. Second, the harms it aims at are destructive (as opposed to appropriative). The analysis offered connects the concept of violence to themes in international theory such as vulnerability, security, and domination, as well as the ethics of war. (shrink)

This paper examines how Adriana Cavarero extends and offers an alternative to Hannah Arendt's understanding of speech and its relationship to politics and violence through a re-reading of Herman Melville’s, Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). The novella was examined by Arendt in On Revolution (1963) where she considers the apolitical character of the French Revolutionary Terror and establishes a link between violence, mimetic contagion, and the failure of articulate speech. I suggest that whereas Arendt’s reading only offers two possible (...) responses to violence—forgiveness or punishment (perpetuating violence)—a reading of the novella inspired by Cavarero’s work shows a third alternative, the prevention of violence, while equally revealing the blind spot of Arendt’s argument. The blind spot is Arendt's privileging of articulate speech and her failure to consider the embodied character of human expression. Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, however, allows for a response to, and responsibility for, the uniqueness of the human voice, and for the intention to convey meaning. To mediate between Arendt and Cavarero, the paper also reconsiders Nidesh Lawtoo’s understanding of mimesis, evokes Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-setting queer reading of Billy Budd, and engages with Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s contrary takes on the relationship between violence and language. (shrink)

The articles intention is to construct a possible minimal response to violence, that is, to describe what would be justified противонасилие. This argument is built on reviving several important philosophical texts in Russian of the first half of the twentieth century as well as on going beyond that historical moment. Starting with the reconstruction of Tolstoys criticism of any use of violence, it is then shown that, paradoxically, resistance to Tolstoys or pseudo-Tolstoys teachings ends up incorporating Tolstoys thematization (...) of counter-violence into various theories, which sought to legitimate the use of force. In particular, Tolstoys discovery of a force, which, on the one hand, is not grounded in violence and, on the other hand, which is capable of countering violence, becomes fundamental in reasoning about the just use of force. The connection is made between Tolstoy and Petar II Petrović Njego, who also thematizes the use of force in Christian perspective. In his view, justice, blessed by the Creators hand, has the capacity to protect from violent force. Any living thing defends itself from what endangers it by means Creator bestowed it with. Living force and protective use of force are conceptually linked in Njegos reasoning. Thus, only protective force can defeat aggressive force. This is shown to be Njegos contribution to the Orthodox Christian discourse on violence. If a force can be counter-violent, the next step in our argument would be to search for a protocol that should have universal validity, that is, it has to be valid for all conflicting sides, The protocol of counter-violence requires that, firstly, it is a response to violence; secondly, it interrupts violence and forestalls any possible future violence ; thirdly, it is subject to verification, it addresses those who are a priori against any response to violence. Finally, it is shown that state power does not create law, but it is being right that makes law or gives life to social order, and thereby can authorize the use of force. This is the innovation in the histories of justification of force, absent in the West. Aggressive violence can necessarily be opposed only in the way that implies the possibility of constituting law and order. (shrink)

The evolutionary origins of religious ethics and violence.

The current financial crisis is one rooted not in recent deregulation but in the breaking of ancient (religious) laws, and this crisis is one of many ethical problems today that have religious roots. The tone of this essay is informed by a document from the World Council of Churches, which affirms "greed as violence" and that Christians do not have all the answers to the problem of greed; therefore, Christians need to seek solutions with other religious communities. Furthermore, religious (...) leaders, theologians, and ethicists, by their very station in life, are not able to effectively listen to the voices of the poor and marginalized people of the world. Self-critically examining the mainstream traditions within Christianity for its allegiance to empires, the article calls for engaging the alternative, rather than the mainstream traditions within religions whose interpretations of Scripture have provided insights that are at variance with the mainstream. It calls those who engage in this work to be double-headed: to examine others' beliefs from the perspective of the other—while continuing to be rooted in one's own center—and to recognize that the voices of those in poor or marginalized communities are inaccessible, unless those who are poor themselves become the mediators of dialogue. (shrink)

: In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence (...) as its instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of "realistic and positive" and "idealistic and moral" arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence (...) as its instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of violence from the survivor’s history and context, Coel’s polyvalent, looping narrative metabolizes rape television’s forms and genres in order to stage and restage both trauma and genre again and anew. Contesting common conceptions of vulnerability and susceptibility that (...) prefigure a violent breach of autonomy, Coel’s series and her interviews about it invite an ethics of looking that embraces a curiosity in the unknowable and untreatable kernel of subjective experience and defies and resists a policing of the survivor’s thoughts and emotions. By emphasizing and exploring what psychoanalysis calls the “afterwardness” of trauma, Coel foregrounds her main character’s subjectivity prior to her victimization, widens the sphere of consequence beyond the victim and criminal justice system to the survivor’s larger community, and entreats that community to preserve a space for her to look and look again at everything, without judgment. (shrink)