MORAL THEORIES OF AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE

Morton Deutsch’s (1982) Theory of Interdependence and Psychological Orienta­tion emphasizes that psychological orientations to social situations have moral as well as cognitive and motivational components.

Morals are the norms, rights, entitlements, obligations, responsibilities, and duties that guide our behavior with others and shape our sense of fairness. Morals, conveyed by social learning and culture, are attuned to who is owed what in particular contexts. Even when morals are unarticulated they can be deeply felt, particularly when people perceive a discrepancy between what should be and what is. Morals can deter aggression and violence when they instruct patience if faced with provocation, but they can provoke aggression and violence when they instruct honor-, reputation-, or status-preserving responses to provocation. Perceived violations of shared social norms can activate a sense of danger and injustice that charge conflict with great intensity.

In aggression and violence, morals, entwine with cognitions and motivations. Morals and cognitions are closely connected. Anger is described as cognitive and physiological, but it is moral too. While it results from cognitions that some­one is responsible for one’s suffering—that someone acted in a socially unjus­tified manner and that a negative occurrence would not have happened otherwise (Berkowitz and Heimer, 1989)—it is also a moral judgment that focuses on responsibility, blame, and violation of social norms. Morals and motives are also closely connected. Blame identifies particular people as respon­sible for one’s failure to achieve an important goal. It is also based upon a per­son’s understanding of prevailing moral norms and can prompt a sense of injustice that can be highly motivating and justify aggression.

Moral theories concerning violation of norms, social judgments, disengage­ment of moral controls, moral exclusion, and structural violence describe the relationship between morals and aggression and violence.

Norm Violations

Social norms guide behavioral expectancies about how people should behave toward each other. These norms are assumed to be widely known and shared within a group. Because social norms foster social coordination and communi­cation, violations are disruptive and can be punished by gossip and ostracism. Violations of social norms also can set in motion attributions that emphasize malevolent motives and antagonistic interests, resulting in hostile reactions, con­flict escalation, and violence. Norm violations are less likely to trigger this neg­ative cycle if the norm violations are perceived as being transient rather than stable, unintentional rather than intentional, and when parties to a conflict (friends, community groups, or nations) have developed norms of redress. Norms of redress are procedures for bringing about retributive or reparative jus­tice. They can effectively avert conflict escalation if they are in place and well established before norm violations occur (De Ridder and Tripathi, 1992).

Moral Reasoning and Judgment

Sociomoral reasoning examines how people judge their own and others’ behav­ior. Aggression can be normative or norm-violating, depending on prevailing norms in the family, community, and culture. Sociomoral judgments of aggression consider an actor’s intentions; the appropriateness, intensity, and nature of the aggression; and the harm done. These judgments, which can be accurate or faulty, are influenced by such factors as the perceiver’s gender, age, ideology, and feel­ings of affinity for the victim or the aggressor (Rule and Nesdale, 1976).

Research on the development of sociomoral reasoning indicates that as chil­dren mature, their ability to take multiple perspectives increases. They progress from simple, self-oriented thinking to complex and abstract analyses that take other perspectives into account.

Domain theorists point out that moral reasoning can be sidestepped alto­gether by viewing behavior in nonmoral terms. Social behavior can be construed as occurring (1) in the moral domain, in which fairness, responsibility, and deserving pertain; (2) in the conventional domain, in which social conventions and structures are salient; or (3) in the personal domain, in which personal dis­cretion and privacy are salient. Understanding others’ behavior depends on knowing whether they view their behavior in moral or nonmoral terms. Ado­lescents, for example, can view smoking or drug use as a moral issue (right or wrong), as socially conventional behavior (hanging out with friends), or as a personal issue (their own preferences) (Berkowitz, Guerra, and Nucci, 1991). Similarly, abortion can be viewed as a moral issue or a matter of personal dis­cretion (Smetana, 1982).

When applied to aggression and violence, domain theory has chilling impli­cations. The moral implications of domestic violence are dismissed by aggres­sors who claim that their behavior belongs in the personal domain: “This is a family matter. Why do you want to make a big deal of it?” (Quindlen, 1994, p. A21). Hate-crime aggressors, too, invoke prevailing homophobic, misogynistic, or racist norms to describe violence as conventional rather than admit that it violates widely shared moral norms about human rights and dignity.

Disengagement of Moral Controls

Norms deterring aggression and violence come from within the individual and from socially shared norms. These norms are weakened during war, strife, and conflict, and gradually can lessen scruples about performing abhorrent acts under these circumstances.

Moral Exclusion

Moral considerations guide our behavior with those individuals and groups who are inside our scope of justice or moral community. The scope of justice is the extent to which one’s concepts of justice apply to others (Deutsch, 1985). Moral inclusion means that considerations of fairness apply to others, they are entitled to a share of community resources, and they are entitled to help, even at a cost to oneself. Moral exclusion dispenses with these considerations (Opotow, 1990, 1993). When people view others as morally excluded, they are more likely to derogate them and justify mistreatment they experience (Lerner, 1980; Staub, 1985). Because it is difficult to see oneself or one’s society as harmful or unjust, research indicates that three kinds of denial perpetuate moral exclusion: first, denying harm­ful outcomes by minimizing their duration or effects; second, denying others’ enti­tlement to better outcomes; and third, denying one’s contribution to violence by seeing it as negligible (Opotow and Weiss, 2000).

Those outside the community in which morals, rules, and considerations of fairness apply can be viewed as nonentities who can be exploited (for example, illegal immigrants, slaves), or they can be viewed as hated enemies who deserve brutal treatment and death. Whether people who are targets of violence are ignored as nonentities or hated as enemies, they are seen as less than human and the violence they experience can seem appropriate. In the Third Reich’s Final Solution, the disappearances in Argentina, the genocide in Rwanda, and in too many other places and times, aggressors demonized hated victims while victims were invisible to indifferent bystander states.

Structural Violence

Structural violence, as distinguished from direct violence (Galtung, 1969), results from societal arrangements that normalize the way things are done, whose voice is heard or ignored, who gets particular resources, and who goes without. It includes unequal access to such social resources as education, quality housing, civic services, safe jobs, and political power. Unlike direct violence, it does not directly maim and kill. However, it does so indirectly by increasing exposure to risk, hard­ship, and danger. Because blame for structural violence is diffuse, those harmed by it are often suspected of causing their own debilitation. Structural violence flour­ishes when people who benefit from the status quo preserve their sense of moral­ity by keeping themselves uninformed about the breadth and depth of structural violence and by avoiding questions that would yield answers they would rather not know. As a result, the advantage that race confers on White people at the expense of people of color and the advantage that gender confers on men at the expense of women is invisible, ignored, and disregarded (Opotow, 2001).