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Summary Philosophy (and Ethics) of Political Violence

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Summary of the Philosophy part of the course Philosophy and Ethics of Political Violence of the minor: Peace and Conflict Studies (midterm). Grade: 8.2 Summary of the literature + presentations.

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Instelling Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
Studie Criminologie
Vak (S_PEV)

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Summary

Lecture 1: Are humans violent by nature?
Hobbes
 State of nature:
o No government, no civilization, no law, no common power to restrain human
nature
o Assumptions:
 Men are equal, both in physical and mental abilities
 Calculating men
 Scarcity
o Conflicts are caused by:
 Competition
 Diffidence
 Glory
o The war of all against all
o No place for industry
o The life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
 Humans are violent by nature (and try to survive)
o Man is to man like a wolf ‘homo homini lupus’
 Look for a solution because of:
o Fear of death
o Desire
o Hope
o Reason
o Laws of Nature → Seek peace
 Solution/Social contract:
o Men must unite and give up their individual sovereignty to a single unity, the
Leviathan
o All individuals make together the state is above all to prevent war
 Sovereign
 Monopoly of power and violence
 An all powerful state
 Tyranny is better than the state of nature, since it provides safety

Rousseau
 State of nature:
o Idyllic, people live together in peace, driven by empathy, compassion and
moral standards
o Conflicts are caused by:
 Living together as families and neighbors
 Private property (placing a fence and saying “this is mine”)
→ Inequality
 Humans are not violent by nature, but due to external factors
o “nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state”
 Solution/Social contract:
o Direct democracy
o The laws are acts of general will
o Aims at liberty and equality of its citizens

,  Giving up natural liberty, but getting political liberty in return

Pinker
 Inspired by Hobbes
 Humans are not violent by nature
o Agrees with Hobbes that humans used to be violent
o But we are improving, thanks to civilization, especially the Enlightenment →
A strong decline of violence
o The use of violence is rather an exception than rule in civilized society
o Optimistic view of the future
 Five Inner Demons = Triggers of violence
o Instrumental violence = People use violence to achieve something, it serves a
purpose
o Dominance = To show that you are better than others, to settle the power
relations
o Revenge = To let the other pay (retribution, justice, punishment)
o Sadism = Enjoy letting others suffer
o Ideology = Believes it serves a good cause (justification)
 Four Better Angels = Motives for peace
o Empathy = Feel what others are feeling
o Self-control = Act of the will, will-power (different from reason)
o Morality
o Reason
 Five (favorable) historical forces:
o States/Leviathan (Hobbes)
o Commerce = When there is trade, there cannot be war
o Feminization = Increasing respect for women
o Cosmopolitanism = Mobility, literacy and media allow people to take on new
perspectives and expand circles of empathy
o Knowledge/rationality/education = Able to reframe violence as a problem to be
solved instead of a contest to be won

De Waal
 Inspired by Rousseau
 Humans are not violent by nature, but empathic by nature and share this quality with
other primates
 Against the Veneer Theory:
o We can build a wall/veneer, cover the “bad” human nature and constrain the
violent human nature
o When this cover breaks down (due to i.e. war), this is exposed again
 Instead: Russian Doll Model
o Based on observational research of ‘higher primates’, i.e. chimpanzees and
bonobo’s, who express empathy
o Increasing levels of mutual understanding with the emergence of
consciousness:
 Feeling with the other (emotional contagion)
 Understanding what the other feels (cognitive empathy)
 Fully placing yourself in the shoes of the other (attribution)
o Each earlier layer plays a role in the higher layers

, o Humans are able to connect at a deeper level, the other is not just an enemy

Lecture 2: Social/political/economic explanations of violence - Why do humans use
violence?
Hegel
 Social explanation for the use of violence
o What happens between humans when they are conscious of each other?
 Hegel’s dialectic = Development of history
o Thesis = Argument
o Antithesis = Counterargument
o Synthesis = New argument
 In this history: (Human) consciousness emerges
 An extra dimension: ‘Spirit’ (‘Geist’)
o Consciousness meets other consciousnesses
o Humans are aware of how other people see them, and therefore see themselves
through the eyes of the other
o Makes you fully ‘interdependent’ = You cannot see yourself as an individual
since you care about what others think of you
 Recognition = Humans want to be recognized by others, acknowledged for their
worth, respected
 Source of conflict:
o Both individuals struggle for recognition
o If there is no equality then this results in affirmation of one self-consciousness
at the cost of the negation or annihilation of the other
o Hierarchy (masters vs. slaves; lordship & bondage)
o Never satisfactory → Conflicts
 Solution/Freedom:
o Rather than seeing conflict as negative, Hegel believes it is necessary for
individuals to achieve a better understanding of themselves and move to a
higher state
o When you no longer worry about this (equal recognition), your consciousness
returns to yourself and you are ‘free’
o You can relate to each other as equals / equal subjects
 In modern times, we start to understand that equality is essential
o Rule of law, democracy → This makes us free, free subjects among other free
subjects, the end of oppression → ‘End of history’

Marx
 Historical path towards inequality:
o There has always been an arrangement of society into various orders/classes
o Once people started producing more than they needed (materialism), an
unequal society arose (have’s and have-not’s)
o Modern bourgeois society has established new opposing classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones BUT
simplified:
 Bourgeoisie = The ruling class
 Proletariat = The working class
o Capitalism leads to the bourgeoisie exploiting the proletariat and profiting
from their labor which leads to economic inequality

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