Abstract
Describing an action or a state of affairs as a form of violence is usually shorthand for condemning whatever falls under that description. However, precisely because the concept of violence is taken to have a special kind of moral force, it is prone to conceptual inflation. In this chapter, I argue that we should resist such inflation for epistemic and moral reasons. Specifically, the indiscriminate application of the concept deprives us of the means for saying what violence is not, which leaves us unable to specify the moral end for the sake of which violence is to be condemned. Having made the case for delimiting the concept of violence, I go on to show that violence is not a normative concept, and that expanded notions of “systemic” or “structural” violence add nothing to our understanding of the specific wrong at stake. I conclude that decoupling violence from normative assumptions enables us to distinguish between violence as a feature of specific human actions and injustice as a feature of policies and institutions that cannot be reduced to individual agency. My aim, ultimately, is not to reject violence as framework for explanation and evaluation, but to show that it is self-defeating to expand this framework beyond reasonable limits.
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Notes
- 1.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) is not without its critics (e.g. Pinker 2007, Murphy 1996). As Gibbs (2009, 2011) shows, many of the criticism fall short of the mark in that they are based on isolated examples, target their criticisms at Lakoff and Johnsons’s early work, and ignore the overwhelming empirical evidence from the different cognitive sciences of the ways in which metaphor shapes language and thought. Nevertheless, my argument does not rest on the wholesale acceptance of CMT. My claim here is simply that, when it comes to reasoning about violence, many philosophers (a) use the concept in a metaphorical sense and (b) this involves reasoning by analogy from our knowledge about concrete experience to a variety of abstract domains.
- 2.
This does not only hold for philosophy, of course. Analogical reasoning plays an equally important role in everyday problem-solving, in scientific and legal reasoning and in artistic creation.
- 3.
The paradigmatic argument that violence is violation is Newton Garver’s “What is violence?” (1977).
- 4.
- 5.
The same criticisms would hold for claims that the term “violence” points to injustice. Once we ask about the specific feature of the injustice that warrant it being called violence rather than injustice, the answer would again have to appeal to the definition of violence as violation, oppression, and so forth. I take up the question of injustice again in the fifth section.
- 6.
A case in point is the definition of “epistemic violence” as “a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance. Pernicious ignorance should be understood to refer to any reliable ignorance that, in a given context, harms another person (or set of persons)” (Dotson 2011, p. 238).
- 7.
This point is nicely illustrated in the disagreement between John Gray and Stephen Pinker about the latter’s claim in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that violence has precipitously declined since the eighteenth century. What Pinker means is that death in war and internecine conflict has declined. Gray counters this by arguing that Pinker leaves out of account the long-term effects of harm and the threat of harm, and that when these are taken into account, “advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred” (The Guardian, 13 March 2015). Gray thus opposes Pinker’s argument by redefining violence and then claiming that violence has not declined—based on this redefinition of the term. Pinker responds in turn that “Gray is not just wrong but howlingly, flat-earth, couldn’t-be-more-wrong wrong” (The Guardian, 20 March 2015).
- 8.
Incidentally, this is why Arendt’s famed distinctions between power, force and violence is not a viable strategy. While she rightly criticizes the expansion of violence to cover both power to act in concert and unjustified coercion, she largely does so by way of definitions rather than argument. See On Violence (1970).
- 9.
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Roodt, V. (2019). Violence As Metaphor. In: Lauwaert, L., Smith, L., Sternad, C. (eds) Violence and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_1
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