Reflection #1 — Violence, I Think?

I wanted to start this after a couple of classes so I could get my feet wet with the topic of violence; a starting point if you will. It did not help. What seems like such a basic concept at first glance gets more and more complicated the farther down the rabbit hole you go. So, in order to keep my sanity, I am going to collect my scattered thoughts on the subject here. So, I will pose a question to myself to begin with; “What does violence mean to you?”. I’ll explore some different concepts that have been floating around in my head and hopefully come up with some kind of meaningful answer.

Violence, stripped bare of all external factors, is merely a means to an end. To what end that is depends on who (or what) is doing violence and what context they are doing it under. For example, you would punch someone in a fight to hurt them; a simple means to a simple end, but which is “morally wrong”. Now, what if you are in a boxing match? You are punching them to ultimately win the match in a sanctioned tournament. Again simple, but this time the perpetrators are not doing wrong. So, if an action can be more violent in different circumstances as opposed to others, then what about the idea of violence?

It seems like society have the ideas of violence and morality negatively tied together. If a violent act would compromise a person’s morality, it becomes less likely that they will go through with it. This can be encapsulated by one of my personal favourite thought experiments, “The Trolly Problem”. Basically, there is a runaway train that is going to kill 5 people who are tied to the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track so that the train goes around the 5 people, but in doing so you will end up killing 1 person that is tied to this alternate track. This experiment (and its partner “Should You Kill the Fat Man”) is available to complete at http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/fatman/ , and it yelds some intresting some statistics. 86% of people said they would switch the track and kill the 1 person; but when it changes to “would you push a fat man off the bridge in order to stop the train?” only 39% of people said yes. This number jumps back up 75% when the fat man is not an innocent bystander, but the one who sabotaged the train in the first place. So, people have 3 choices to make: in choices 1 and 3, the answers that save the most amount of people end up having a higher morality to violence ratio. However, in the 2nd choice, violence ends up outweighing the answer that saves the most amount of people. So here is appears that apparent morality plays an important role in the decision to do violence.

So what does violence mean to me? As a human being, it is a way of displaying anger or displeasure. As a gamer it is a way of entertainment. As a psychology student and an academic it is an intrinsic part of the human experience. I believe that violence at its core is an opposing force to morality. Although, how does this relationship work in people with low levels of morality? Perhaps it is like a threshold; once the level of violence reaches a certain point, people will be more inclined to use violence. In people with lower levels of morality this threshold would be much lower, meaning they could commit violent acts without worrying about morals. Is this meaningful? Maybe, but it is definitely a topic I would be interested to learn more about in the coming weeks.