EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (8 page)

Disordered minds, such as those of the lust killer, are part of the human condition, a continuum that stretches from individuals who never cache in on their fantasies to those who not only deliver, but develop — as in addictions to food and drugs — deeper and deeper desires for harming others without the rewards that come from such harm. When wanting and liking part company, with liking falling dormant due to sensitization, wanting grows in intensity, seeking but failing to find satisfaction. So begins an appetite for violence, one that can turn into a craving.

Further evidence of the connection between violent fantasies and violent actions, and especially the addictive properties of violence, comes from studies by the psychologist Thomas Elbert who studied child soldiers brainwashed into joining the ranks of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Northern Uganda’s rebel group. Since its inception in 1987, the LRA has recruited 25-65,000 children, starting with boys and girls as young as 10-12 years old. In detailed interviews and analyses of now retired child soldiers, Elbert discovered that those who had more experience with killing developed stronger, appetite-driven fantasies of killing, a hunger that had to be fulfilled by real killing. As one ex-child soldier noted “The more we killed, the more we acquired a taste for it. If you are allowed to act out this lust it will never let you go again. You could see the lust in our greed popping eyes. […] It was an unprecedented pleasure for everyone.”
²⁴
Not only was the desire to kill converted into killing, but the more they killed, the less they experienced any trauma in later life. Unlike the droves of veterans who have returned from more traditional wars and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, these child soldiers developed an immunity. For many American war veterans, such as those that returned from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, there was little interest in killing; many considered war unnecessary, but served to defend their country and national pride. In contrast, the LRA’s child soldiers were brain washed into believing that killing was necessary and a sign of importance. Killing that is justified is rewarding, whether the justification is real or the product of self-deception. When self-deception joins the fray — as I further develop in
chapter 2
— killing is not only rewarding but virtuous. Killing reaches its most virtuous state in the case of suicide bombers
²⁵
.

Work by the economist Alan Krueger reveals that terrorists, including suicide bombers, are neither poor nor uneducated, but typically come from countries that limit civil liberties and focus their attention on democratic societies. From these correlations, Krueger and others have concluded that individuals living in societies that constrain human freedom, and who desire the public attention of large powerful democratic nations, are most at risk of terrorism. As the anthropologist Scott Atran correctly notes, however, a closer look at the characteristics of these terrorists, and the countries from which they emanate, reveals an important twist to this account. Al-Qaeda, for example, consists of members that come from a wide variety of countries, some poor and some not, some democratic and some authoritarian; Hezbollah and Hamas, in contrast, consist of a more circumspect membership. Looking to Europe, a high incidence of terrorist activities were ignited by individuals with unconstrained civil liberties. In a more focused set of analyses, Atran found that among the wealthiest and most educated Palestinians, there was more support for suicide attacks, whereas close to 80% of terrorist attacks by Jemaah Islamiya — a southeastern ally of Al-Qaeda — were carried out by uneducated, unskilled individuals. These analyses suggest that education, poverty, and political ideology are not predictors of terrorist activity. Rather, as Atran’s studies reveal, the best predictors of terrorism are small social networks, including the people they play soccer with, marry, and befriend in their neighborhood. When members of ones most intimate social network promote violent ideology and convey the excitement of public attention, the odds of joining in on a violent mission rise, even if this means self-sacrifice. As Atran notes, the 21
^st
century of terrorism reveals the power of “adventure, dreams of glory, and esteem in the eyes of peers” (p.8) to fuel excessive acts of harm by young people.

Given the material discussed thus far, one plausible conclusion is that the potentially addictive nature of violence can only be seen in relatively uncommon and extreme cases: lust murderers, brain washed child soldiers and suicide bombers. Though these cases provide vivid illustrations of how unsatisfied desires can drive excessive violence, other, far more common examples surround us. One of the most common contexts is domestic or intimate partner violence
²⁶
. In the United States, an estimated 1.3 million women per year are battered by their male partners, with the number of attacks within a couple increasing both when women attempt to leave or when they report the violence to the authorities. This pattern suggests that partner withdrawal, just like substance abuse withdrawal, causes an increasing desire to harm, leading in many cases to homicide. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that there were 1640 females killed by their partners in 2007. Based on these patterns, a number of clinicians have noted the parallels between domestic violence and addictive disorders. As discussed by Richard Irons and Jennifer Schneider, when domestic violence erupts, it, like an addiction to drugs or alcohol, is characterized by a loss of self-control, repeated actions with adverse consequences, obsessive thoughts, denial of the problem, and desensitization, with violence no longer satisfying the desire to harm. Domestic violence is rarely a one time affair. Domestic violence grows from an unsatisfied desire to control one’s partner. But like the consumption of alcohol, violence itself fails to satisfy the desire because wanting and liking have parted company. Violence becomes addictive.

Lust murderers, child soldiers, suicide bombers, and batterers in an abusive relationship move easily from violent desires to violent actions. For all, harming others is addictive. For all, the addiction is aided by a psychology of denial. Lust murderers fuel their appetite for violence by thinking of their victims as objects, child soldiers do it by means of self-deception, suicide bombers by the belief in a just cause, and battering spouses by creating the false belief that they deserve control. Objectification, self-deception, and ideological justification are forms of denial that loosen the grip of our moral sense, and help complete the recipe for evil.

Recommended books

Atran, S. (2010).
Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists.
New York: Harper Collins.

Bloom, P. (2010).
How Pleasure Works
. New York: W.W. Norton.

Krueger, A. (2007).
What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism
. Princeton, N : Princeton University Press.

Staub, E. (2010).
Overcoming Evil
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2:

Ravages of denial

Self denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

— George Bernard Shaw

The still life and tableau vivant represent two art forms that involve careful placement of objects into specific positions. The artist, using canvas or camera, recreates a staged scene. In a still life, the focus is typically on inanimate objects such as pitchers, books, or fruit, while in a tableau vivant the focus is on animate objects, including humans and other animals.

The tableau vivant reached new heights when Corporal Charles Graner decided to use his photographic talents to pose Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib into human pyramids, hooded scarecrows attached to electrical wires, dogs on leashes, and piles of naked flesh. Unlike the original art form which involved wealthy guests at dinner parties who voluntarily put on costumes and assumed silly poses, the Iraqi detainees were forced into humiliating positions, dehumanizing them into inanimate objects or animals. This represents a massive distortion of reality, but is not the representation of a delusional mind. Graner believed that the only way to protect his group was to crush and humiliate the other group’s spirit, and the only way to do that was to dehumanize them. For those of us who dared to stare at these pictures, or saw them come to life in Errol Morris’s superb film
Standard Operating Procedure,
they provide a wake-up call to the horrific ways in which we recruit dehumanization and self-deception to deny the moral fabric of other humans. This chapter explains how these two components of denial work, how they are enlisted to satisfy our desires, and often lead to the destruction of innocent lives.

Attempting to satisfy our desires frequently brings us into opposition with others who are interested in the same resources, as well as moral sanctions that prohibit particular actions. When moral constraints operate, either as intuitively understood norms or explicitly recognized laws, they set guidelines for what is right or wrong, what is praiseworthy or blameworthy, and who counts within the circle of morally relevant individuals. When we dehumanize another human being, we have taken them out of the circle of moral consideration, thereby lifting a significant constraint on our desire to procure resources. When we self-deceive, we justify to ourselves and often to others that new moral norms are necessary to address a societal problem. With new norms in place, actions that were prohibited under the old regime are not only legitimate, but sanctioned. So begins a process of denial that enables us to satisfy our desires.

Before I explain how we dehumanize and self-deceive?? I need to explain the process of humanization, the capacity to perceive some things but not others with human qualities and moral worth. This is an important process as it shapes our perception of who can cause excessive harm and who can suffer from it. Rocks can cause great pain — as in landslides — but we don’t hold them responsible for the harm caused because they lack intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires. Rocks can also be crushed, pulverized into sand by humans working in a quarry. But rocks are neither innocent nor victims as they have no moral worth, no capacity to suffer, and no ability to intentionally harm another. If not rocks, what? If dehumanization is taking away human qualities and moral worth, who has these to take away?

iHuman

Aristotle developed the distinction between moral agents and moral patients. Agents have responsibility for others’ well being, whereas patients deserve moral consideration and care. Moral agents are potential evildoers who can cause excessive harm to moral patients, but not the other way around. Moral patients may well cause harm, but they lack the cognitive wherewithal to both reflect upon the moral consequences of their actions and the reasons why certain actions are morally forbidden.

Aristotle’s distinction between moral agents and patients raises fundamental questions concerning the features we use to distinguish them
²⁷
. What enables someone to have responsibility and know when to deploy it in the service of helping another? What capacities make an individual worthy of a moral agent’s care, including the delivery of help and the avoidance of harm? The psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner addressed this problem in a series of studies. In one experiment, a large internet population of adults compared the qualities of different things, including humans at different stages of development (fetus, baby, child, and adult), an adult human in a vegetative state, a dead human, nonhuman animals (frog, pet dog, chimpanzee), God, and a socially savvy robot. Subjects judged different pairings of these
things
on a wide range of dimensions, including which was more likely to develop a unique personality, feel embarrassed, suffer pain, distinguish right from wrong, experience conscious awareness, exert greater self-control, plan ahead, develop fears, feel pleasure, and erupt into rage. Subjects also provided their personal opinions on which individual, within the pair, they liked most, wanted to make happy or destroy, was most deserving of punishment, and most likely had a soul.

Presumably, everyone reading about the design of this study has already formed an opinion about some of the comparisons. Presumably, everyone believes that a living adult is more consciously aware than a dead person, fetus, dog, and robot. Presumably, everyone believes that all animals feel more pain than a dead human or a robot. And presumably, everyone would rather make a dog happy than a frog, and would be more likely to allocate souls to fetuses, babies, and adult humans than to robots and frogs. But are we more or less conscious than God? Does a chimpanzee feel more embarrassed than a baby? Can a person in a vegetative state feel more pleasure than a frog or robot? What dimensions, if any, cause us to lasso some things together but not others? What things cluster together and why?

Gray and Wegner added up the responses and produced a landscape defined by two dimensions: experience and agency. Experience included properties such as hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, desire, consciousness, pride, embarrassment, and joy. Agency included self-control, morality, memory, emotion recognition, planning, communication and thinking. Experience aligned with feelings, agency with thinking. With these dimensions, we find God at one edge, high in agency and low in experience. On the opposite side, huddled together on the landscape defined by low agency and high experience, we find fetuses, frogs, and people in a vegetative state. Clustered inside the high agency and experience space we find adult men and women, whereas robots and dead people land in the low experience and middling agency space; dogs, chimpanzees, and human kids are clustered together in the high experience and mid-level agency.

In addition to classification, the dimensions of experience and agency also play an active role in guiding individuals’ judgments to punish, provide pleasure, and avoid harm. The simple rule of thumb is: avoid harming things high in experience and punish things high in agency. Even young children understand that you can kick a rock but not a dog, and that you can punish dogs but not rocks.

What this work suggests is that people have strong intuitions about which things are morally responsible as agents and which deserve our moral concerns as patients. Moral patients are high in experience and can thus suffer as victims, innocent or not. This is why many countries have created laws against harming nonhuman animals, including restrictions on which animals can serve in laboratory experiments, what can be done to them, and how they should be housed. This is also why we don’t do experiments on fetuses, newborns, adults in a vegetative state, or humans with neurological disorders that eliminate aspects of their experience and agency; when people carry out such experiments, as in the case of the Nazi doctors, those responsible are perceived by many as inhumane moral monsters.

Once something enters the arena of moral patients, we tend to leave them within this space even if they lose particular capacities; for example, when human adults lose self-control or compassion due to brain injury or a developmental disorder, this has no bearing on their status as moral patients. Conversely, if scientists discover that an animal outside the arena of moral patient-hood has capacities of experience and agency that are on a par with those inside, this evidence often promotes their legal status and protection. Such was the fate of the octopus, an invertebrate once classified by Aristotle as stupid, but today elevated to the company of much smarter animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins who solve novel problems, deploy trickery, and show some evidence of being aware of their behavior. As such, they are one of the few invertebrates to enjoy legal protection and thus, specific forms of care when they are kept in captivity. The octopus is a moral patient.

Moral agents are an altogether different species. They are high in agency, meaning they can distinguish right from wrong, exert self-control in the context of selfish temptation, can be blamed and punished, and are expected to care for moral patients. Moral agents are also high in experience, especially the capacity to feel pain and recognize pain and suffering in others. These differences place a burden of responsibility on moral agents that is absent from moral patients.

Moral agents and patients have moral worth. But as with all entities that have worth or value, some are more valuable than others. So it is with moral worth. This is where departures from humanness get interesting, dangerously so. When we strip individuals of their moral worth, denying them qualities that define humanness, we enter a world of denial that can energize our desires and justify excessive harm.

Moral zeroes

Chances are that you believe you are more compassionate, ethical, and rational than most people you know. My presumptuous guess is based on the evidence from several studies showing that individuals consider themselves to be more human — as defined by the dimensions of experience and agency — and to have greater moral worth than other individuals. When individuals are socially ostracized and excluded from a group, they judge themselves as less human, and so do the spectators who watch the ostracism unfold. Individuals judge members of their own group to be more human and morally worthy than those outside the group, no matter how small or broad the group is. What counts is our overall sense of how we compare to others and the dimensions used to calibrate this similarity metric. Understanding this process is a key step in explaining how we can deceive ourselves into believing that another human being is morally worthless, and thus worthy of exclusion from the circle of moral patients. Once they are displaced outside, causing them harm either feels justifiable because they are dangerous predators or parasites, or there are no feelings at all because they are objects — moral zeroes.

The social psychologist Nick Haslam carried out several experiments to determine how our rating of a group’s humanness influences how much we praise, blame, and protect them, as well as whether we believe that rehabilitation or punishment is most appropriate after they have done something wrong
²⁸
. Haslam based his study on the idea, supported by law, science, and folk intuitions that we blame, praise, and punish only those who do bad things on purpose as opposed to by accident. Conversely, we favor rehabilitation in those cases where we believe that the person can right a wrong, learning a lesson from a prior transgression. For example, we don’t blame a five year old for picking up a gun and shooting someone, and nor do we sentence him to life in prison. We blame his caretakers and find ways to help the child understand the consequences of his actions. At some point, usually around the eighteenth birthday in most countries, we blame the shooter, holding him responsible and punishing him, often with life in prison or the termination of life itself.

Haslam’s subjects started by rating several different social groups along different dimensions of humanness. Though the dimensions were slightly different from those used by Gray and Wegner, they generally corresponded to experience and agency, including compassion, warmth, and a sense of community on the one hand, and reason, self-control, civility, and refinement on the other. The target social groups were associated with negative or positive stereotypes such as the homeless, mentally disabled, athletes, politicians, doctors, lawyers, gays, and different religious groups. Next subjects imagined that a member of one of these groups had acted morally or immorally, or had been mistreated in some way. Then they decided whether the person should be praised for a particular moral act such as returning a wallet, considered responsible for an immoral act such as breaking a promise, helped out for mistreatment such as being pushed out of line by a person in a hurry, and punished or rehabilitated for wrongful behavior.

Haslam’s results generated a landscape of humanness very much like Gray and Wegner’s. Those groups rated highly in terms of agency were more likely to be blamed and punished. Those groups rated high in experience were more likely to be praised, protected, and placed into rehabilitation. Those groups perceived as more emotional, compassionate and warm — components of experience — were praised more, whereas those perceived as more civil and rational — components of agency — were praised less. Overall, the more a group tilts toward the experience end of the spectrum, the more we see them as moral patients, deserving of our care and compassion. The more a group tilts toward the agency end of the spectrum, the more we see them as moral agents, having responsibilities and duties to act morally. When one group perceives another as lacking in experience and agency, they are perceived as moral zeroes. As in mathematics, subtracting zero from something leaves the mathematical universe unchanged. So it is with subtracting moral zeroes, at least from the perspective of those doing the subtracting. How a group shifts their perception of another’s moral worth and thus, shifts their sense of which actions are morally justified, requires further explanation as it represents a fundamental enabler of evildoing.