Anton van Harskamp, Review of Lorenzo Magnani: Understanding Violence, The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence: A Philosophical Stance (original) (raw)

This book is an impressive sample of applied philosophy. The author of this study on the relations between violence and morality, Lorenzo Magnani (University of Pavia), philosophizes on the pervasiveness of violence in human life by using insights from quite a lot of distinct nonphilosophical disciplines, like cognitive (social) science, evolutionary biology, sociology, cultural anthropology, political and economic theory, religious studies, theology! Presupposition in this work is that the ubiquitous presence of violence in human life is usually culturally more or less deliberately concealed. That is to say, according to M. the phenomenon of violence is often perceived as being only a manifestation of a highly irrational, non-human, anti-moral, exogenous force. The central thesis in this book is an argument against this perception of violence. According to M. violence is literally from 'the beginning of mankind' a universal trait of moral life. Violence, states M., is intertwined with morality, violence is most of the time even enacted for moral reasons! Already in the first chapter the foundation is laid for this undeniably challenging thesis. Arguing on the basis of the Coalition Enforcement Hypothesis of evolutionary biologist Paul Bingham, M. brings forward that seen from an evolutionary perspective, the biologically grounded adaptive mechanism of cooperation of related and unrelated (non-kin) animals, is a stimulus for the making of morality as well as for the making of violence. Even the possibility of altruism among human animals is connected with the possibility of violence. The emergence of 'remote killing' for instance, should have been an evolutionary advantageous form of moral group behaviour. There must have been, according to M., continuously 'adaptive' manifestations of violence in early processes of coalition formation, for instance when dealing with free-riders, in the expulsion of scape goats, in exclusion and boundary maintenance, and in many other forms of 'otherisation'. Cultural-moral systems in human groups, suggests M., can only function when 'coalitions', primal forms of 'society', comprise the possibility of all kinds of verbal, symbolical and structural violence.