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"Cowardice"
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Punishment sustains large-scale cooperation in prestate warfare
Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur, and are punished by community-imposed sanctions, including collective corporal punishment and fines. Furthermore, Turkana norms governing warfare benefit the ethnolinguistic group, a population of a half-million people, at the expense of smaller social groupings. These results challenge current views that punishment is unimportant in small-scale societies and that human cooperation evolved in small groups of kin and familiar individuals. Instead, these results suggest that cooperation at the larger scale of ethnolinguistic units enforced by third-party sanctions could have a deep evolutionary history in the human species.
Journal Article
COWARDICE AND INJUSTICE
Contrary to Greek tradition, Aristotle condemns suicide without qualification, citing two reasons for moral disapproval. First, suicide is an act of cowardice. Second, suicide involves an act of injustice toward the state. It is argued that the charge of cowardice is too strong even by Aristotle’s own standards. There is evidence that the philosopher recognized a distinction between the cases of self-murder that testify to a cowardly character and the cases when one may be pardoned. It is shown that a suicide acts unjustly toward the polis in a way analogous to desertion from an army.
Journal Article
How the Second-Order Free Rider Problem Is Solved in a Small-Scale Society
Moralistic punishment enables human cooperation, but an outstanding question is why people voluntarily sanction when they can obtain the benefits of punishment without being enforcers themselves. To address how decentralized societies solve this second-order free rider issue, I examine why people punish among the Turkana, a population in Kenya in which informal peer sanctioning sustains participation in high-stakes interethnic warfare. Using vignette experiments I show that Turkana subjects express punitive sentiments toward second-order free riders and those who sanction irresponsibly. The prevalence of such meta norms regulating punishment reveal a possible pathway by which moralistic punishment could have evolved.
Journal Article
Why Not Kill Them All?
Genocide, mass murder, massacres. The words themselves are chilling, evoking images of the slaughter of countless innocents. What dark impulses lurk in our minds that even today can justify the eradication of thousands and even millions of unarmed human beings caught in the crossfire of political, cultural, or ethnic hostilities? This question lies at the heart of Why Not Kill Them All? Cowritten by historical sociologist Daniel Chirot and psychologist Clark McCauley, the book goes beyond exploring the motives that have provided the psychological underpinnings for genocidal killings. It offers a historical and comparative context that adds up to a causal taxonomy of genocidal events. Rather than suggesting that such horrors are the product of abnormal or criminal minds, the authors emphasize the normality of these horrors: killing by category has occurred on every continent and in every century. But genocide is much less common than the imbalance of power that makes it possible. Throughout history human societies have developed techniques aimed at limiting intergroup violence. Incorporating ethnographic, historical, and current political evidence, this book examines the mechanisms of constraint that human societies have employed to temper partisan passions and reduce carnage. Might an understanding of these mechanisms lead the world of the twenty-first century away from mass murder? Why Not Kill Them All? makes clear that there are no simple solutions, but that progress is most likely to be made through a combination of international pressures, new institutions and laws, and education. If genocide is to become a grisly relic of the past, we must fully comprehend the complex history of violent conflict and the struggle between hatred and tolerance that is waged in the human heart. In a new preface, the authors discuss recent mass violence and reaffirm the importance of education and understanding in the prevention of future genocides.
eBook
In a “Rabelaisian Mood”: Laughter, Shock, and Cowardice in James Jones’s \The Thin Red Line\
James Jones’s second war trilogy, “The Thin Red Line” (1962), sketches the comic cycle of infantrymen undeterred by the relentless battles of Guadalcanal. In the name of bravery, Jones’s characters refuse to suffer by veiling their cowardice, insecurities, and anxieties under a burst of nervous laughter. In his mission to offer a verisimilar description of the Pacific struggle, Jones interrupts the bleak realism of his literary canon by carnivalesque episodes of combat festivals filled with tough humor at the act of killing and the spectacle of death. The aim behind this technique is to ridicule the tedious routine of military life, in particular, and war, in general. Most importantly, his narrative style conceals through laughter the traumas of his soldiers by offering a temporary therapy to their combat stress. Thus, “The Thin Red Line” does not only show Jones’s antiwar stance but also his endeavor to create characters who repress their anxieties to resist the pain inflicted by a higher order.
Journal Article
The coward: A priest, a fire and a choice
A photographs sits on the mantle in my father's study. It has been there a long time, and I never paid attention to it until recently. It is a sepiatoned photograph of a woman in her early fifties with short brown hair. She wears a white dress. It was evidently taken at a party: she sits in an armchair with her hands clasped together, a glass of wine beside her. Her expression is unsmiling but gives the impression of warmth and intelligence. The woman is Anne Staniforth Carter. She is an aunt I never met, an aunt WHO died six years before I was born.
Journal Article
Heurs et malheurs du cœur, des chansons de geste au planh de Sordel
This analysis focuses on exploring the images of the heart in the epic genre, including a singular case of imaginary heart-eating (cardiophagia) that is highlighted in le planh written by the troubadour Sordel. This wild behavior associated with otherness, above all with the cannibals of the Far East, stands out from the medieval literary corpus focused on the punishment of an illicit love. It also reveals, like other images of the heart present in the chansons de geste, a very subtle play between the concrete appearance of an organ and its metaphorical significations. In other words, this game enables a symbolic quantification of such abstract notions as courage, bravery, physical strength or, on the contrary, cowardice.
Journal Article
Courage, cowardice, and Maher's misstep
Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists' acts were 'not cowardly.' It is shown that Maher's controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous.
Journal Article