Abstract
To undertake a serious investigation of violence calls for a discrete amount of courage and sincerity: as human beings we can wishfully ignore our own violence, thanks to a kind of “embubblement” I am illustrating in this article. I would also like to offer to the attention of researchers in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry the main features of the situations in which the awareness of human violent acts is in question, as indicated in the subtitle “Violent and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Violence Lead to Disregard the Inflicted Harm”. In these cases a process of what can be called “autoimmunity” is at play. I contend the concept of moral bubble can provide an integrated and unified perspective able to interpret in a novel way many situations in which morality and violence are intertwined.
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Notes
- 1.
Moral rules and related violence are first of all performed thanks to natural language—imagine for instance the military/violent status of hateful, racist, homophobic speech—but also by motor actions and emotions: it is well-known that patent hostility in emotions is a chance to start violent actions.
- 2.
Studying the related problem of “feeling of knowing” Burton [4, p. 12] contends that it is in general recognized by the absence of knowledge itself (that is when we do not know something we feel we should know), and it is also connected to the well-known situation of the so-called “cognitive dissonance”: “In 1957, Stanford professor of social psychology Leon Festinger introduced the term cognitive dissonance to describe the distressing mental state in which people find themselves doing things that don’t fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold”.
- 3.
Even though, during the last decades, studies regarding decision-making have increased knowledge about biases and fallacies, de-biasing inferential processes are still relatively uninvestigated. Some more notes about this issue are illustrated in [14, chapter three].
- 4.
We have to remember that the cognitive autoimmunity of the agent is also related to the psychological problems of the so-called “epistemic feelings” [17, 18], that is feelings that are linked to the epistemic situation of the agent, such as in the case of feeling of knowing, feeling of forgetting, and tip on the tongue feeling. They can be seen as the neurological and cognitive detonators of cognitive autoimmunity [2].
- 5.
Just to make an example, research on informal logic has illustrated that a fallacy such as hasty generalization, that is an induction based of one or few examples, can be positive and favor the fitness of the reasoner, even if it is a violence against the correct reliable way of seeing inductions, that it is unacceptable in the light of good rational criteria for a good induction [21].
- 6.
This phenomenon not only concerns natural language, but also emotions, actions, and all kinds of other non propositional cognitive activities, such as the ones based on models(icons, diagrams, visualizations, simulations, etc.).
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Acknowledgements
Parts of this article were originally published in chapter three of L. Magnani, Understanding Violence The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence: A Philosophical Stance, Springer, Heidelberg, 2011.
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Magnani, L. (2020). Moral Bubble Effect. In: Giovagnoli, R., Lowe, R. (eds) The Logic of Social Practices. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37305-4_6
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