Retribution can serve a cathartic function for members of the moral community who have been affronted and angered by the transgression.
Punishment of the violator may have a deterrent effect against future violation as well as a cathartic effect.
Retribution may take the form of compulsory reeducation and reform of the transgressor so that he is no longer likely to engage in immoral behavior.
Retribution in the form of restitution, in addition to its other functions, may serve to help the victim recover from the losses and damages that he or she has suffered.
There are considerable variations among cultures and subcultures with regard to the nature of moral rules and how to respond to violations of them. Ignorance with regard to the moral rules of another culture as well as ethnocentrism are likely to give rise to misunderstanding as well as conflict if one violates the moral code of the other’s group.
Moral Exclusion
Moral exclusion, or scope of justice, refers to who (and what) is included in one’s moral community. Who is and is not entitled to fair outcomes and fair treatment by inclusion or lack of inclusion in one’s moral community? Albert Schweitzer included all living creatures in his moral community, and some Buddhists include all of nature. Most of us define a more limited moral community.
Individuals and groups who are outside the boundary in which considerations of fairness apply may be treated in ways that would be considered immoral if people within the boundary were so treated. Consider the situation in Bosnia. Prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Serbs, Muslims, and Croats in Bosnia were more or less part of one moral community and treated one another with some degree of civility. After the start of civil strife (initiated by power-hungry political leaders), vilification of other ethnic groups became a political tool, and it led to excluding others from one’s moral community. As a consequence, the various ethnic groups committed the most barbaric atrocities against one another. The same thing happened with the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi.
At various periods in history and in different societies, groups and individuals have been treated inhumanly by other humans: slaves by their masters, natives by colonialists, blacks by whites, Jews by Nazis, women by men, children by adults, the physically disabled by those who are not, homosexuals by heterosexuals, political dissidents by political authorities, and one ethnic or religious group by another.
Lesser forms of moral exclusions, marginalization, occur also against whole categories of people—women, the physically impaired, the elderly, and various ethnic, religious, and racial groups—in many societies where barriers prevent them from full participation in the political, economic, and social life of their societies. The results of these barriers are not only material deprivation but also disrespectful, demeaning, and arbitrary treatment, as well as decreased opportunity to develop and employ their individual talents. (For extensive research and writing in this area, see the work of Susan Opotow, 2001, a leading scholar in this area.)
Three central psychological questions arise with regard to moral exclusion:
What social conditions lead an individual or group to exclude others from the individual or group’s moral community?
What psychological mechanisms enable otherwise moral human beings to commit atrocities against other human beings?
What determines which individuals or groups are likely to be excluded from the moral community?
Existing knowledge to answer these questions adequately is limited; their seriousness deserves fuller answers than space allows here.
Social Conditions.
Studies of political, ethnic, and religious violence have identified several social conditions that appear particularly conducive to developing or intensifying hatred and alienating emotions that permit otherwise nonviolent members of a society to dehumanize victims and kill (Gurr, 1970; Staub, 1989).
The first of these conditions is emergence of, or increase in, difficult life conditions, with a corresponding increase in the sense of relative deprivation. This may happen as a result of defeat in war, economic depression, rapid social change, or even physical calamity. The resulting decrease in living standards often leads to a sense of insecurity and a feeling of being threatened by potential rivals for scarce jobs, housing, and the like.
The second condition is an unstable political regime whose power may be under challenge. In such situations, those in power may use scapegoating as a means of deflecting criticism and attacking potential dissidents and rivals.
Third, there may be a claim for superiority—national, racial, gender, class, cultural, religious, genetic—that justifies treating the other as having inferior moral status.
The fourth condition is when violence is culturally salient and sanctioned as a result of past wars, attention in the media, or availability of weapons.
Fifth, there may be little sense of human relatedness or social bonding with the potential victims because there is little in the way of cooperative human contact with them.
The sixth condition consists of social institutions that are authoritarian. Here, nonconformity and open dissent against violence sanctioned by authority are inhibited.
Finally, hatred and violence are intensified if there is no active group of observers of the violence, in or outside the society, who strongly object to it and serve as a constant witness and reminder of its injustice and immorality.
Psychological Mechanisms.
There are many mechanisms by which reprehensible behavior toward another can be justified. One can do so by appealing to a higher moral value (killing physicians who perform abortions to discourage abortion and “save unborn children”). Or one can rationalize by relabeling the behavior (calling physical abuse of a child “teaching him a lesson”). Or one can minimize the behavior by saying it is not so harmful (“It hurts me more than it does you”). Or one can deny personal responsibility for the behavior (your superior has ordered you to torture the prisoner). Or one can blame the victim (it is because they are hiding the terrorists in their village that the village must be destroyed). Or one can isolate oneself emotionally or desensitize oneself to the human consequences of delegitimating the others, as many do in relation to beggars and homeless people in urban areas.
Selection of Targets for Exclusion.
We are most likely to delegitimate others whom we sense as a threat to anything that is important to us: our religious beliefs, economic well-being, public order, sense of reality, physical safety, reputation, ethnic group, family, moral values, institutions, and so on. If harm by the other was experienced in the past, we are likely to be increasingly ready to interpret ambiguous actions of the other as threats. A history of prior violent ethnic conflict predisposes a group to be suspicious of another’s intentions. We also delegitimate others whom we exploit, take advantage of, or otherwise treat unfairly because of their deviance from normative standards of appearance or behavior. However, there is an asymmetry such that the ability to exclude the other is more available to the powerful as compared to the weak; the powerful can do this overtly, the weak only covertly. Thus, the targets for exclusion are likely to be those with relatively little power, such as minority groups, the poor, and “social deviants.”
Sometimes suppressed inner conflicts encourage individuals or groups to seek out external enemies. There are many kinds of internal needs for which a hostile external relationship can be an outlet:
It may amount to an acceptable excuse for internal problems; the problems can be held out as caused by the adversary or by the need to defend against the adversary.
It may be a distraction so that internal problems appear less salient.
It can provide an opportunity to express pent-up hostility arising from internal conflict through combat with the external adversary.
It may enable one to project disapproved aspects of oneself (which are not consciously recognized) onto the adversary and to attack those aspects through assault on the adversary. The general tendenc
y is to select for projection those who are weaker, those with whom there is a prior history of enmity, and those who symbolically represent the weaker side of the internal conflict. Thus, someone who has repressed his homosexual tendencies, fearing socially dangerous consequences for acting on them, may make homosexuals into an enemy group.
Especially if it has dangerous undertones, conflict can serve to counteract such personal feelings as aimlessness, boredom, lack of focus, lack of energy, and depression. It can give a sense of excitement, purpose, coherence, and unity as well as energize and mobilize oneself for struggle. It can be an addictive stimulant masking underlying depression.
It may permit important parts of oneself—including attitudes, skills, and defenses developed during conflictual relations in one’s formative stages—to be expressed and valued because relations with the present adversary resemble earlier conflictual relations.
Cultural Imperialism
“Cultural imperialism involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture and establishing it as the norm” (Young, 1990, p. 59). Those living under cultural imperialism find themselves defined by the dominant others. As Young points out, “Consequently, the differences of women from men, American Indians or Africans from Europeans, Jews from Christians, becomes reconstructed as deviance and inferiority” (p. 59). Culturally dominated groups often experience themselves as having a double identity—one defined by the dominant group and the other coming from membership in one’s own group. Thus, in my childhood, adult African American men were often called “boy” by members of the dominant white groups, but within their own group, they might be respected ministers and wage earners. Culturally subordinated groups are often able to maintain their own culture because they are segregated from the dominant group and have many interactions within their own group, which are invisible to the dominant group. In such contexts, the subordinated culture commonly reacts to the dominant culture with mockery and hostility fueled by their sense of injustice and of victimization.
IMPLICATIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING CONFLICT
There are several interrelated implications for conflict in this discussion:
Perceived injustice is a frequent source of conflict.
If the processes or outcomes of a conflict are perceived to be unjust, the resolution of a conflict is likely to be unstable and give rise to further conflict.
Conflict may exist about what is “just.”
Paradoxically, justifying as a negotiation technique—that is, blaming the other for an injustice and claiming special privilege because of the injury one has presumably suffered—is likely to lead to conflict escalation unless the other agrees that she has been unjust and takes responsibility for remedying it. Blaming tends to be inflaming.
Injustice as the Source of Conflict
A paradigmatic example of procedural as well as distributive injustice is two people who have to share something to which each is equally entitled (found cash, space, equipment, inherited property) and the one who gets at it first takes what he wants of it and leaves the remainder (a smaller or less valuable portion) to the other. Thus, if two children have to share a piece of cake and the one who divides it into two portions takes the larger one, then the other child is likely to get mad. If not afraid of the other, the child may challenge the unfair division and try to restore equality. If afraid, the child may be unwilling to admit the injustice, but will be resentful and try to get even covertly. Thus, conflict continues even though the episode ends.
There is a clear procedural way to avoid this sort of injustice (see also the later section, “Inventing Solutions”), in which the person who divides the cake (or whatever) does not get first choice with regard to his or her portion of the division. There is also final-offer arbitration, a form sometimes employed when the parties cannot resolve conflict by themselves. It is based on a similar notion: creating an incentive for making fair offers. Each party to a conflict agrees to binding arbitration and secretly informs the arbitrator of his or her last and best offer for an agreement. The arbitrator then selects the one that is the fairest.
Suppose two ethnic groups in a country are in conflict over how many representatives they are each allocated in the national parliament. One group wants to make the allocations in terms of the proportion of each ethnic group in the population; the other group wants to do it in terms of the proportion of the territory occupied by each ethnic population. Ethnic group A, which has fewer people but more land, makes its final offer a bicameral legislature in which one legislative body would be elected by per capita vote and the other in proportion to the size of the territory. Ethnic group B makes a final offer of a simple legislative body based on per capita vote.
Injustice in the Course of Conflict
Unfair procedures employed in resolving conflict undermine confidence in the institutions that establish and implement the policies and rules regulating conflict. Thus, people become alienated from political institutions if they feel that elections are not conducted fairly, or that their interests are ignored and they have no voice in affecting social policies and how they are implemented, or that they are discriminated against such that they are likely to be the losers in any political conflict. Similarly, people lose confidence in legal and judicial institutions and third-party procedures such as mediation and arbitration if the police, judges, and other third parties are biased, if they are not treated courteously, if competent legal representation is not available to them, or if they have little opportunity to express their concerns.
Trust in organizations and groups as well as in interpersonal relations is also undermined if, when conflict occurs, one is abused, not given opportunity to voice one’s concerns and views, treated as an inferior whose rights and interests have legitimacy only as they are bestowed by others, or otherwise not respected as a person.
Alienation and withdrawal of commitment are not the only possible forms of response to unjust processes of conflict resolution. Anger, aggression, rebellion, sabotage, and assertive attempts to remove the injustice are some other forms of response. Depending on the perceived possibilities, one may become openly or covertly active in attempting to change the institutions, relations, and situations giving rise to the injustice. Conflict is central in the functioning of all institutions and relations. If the processes involved in conflict resolution are unfair, pressures to bring about change arise; they may take a violent form if there are no socially recognized and available procedures for dealing with grievances.
Conflict About What Is Just
Many conflicts are about which principle of justice should be applied or how a given principle should be implemented. Thus, disputes about affirmative action often center on whether students (or employees) should be selected on the basis of individual relative merit as measured by test scores, academic grades, and prior work experience, or selected so as to reflect racial and ethnic diversity in the population. Each principle, in isolation, can be considered just. However, selection by the criterion of relative merit as measured by test scores and grades often means that ethnic diversity is limited. Selection so as to achieve ethnic diversity frequently means that some individuals from the majority group, with higher relative standing on tests, are not selected even as some minority group members with lower standing are. These results are possible even when only well-qualified applicants are chosen.
Conflict over affirmative action may not only be about principles of justice; it also concerns the justness of the procedures for measuring merit. Some claim that the standard measures of merit—tests, grades, prior work experience—are biased against individuals who are not from the dominant culture. Others assert that the measures are appropriate since selection is for performance in a setting—a college or workplace—that reflects the dominant culture.
The BTC-SBM conflict described in the Introduction to this Handbook is between two principles of justice. Should teacher representatives on the school council be selected to represent thei
r academic department by vote of the department members? Or should they be selected to represent their academic departments but also chosen to represent the ethnic diversity of the teachers?
In dealing with conflict between reasonable principles of justice, it is well to apply the notions advanced in the chapter 1. Specifically, you want to turn the conflict into a win-win one in which it is perceived to be a mutual problem to be resolved cooperatively. In the illustration of affirmative action, there are many ways in which both claims—for diversity and for merit—can be represented in selection policies. It is better to discuss how these two principles can be combined, so that the claims of each can be adequately realized, than to create a win-lose conflict by denying the claims of one side so that the other’s can be victorious.
“Justifying” as a Negotiation Tactic
“Justice” can be employed as a tactical weapon during negotiations to claim higher moral ground for oneself. Doing so claims greater morality for your position as compared to the other’s. This form of justifying commonly has several effects. It hardens your position and makes it inflexible as you become morally committed to it as well as increasingly self-righteous. It leads to blaming the other and implicit denigration of the other as morally inferior. It produces a similar effect in the other and escalates the conflict into a conflict about morality.
The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed) Page 11
