Just business? Moral condemnation and virtuous violence in the American and Russian mass publics
| Published date | 01 July 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221149761 |
| Author | Caleb Pomeroy,Brian C Rathbun |
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
Journal of Peace Research
2024, Vol. 61(4) 560 –575
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221149761
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1225162JPR0010.1177/00223433221149761Journal of Peace ResearchPomeroy & Rathbun
research-article2023
Regular Article
Just business? Moral condemnation
and virtuous violence in the American
and Russian mass publics
Caleb Pomeroy
John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Dartmouth College
Brian C Rathbun
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California
Abstract
More often than not, violence between states in the field of international relations is understood in instrumental
terms. States are thought to act purposively in the pursuit of some tangible object, treating those in their way as
objects; the targets of that violence respond to such treatment phlegmatically, without any sense of outrage. Drawing
on psychological research in ‘virtuous violence’, which argues that intergroup violence is primarily moralistic in
character, we present results from three survey experiments in the United States and Russia and a re-analysis of a
recent study, which demonstrate that moral condemnation of adversaries is extremely easy to invoke, hard to avoid,
common across different cultural contexts, and a central feature of ‘binding’morality, one of the most fundamental
moral foundations. Our first survey experiment presents American respondents with a fictional state developing
nuclear weapons. Strategic features of the situation –offensive capability, past history, and interest divergence –
generate not only threat perception but, crucially, negative moral attributions that mediate between the two. In the
next two survey experiments, we show that American and Russian respondents judge aggressive action against a third
country, regardless of whether the aggressor pursues water necessary for its population or oil useful for its economy.
Finally, our re-analysis of Rathbun & Stein
1
shows that moral condemnation strongly mediates the effect of binding
morality on support for nuclear weapons use against terrorists. Our results suggest a future agenda on morality’s role
in international relations that highlights ethical dynamics beyond the taming influence of humanitarianism and
cosmopolitan individualism. Morality can drive conflict, not just restrain it.
Keywords
American foreign policy, morality, nuclear proliferation, public opinion, resource conflict, Russian foreign policy,
virtuous violence
Introduction
More often than not, the field of international relations
understands violence between states in instrumental
terms. Not only are states thought to act purposively
in the pursuit of some tangible object, they treat those
in their way as objects, albeit calculating ones. In vio-
lence of this sort, ‘perpetrators have no destructive
motive like hate or anger. They simply take the shortest
path to something they want, and a living thing happens
to be in the way. At best it is a category by exclusion: the
absence of any inhibiting factor like sympathy or moral
concern’. Others are simply ‘part of its environment like
a rock or a river’(Pinker, 2012: 509).
Even more strikingly, those ‘inhibiting factors’
respond to such treatment phlegmatically, without any
Corresponding author:
brathbun@usc.edu
1
Rathbun & Stein, 2020.
Pomeroy & Rathbun 561
sense of outrage, presumably because they are thought to
objectify adversaries in the same manner. International
relations is ‘just business’; it isn’t personal. There is noth-
ing to be upset about. War resembles an athletic com-
petition in which beating the other is part, indeed the
very point, of the game. Just as we cannot presume that
others will not try to score, there is nothing to morally
judge if another state desires a piece of your territory.
There is simply a divergence of interests.
What does this phrase, ‘just business’, really mean? It
associates with excuses offered by dastardly mafiosos to
avoid moral condemnation from others. It presumes that
a different set of moral standards applies to the transac-
tional world of business. Better said, there is an absence
of ethical restrictions.
Psychologists increasingly take issue with this under-
standing of violence, including the motivation behind it
and the response to it. Fiske & Rai (2014: 5) describe
this as ‘virtuous violence’:‘[M]ost violence is morally
motivated […] [T]he person doing the violence subjec-
tively feels that what she is doing is right: she believes
that she should do the violence’. Anyone who has seen
The Godfather knows that even mafiosos rarely stick to
the rule of ‘just business’. For every Michael Corleone,
there is a Sonny. These insights are beginning to pene-
trate the ostensibly amoral realm of international rela-
tions theory, most notably in studies of revenge and
retribution (McDermott et al., 2017; Stein, 2019; Liber-
man, 2006). However, whether such virtuous violence is
the exception or the rule remains unclear.
Virtuous violence entails more than revenge and retri-
bution. It is any violence that the perpetrator believes is
morally justified. Virtuous violence involves moral con-
demnation (De Scioli & Kurzban, 2009), the ethically
laden judgment and potentially punishment of bad indi-
viduals or groups. This dynamic is present in rivalries,
which constitute most uses of force in international rela-
tions. But, we expect this dynamic to exist beyond dya-
dic relations with significant psychological baggage based
on perceived historical wrongs.
In this article, we show that among ordinary individ-
uals, moral condemnation is easy to invoke, hard to
avoid, and manifests similarly across different popula-
tions. Given that moral condemnation is so common,
psychologists believe that it has evolutionary origins,
helping groups to punish opportunism and predatory
behavior. In this way, it is similar to in-group favoritism,
another intuitive and automatic tendency likely with
evolutionary origins (Choi & Bowles, 2007) and
thought to have implications for international relations
(Mercer, 1995). We present results from three original
survey experiments and a re-analysis of Rathbun &
Stein’s (2020) survey on attitudes towards nuclear weap-
ons use, showing in all four cases that the American and
Russian publics do not think of international relations as
just business. They take it quite personally, which entails
moral judgements of those who threaten and harm.
Our first survey experiment presents American
respondents with a fictional state developing nuclear
weapons. Strategic features of the situation –offensive
capability, past history, and interest divergence –gener-
ate not only threat perception but, crucially, negative
moral attributions that mediate between the two. In the
next two survey experiments, we show that American
and Russian respondents judge aggressive action against
a third country, regardless of whether the aggressor pur-
sues water necessary for its population or oil useful for its
economy. Finally, our re-analysis of Rathbun & Stein
(2020) shows that moral condemnation strongly med-
iates the effect of binding morality on support for nuclear
weapons use against terrorists. Thought to be one of the
most common moral foundations, our analysis indicates
that binding morality’s effects on foreign policy flow
through the mechanism of moral condemnation.
Given that moralization of this kind is so easy to
generate and hard to avoid, even across different cultural
contexts, international relations is unlikely ever ‘just
business’.Itisajust business, inherently moral in char-
acter. The conclusion further notes that moral judg-
ments play a stronger mediating role between the
actions of adversaries and threat perception than percep-
tions of resolve, bringing home that international con-
flict is more moralized than the game of poker we often
use as a metaphor.
Force for good: Virtuous vs. instrumental
violence
Central theories of international relations adopt an
instrumental conception of state action and violence,
devoid of questions about virtue and ethics. Structural
realists are most explicit on this score (see e.g. Waltz,
1959: 238; Kennan, 1985: 206). Subsequent research
traditions retain structural realist assumptions about the
‘just business’nature of international relations more
implicitly. Pivoting from the ‘first debate’between pes-
simistic realists and optimistic liberal internationalists –
which hinged on the centrality of ethics in IR –ration-
alists drew on microeconomic theories of bargaining
failure to account for interstate conflict (Fearon,
1995). Save references to ‘greedy states’(Glaser,
2010), generally ethically sanitized under a ‘revisionist’
2journal of PEACE RESEARCH XX(X)
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