Vladimir Putin’s Virtuous Violence
Eden, Janine and Jim (CC BY 2.0), Putin Burn in Hell!
Paul Slovic
A recent article examining psychic numbing and the arithmetic of compassion in the context of decisions pertaining to the use of nuclear weapons found evidence in support of a disturbing concept that Alan Fiske and Tage Rai have labeled “virtuous violence.” The abstract of the article reads:
How likely is it that someone would approve of using a nuclear weapon to kill millions of enemy civilians in the hope of ending a ground war that threatens thousands of American troops? Ask them how they feel about prosecuting immigrants, banning abortion, supporting the death penalty, and protecting gun rights and you will know. This is the finding from two national surveys of Democrats and Republicans that measured support for punitive regulations and policies across these four seemingly unrelated issues and a fifth, using nuclear weapons against enemy civilians (in Survey 1) or approving of disproportionate killing with conventional weapons (in Survey 2). Those who support these various policies that threaten harm to many people tend to believe that the victims are blameworthy and it is ethical to take actions or policies that might harm them. This lends support to the provocative notion of virtuous violence put forth by Fiske and Rai, who assert that people commit violence because they believe it is the morally right thing to do.
The most odious example of virtuous violence may be the Holocaust, which Hitler portrayed as necessary to rid Germany of “Jewish Bacteria” whose continued presence would lead to the death of the nation (Koenigsberg, 1975/2007). Hitler’s “final solution” was portrayed by him as a virtuous project, necessary to rescue Germany. More recently, those who stormed the U.S. capitol on January 6, 2021, believed their actions to overthrow what they believed was an evil government were virtuous, reinforced by a sitting president who reluctantly sent the invaders home, saying that he loved them.
On February 2, 2023, Vladimir Putin shamelessly invoked the specter of Nazism in Ukraine to characterize his destruction of Ukraine as a virtuous war. Speaking at Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Putin said
“The legacy of generations, values and traditions — this is all what makes Russia different, what makes us strong and confident in ourselves, in our righteousness and in our victory.”
Elements of the arithmetic of compassion, in particular psychic numbing and the blaming and dehumanization of victims, enable perpetrators of violence to operate under a mantle of virtuousness that justifies their actions and makes them hard to combat. As Slovic et al (2020) concluded in their PNAS article, the punitiveness underlying virtuous violence within American social policies “needs to be recognized, understood, and confronted by any society that professes to value fundamental human rights and wishes to prevent important decisions from being affected by irrelevant and harmful sociocultural and political biases.”