March 22, 2024 to March 23, 2024
Indiana University, Hodge Hall, room 1059
This event is sponsored by the College Arts and Humanities Institute and the East Asian Studies Center
This two-day seminar on ethics and violence, will explore how collective violence is and has been morally justified and religiously sanctioned in different cultural and historical contexts, thereby adding to our understanding of what motivates and informs organized violence today. Most religions and philosophical schools in world history have included strong admonitions against the exorcise of violence, yet violent entrepreneurs – including religious leaders of otherwise peaceful religions – have had no trouble finding ways to legitimize or even encourage certain acts of extreme violence – from terrorism, and ethno-nationalisms to genocides, slavery, and conquests both in the past and today. Since modes of appropriate aggression are cultural products and not inherent human traits, such modes need to be taught, learned, and accepted. Existing notions of morality and righteous violence are continuously being negotiated and redefined in social contexts.
The purpose of the Ethics of Violence Seminar is to create a dialogue between scholars from different disciplines about cross-cultural and culture-specific ideas of ethical and appropriate violence. Scholars will explore the social and cultural contexts in which violence becomes moral, thus increasing our understanding of how good people suddenly “turn bad”; of how seemingly innocent narratives and positive self-images and ethics may increase a group’s capacity for inflicting harm on others; and of how we may become better at identifying such critical junctures before collective outbursts of violence happen.
