Note: The ethical judgments on this page refer exclusively to the action — never to the person who performs it. Every person possesses inalienable dignity, regardless of what they do or have done. Cf. Note on ethical judgments (German).
Violence is the intentional injury or destruction of the bodily-psychic-spiritual integrity of a person. It contradicts the personalist norm radically, because it degrades the person to a mere object. According to Dietrich von Hildebrand, the violent action presupposes that the personal character of the other has dropped out of view (cf. Hildebrand, Ethics, 1953).
The person is a body-soul unity: the body is not an external instrument that the person merely “has,” but belongs to the essence of the person — the person is bodily. For this reason every act of violence against the body strikes the person himself. Physical violence is always at the same time an assault on the dignity of the someone who this body is. Likewise psychic violence — humiliation, intimidation, psychological destruction — is an assault on the interiority of the person, which belongs to their personhood.
Violence is a form of practical oblivion of the person, and indeed a particularly radical one: it treats the person as a mere something, as a resistance to be broken, or as a body that can be injured. It thereby denies the most fundamental insight of personal ontology — that the person is a someone to whom affirmation is owed.
The ontology distinguishes various forms of violence. Torture, as a subclass of violence, is a particularly grave injury to personal integrity. War constitutes a collective and institutionalized form of violence that contradicts peace as the properly person-fitting order of communal life. Conflict, too, can — when it crosses the boundary into injury of the other — become violence.
Violence is not only a transgression against the personalist norm, but also a destruction of interpersonality: it tears apart the relationship between persons, which rests essentially on mutual recognition. Where violence rules, the third dimension of personhood — free self-realization in the turning toward the other — is made impossible.
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concepts: practical oblivion of the person
Subclasses: Torture, Form of Violence (direct, structural, cultural violence)
Ontological relations:
- violates: personalist norm
- denies: body-soul unity as personal integrity
- destroys: interpersonality
Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person (German)
The Triangle of Violence according to Galtung
The peace researcher Johan Galtung extended the concept of violence beyond the visible act: violence is present whenever human beings are influenced in such a way that their actual bodily and mental realization is avoidably lower than their potential realization (Galtung 1969). His triangle of violence distinguishes three forms that reinforce one another and are recorded in the ontology as expressions of the form of violence.
Direct Violence
The first corner of the triangle: visible violence with an identifiable agent who injures the bodily-psychic integrity of a person. In terms of personal ontology it coincides with violence in the narrower sense — the intentional injury of the bodily-psychic-spiritual integrity.
Structural Violence
The second corner: violence without an identifiable perpetrator, built into social, economic, or legal structures. No one strikes a blow — and yet human beings are hindered in the unfolding of their personhood, because institutions, economic structures, or technological systems systematically curtail their possibilities of life. In terms of personal ontology, structural violence is practical oblivion of the person without a direct perpetrator. It extends the narrower, intention-bound concept of violence by the non-intentional dimension mediated through circumstances — according to Galtung, only its absence constitutes positive peace.
Cultural Violence
The third corner (Galtung 1990): those aspects of a culture — language, ideology, symbols, science, religion — that legitimize, normalize, or render invisible direct or structural violence. In terms of personal ontology, cultural violence is the discursive preparation of the oblivion of the person: the person is linguistically recoded into an object before being practically treated as an object.
A case in which all three corners converge is surrogacy: direct violence in the contractually stipulated interventions in the body of the woman and in the separation of mother and child, structural violence in the global poverty gradient and in the asymmetry of the contract, cultural violence in the language of the market that makes both appear as a “service.”
Murder
Note: The ethical judgments on this page refer exclusively to the action — never to the person who performs it. Every person possesses inalienable dignity, regardless of what they do or have done. Cf. Note on ethical judgments (German).
Murder is the direct and deliberate killing of an innocent human being. It is to be distinguished from killing in self-defense. According to Thomas Aquinas, murder contradicts human nature essentially and can be dispensed from by no authority.
As an intrinsically evil act and as a crime, murder constitutes the most radical denial of the personhood of another someone. It destroys the bodily existence of the person and thereby the foundation of all three dimensions of their personhood. Murder contradicts the personalist norm absolutely. It treats the person not only as a means, but takes from them life itself. It is a form of violence in its most extreme consequence.
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concepts: intrinsically evil act, crime
Ontological relations:
- contradicts: personalist norm
- annihilates: personal life
Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 293–306 (oblivion of the person as a privative phenomenon and its practical consequences).
Further sources:
- Hildebrand, D. von: Ethics (1953). Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. (The loss of the personal regard as the precondition of violence.)
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64 (On killing and the inviolability of life). Transl. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.
- Galtung, Johan (1969): “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”. In: Journal of Peace Research 6 (3), pp. 167–191. (Direct and structural violence.)
- Galtung, Johan (1990): “Cultural Violence”. In: Journal of Peace Research 27 (3), pp. 291–305. (Cultural violence as legitimation.)