Utilitarian justifications for violence rest on biased estimates of future harm

Evidence

Exonerating comparison relies heavily on moral justification by utilitarian standards. Making violence morally acceptable from a utilitarian perspective is facilitated by two sets of judgments. First, nonviolent options are depicted as ineffective for achieving desired changes, thus removing them from consideration. Second, utilitarian analyses using advantageous comparisons affirm that one’s injurious actions will prevent more human suffering than they cause. The utilitarian cost-benefit calculus, however, can be quite slippery in specific applications. Estimates of future harm contain many uncertainties and ambiguities. Predictive judgment is, therefore, subject to many biases (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). As a result, calculations of long-term human costs and benefits are often suspect. Estimating the gravity of potential threats also is fraught with subjectivity. Moreover, violence is often used as a weapon against minor threats on the grounds that if left unchecked, they will escalate and spread to cause far more human suffering. The frequently invoked domino theory reflects this type of escalative projection error concerning a likely course of events. Estimate of the gravity of a situation justifies choice of options. But preference for violent options often biases estimates of gravity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s claimed interest in ‘small acts of decorum toward corpses mattering more than practical logic’ — the inversions in cost-benefit reasoning about violence pair with how violence converts ritual logic into utility. — connects to: the MOC “The Violence That Builds: How Modern Order Is Forged, Not Broken, by Force”
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing inversion — gravity justifies the option chosen, but the chosen option biases the gravity estimate — is a genuinely tight feedback-loop observation that resists easy summary.