Ethics

What makes people cruel?

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Let me offer what may seem to be an annoying answer. There are two things you might mean. One is what causes people to become cruel? And if that's the question, philosophers have no special basis for answering, since philosophers have no special insight into the causes of human conduct. But there's a related question: what does it mean to be a cruel person? What distinguishes a truly cruel person from someone who may occasionally do cruel things but overall isn't someone we'd count as cruel? Putting the question in more traditional vocabulary, we count cruelty as a vice. But what is this vice? (This isn't just irrelevant to your more likely question, because if what want to know how people become cruel, we need to have an idea of what state of character we have in mind.)

Without pretending to offer a full analysis, we can at least say a few things. We generally say that an action is cruel when it's deliberately intended to cause pain, and when the person performing the action takes pleasure in that very fact. Someone acting cruelly may well be able to imagine themselves into the state of mind they are causing in their victim, but they don't care: they act without sympathy. But the occasional cruel act doesn't make someone a cruel person; if it did, most of us. alas would count as cruel. We count people as cruel overall if cruelty is a matter of habit -- if acting in spite of what sympathy would lead to comes as second nature.

That still doesn't tell us how people get to be cruel, but it at least guides our inquiry. Some people, we might suspect, are incapable of sympathy. If so, we might want to understand what distinguishes them from the rest of the world. (It might even be something about their "wiring.") Other people, one assumes are perfectly capable of sympathy, but come not to exercise it. How does that come about? Pressing a little further, lack of sympathy is one thing; taking pleasure in other people's distress is another. To understand the origins of cruelty, we'd want to understand how that works. It's puzzling, after all: what could make it pleasant to witness someone's pain?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions, and getting the answers would call for some very subtle social science. But I hope you can see that the question is actually quite complex. And even if philosophy can't answer the causal question, it may have something to contribute to figuring out what we need to investigate.

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