Can Collective Responsibility for Perpetrated Evil Persist over Generations?

In the first part of the paper an argument is developed to the effect that (1) there is no moral ground for individual persons to feel responsible for or guilty about crimes of their group to which they have in no way contributed; and (2) since there is no irreducibly collective responsibility nor guilt at any time, there is no question of them persisting over time. In the second part it is argued that there is nevertheless sufficient reason for innocent individual members of a group (that persists over time) to take on responsibility and guilt for the evil other (earlier) members have committed. The reason depends on the acceptability of a particular psychological theory of personal identity.     

Joint Commitments

I question the adequacy of Margaret Gilbert's account of collectivefeelings of guilt as collective judgments which do not necessarilyhave any phenomenological components. I question whether joint commitment theory in its present form helps us to understand orresolve social conflicts.     

Evaluation of the Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways (RIPP) Seventh Grade Violence Prevention Curriculum

We evaluated the impact of RIPP-7, a seventh grade violence prevention curriculum designed to strengthen and extend the effects of the sixth grade RIPP-6 curriculum. Classes of seventh graders at two urban middle schools serving predominantly African-American youth where RIPP-6 had been implemented the preceding school year were randomized to intervention (N = 239) and control groups (N = 237). Compared to students in the control group, students who participated in RIPP-7 had fewer disciplinary code violations for violent offenses during the following school year. A limited number of main effects were found on self-report outcome measures and measures of attitudes. Although significant main effects were not found on self-report measures of physical aggression, drug use, or anxiety, analyses of interactions with pretest scores indicated that intervention effects were significantly moderated by pretest scores for several outcome measures. Students most likely to benefit from the intervention were those who reported higher pretest rates of problem behaviors including violent behavior, nonphysical aggression, and delinquent behavior.     

How Do I Treat My Hungry Lion: A Model for Violence Management in Prison

This theoretical model for the management of violence relies on the notion that there are fundamentally only two kinds of prison violence—provoked and unprovoked—and that all violence is caused by the influence of some fear-causing agent which triggers the autonomic nervous system's Fight or Flight Response (FFR) which in turn causes the release of FFR chemicals to create and enable an action potential for violence in the actor. Provoked violence is an act of violence which occurs in response to an FFR instigated by some external, independent contemporaneous, real or imagined fear causing agent. Treating provoked violence must include suppressing the production of an excess of FFR stimulant chemicals, which at the same time employing psychodynamic therapy to modify the negative behavior learned from a lifetime of excessive responses to FFR chemical releases. Unprovoked violence is the result of an actor's addiction to FFR chemicals. This addiction leads the actor to experience an apperceptive compulsion to engage in thrill seeking as a method of exposing himself to fear causing agents that are calculated to cause the release of FFR chemicals. In order to treat unprovoked violence you must treat both the chemical addiction and the negative pattern of behavior which was learned to support the habit of self-triggering an FFR. Thus any successful treatment of violence must employ both energetic and psychodynamic models for development of fear management strategies.     

Preventing School Violence by Promoting Wellness

This paper presents a framework for school-based health promotion and prevention programming that can serve to guide planning and action. Rather than separating specific prevention programs (such as violence prevention, substance abuse prevention, etc.) from more broad-based youth development efforts, this approach provides an integrated framework that: (a) identifies benchmarks of healthy development and strategies to support this development across contexts; (b) specifies additional factors that contribute to identified problems that are not directly linked to healthy development; and (c) provides for matching services to individual needs. Suggestions for application of this framework are discussed, with a particular focus on its application to the development of school-based Wellness Centers.     

Teasing,rejection, and violence: Case studies of the school shootings

Media commentators have suggested that recent school shootings were precipitated by social rejection, but no empirical research has examined this claim. Case studies were conducted of 15 school shootings between 1995 and 2001 to examine the possible role of social rejection in school violence. Acute or chronic rejection—in the form of ostracism, bullying, and/or romantic rejection—was present in all but two of the incidents. In addition, the shooters tended to be characterized by one or more of three other risk factors—an interest in firearms or bombs, a fascination with death or Satanism, or psychological problems involving depression, impulse control, or sadistic tendencies. Implications for understanding and preventing school violence are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 29:202–214, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Do beliefs about aggression predict physical aggression to partners?

Three hypotheses concerning the association between instrumental (I) and expressive (E) beliefs about aggression and physical aggression were assessed among a sample comprising students (n=40), women from a domestic violence shelter (n=29), and male prisoners (n=46), all of whom had committed at least one act of physical aggression to a partner. Participants completed an adapted version of the EXPAGG [Archer and Haigh (1997a): British Journal of Social Psychology 35:1–23] to measure I and E beliefs about aggression, the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) [Straus (1979): Journal of Marriage and the Family 41:75–88] for themselves and their partner, and measures of fear and injuries resulting from partner violence. I beliefs predicted self‐reported physical aggression to the partner, most CTS acts of physical aggression, and injuries to the partner, with only minor and limited associations for E beliefs. Correlations for the student and prisoner samples, and for men and women, showed different strengths. The findings supported a general link between I beliefs and aggression but offered no support for the predictions that the link would be restricted to men or to men who showed a persistent pattern of violence to their partners. Aggr. Behav. 29:41–54, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

JUST WAR THEORY,HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION,AND THE NEED FOR A DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION

The primary purpose of government is to secure public goods that cannot be achieved by free markets. The Coordination Principle tells us to consolidate sovereign power in a single institution to overcome collective action problems that otherwise prevent secure provision of the relevant public goods. There are several public goods that require such coordination at the global level, chief among them being basic human rights. The claim that human rights require global coordination is supported in three main steps. First, I consider Pogge's and Habermas's analyses as alternatives to Hobbesian conceptions of justice. Second, I consider the core conventions of international law, which are in tension with the primacy of state sovereignty in the UN system. Third, I argue that the just war tradition does not limit just causes for war to self‐defense; it supports saving innocent third parties from crimes against humanity as a just reason for war. While classical authors focused less on this issue, the point is especially clear in twentieth‐century just war theories, such as those offered by the American Catholic bishops, Jean Elshtain, Brian Orend, and Michael Walzer. Against Walzer, I argue that we add intractable military tyranny to the list of horrors meriting intervention if other ad bellum conditions are met. But these results require us to reexamine the “just authority” of first resort to govern such interventions. The Coordination Principle implies that we should create a transnational federation with consolidated powers in place of a treaty organization requiring near‐unanimity. But to be legitimate, such a global institution must also be directly answerable to the citizens of its member states. While the UN Security Council is inadequate on both counts, a federation of democracies with a directly elected executive and legislature could meet both conditions.