Violence: A value judgment on power relationships
The objective of this article is to offer critical reflective analysis of the notion of violence from the point of view of ethology and evolutionary psychology. The authors define violence as a value judgment of aggression in which aggression, operationally defined by any oriented (physical, gestural, verbal, etc.), non-playful behavior that may potentially cause harm to the physical or psychological integrity of another person, is deemed to be an abuse of power. Thus, they adopt a position contrary to that of researchers who consider parental neglect, play-fighting and war games among children to be violent. They also respond to the tendency to consider parental corporal punishment as necessarily violent. They then examine the adaptive biological functions of different types of aggression as well as several of the natural regulating mechanisms governing them. They consider the question of violence from two angles: is violence typical of the entire human species, and are men more violent than women? The authors then propose a model for family power relationships (marital, parent-child, child-child) which may provide a better understanding of family conflict and its possible influence on the development not only of child aggression towards peers but also of children’s competitive skills for gaining access to environmental resources. Finally, they conclude that morality is arbitrary and it is therefore important not to attempt to use science to justify it.