Abstract
In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith
Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to
cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most evil
of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional
rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a
liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate
cruelty as a concept with torture (Stade) and with love
(Rapport). Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability
to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade
and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Philosophy & Social Criticism |
| Volume | Online First |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 6 Jun 2022 |
Keywords
- Cruelty
- Torture
- Love
- Intimacy
- Impersonalism
- Civil attention
- Psychology
Access to Document
- Stade_2022_PSC_Cruelty_CC
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).