cruel. For Michel Montaigne, the French philoso-
pher and essayist writing in the 16th century, intent
was important, but it was not the only determining
factor. Actions could be cruel in and of themselves
even when allowed by law. For instance, many soci-
eties have allowed slavery, but as Montaigne pointed
out, the fact that the practice is legal does not make
it merciful. Like St. Augustine, the 18th-century
British philosopher John Locke focused on the
effect cruelty has on the perpetrator. Even when the
victims were animals and not human beings, Locke
believed cruelty had a destructive effect on those
who inflicted harm.
If it seems that much philosophical thought on
cruelty attempts to define it, perhaps that is because
one of the central philosophical questions on the
topic has to do with whether or not cruelty is ever
justified. In order to justify (or to condemn) cruelty,
it must first be defined. For instance, the bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States
in World War II was without question devastating
and brutal, and many noncombatants, including
children, were seriously injured and killed. Whether
or not we are willing to call that action cruel, how-
ever, seems to have to do with whether or not it was
justified. Psychologists, however, have argued that
in the minds of many perpetrators of violence, any
action may be justified. Roy Baumeister, for instance,
argues that most acts of violence result from mutual,
escalating provocations and grievances. This leads
to a rationalization in the mind of the victimizer.
For instance, people often feel victimized by other
groups and convince themselves they are acting out
of a justified need for a role reversal. Rapists, for
instance, often claim to have been enacting a kind
of revenge against all women (166). Incredibly, the
Ku Klax Klan often claimed they were acting out of
revenge when they burned down homes, raped black
women, and lynched black men throughout the 20th
century. These acts, they claimed, were in retaliation
against freed slaves who had disrupted the system of
white superiority and complacency (166–167).
Ideology is often another justification for vio-
lence and cruelty. Even seemingly good, ordinary
people who have convinced themselves they are
“fighting for a good cause” have engaged in despi-
cable acts of cruelty. The Crusades, for instance,
beginning in the 1100s, were led by soldiers who
believed they were heeding the pope’s call to recap-
ture the Holy Land. In general, these were ordinary
men who believed they were serving their God, but
they participated in the vast slaughter of innocent
human beings and barbaric acts of brutality, such as
burning people alive and mutilating and torturing
noncombatants. In the Ukraine in the mid-20th
century, soldiers under the orders of Joseph Stalin
systematically confiscated the food of peasant farm-
ers and their families all in the name of the “uni-
versal triumph of communism” (Baumeister 179).
Ultimately, 11 million starved to death—a torturous,
brutal way to die. But these soldiers, acting in the
sway of an ideology, believed, or forced themselves
to believe, that the ends justified the means.
Indeed, many philosophers and psychologists
would argue that driven by ideology, or in the pursuit
of revenge, most human beings are capable of cruelty.
In fact, two famous experiments seem to indicate
that even being placed in a culture whereby such
acts are acceptable and being given orders is enough
for many ordinary people to cross the line. In 1963,
the social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted
an experiment that has come to be named for him.
Participants were told to choose slips of paper from
a hat, and they would be assigned either “teacher” or
“learner.” The teacher would read word pairs out to
the learner and then ask questions about what the
learner remembered. When the learner made a mis-
take, the teacher was to administer an increasingly
painful electric shock. In reality, there were no actual
shocks; all the slips said “teacher,” and the “learner”
was played by an actor. Even when the learner asked
to stop the experiment, 65 percent of the subjects
went on to administer the most powerful shock:
450 volts. In the 1972 Stanford Prison Experiment,
the psychologist Philip Zimbardo staged an experi-
ment in which undergraduate volunteers took on
the roles of “prisoner” and “guard” in a mock prison.
The “guards” became so sadistic and the “prisoners”
so emotionally traumatized that the experiment,
planned for two weeks, was halted after six days.
In both of these experiments, the victimizers
focused not on the human beings on the receiving
end of the cruelty, but on the rationales they had
been given. Cruelty must necessarily turn human22 cruelty