Ethical Canons and Scientific Inquiry

	PART I	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING WAR
	Chapter  1	About Ethical Canons and War
	Chapter  2	Decisions Precipitating War
	Chapter  3	Human Sacrifice
	Chapter  4	Amiriyah Shelter
	PART II	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EQUALITY
	Chapter  5	Slavery
	Chapter  6	Arens' Atrocity Attribution Theory
	Chapter  7	Genocide of Native Americans
	Chapter  8	Intermarriage
	PART III	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING JUSTICE
	Chapter  9	Incarceration
	Chapter 10	Reemergence of Torture
	Chapter 11	Witchcraft Trials
	Chapter 12	Trials of Heretics
	PART IV	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING RELIGION
	Chapter 13	The New and Old Testaments
	Chapter 14	Transplanted Mentality
	Chapter 15	God and His Messengers
	PART V	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EMPATHY
	Chapter 16	Karla Tucker and George W. Bush
	Chapter 17	A Girl with the Almond Eyes
	Chapter 18	Beyond Partiality: Building a World of Laughter and Love

  Aren's Theory of Atrocity Attribution

Comte saw that the scientific method can be applied to social problems and held that the scientific method is the main source of positive knowledge. As natural science has contributed to our understanding of natural phenomena, sociology can help us to understand social phenomena. Comte also saw that the experimentation in social sciences, if strictly patterned after physical sciences, would not be able to capture significant social issues. He therefore advanced the method of natural experiments, where social scientists wait for significant social event to happen and then study these events by using quantitative methods. Core methods of social sciences are observations and quantification of observations. Statistical methods and the visual representation of data are well suited for this task. Statistical methods can also be helpful in establishing relationships between observations as to unravel their common underlying structure. Perhaps the most important part of observation is the selection of relevant events for scientific study. In this, the scientist should be guided by theoretical considerations. Experimentation, a central method of research in the physical sciences, is only of limited utility within social sciences as human affairs are often not subject to direct experimentation. However, whenever the regular flow of social events is disrupted or interrupted by some significant event, a social experiment can be said to take place. The downing of a Korean civilian airliner by the Soviet Air Force on September 1, 1983 for violating Soviet airspace, killing 269 persons aboard, was one such event interrupting the regular flow of human affairs, which we used as a social experiment, described in this chapter. Another event interrupting the flow of events was the Watergate scandal which helped us to recognize the utility of paired comparisons as a sensitive gauge of social events. In this chapter we discuss this type of methods and their role in the social sciences within the framework of Arens book, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy where he espouses his atrocity attribution theory.

Cannibals of the Caribbean

Throughout history, accusations of atrocities have been one of the most effective tools of attitude change  and have often preceded hostilities between people or nations. A prototypical form of atrocity attribution is the accusation of cannibalism. The term cannibal was coined during Columbus’ times after the name of Caribs, a West Indian tribe with a reputation for eating their enemies. Following Columbus’ discoveries, the Spanish monarchy adopted a policy prohibiting the enslavement of natives in the new territories. However, the royal mandate for the West Indies contained a clause excluding cannibals from royal protection. Repeatedly, this clause was invoked to derive an economic advantage from human bondage.

The Art of Atrocity Attribution

 

The cannibalism legend was also used against the Spanish Empire. During the period following the Thirty Years’ War and preceding the American Revolution, the English published a series of books and pamphlets accusing the Spanish of unspeakable cruelties - the leading of these being the accusation of abetting cannibals. These atrocity accusations reached their height with the English push into the Caribbean and their acquisition of Jamaica. The study of British atrocity propaganda is instructive. What can be more effective, while preparing an aggressive war, than to proclaim the purity of one’s intentions and sanctity of one’s cause, while ascribing atrocities to the enemy? Throughout history, the enemies of the British Empire, portrayed as aggressors, cruel and inhuman, were annihilated while the British preserved their image of a caring, ‘gentlemanly’ nation. By mastering the art of atrocity attributions, Great Britain started more wars than any other nation resulting in the deaths of millions of people, subjugated millions of others by sanctioning piracy, the drug trade, the slave trade, and yet, maintained an image of a cultured nation.

 

Vindictiveness

The prevailing ethical code of classical teachings of the East is to accommodate. Some of the Chinese sayings on these topics are:

Question: What makes marriage happy?
Answer: Short memory

Before the marriage, open both eyes
After the marriage, close one.

The ethical canons of the Old Testament (Exodus, 21:22; Leviticus, 24:17) resound with moral precepts such as

An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth

reconfirmed by Deuteronomy 19:16

And Thine Eye Shall Not Pity;
but Life Shall Go for Life,
Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth.

Atrocity attributions are frequent within the traditions of the monotheistic religions, exalting one’s own causes and ascribing amoral, wicked motives to one’s foes. Traditions of monotheistic religions maintain the evil images of their enemies for millennia, making distant countries near and old events recent. Bible keeps the memories of old enemies alive. One still can hear from pulpits invectives against the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans. People and societies viewed as enemies thousands years ago are still eloquently described so as not to omit any vice possible or any cruelty imaginable.

The Myth of Anthropophagy

As argued by Arens in his book, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (1979), cannibalism never existed as a socially sanctioned practice. This statement contradicts a generally held belief. Perhaps the strongest argument for the existence of cannibalism as a socially-sanctioned practice was asserted by Gajdusek, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on kuru, a disease similar to AIDS frequently diagnosed in one New Guinea tribe, practicing ritual homosexuality. In the years to follow, Gajdusek served lengthy prison sentence on the charges of child molesting. Originally, Gajdusek maintained that kuru is transmitted by eating infected brains during a cannibalistic ritual. This practice, he believed, spreads kuru, caused by a slow virus manifesting its presence only years after initial infection. Gajdusek never actually observed this cannibalistic ritual. Moreover, subsequent experiments with chimpanzees failed to show that they could get this disease by being fed infected brain tissue of people who died of kuru. Later, Gajdusek admitted in an interview in the New York Times that ‘there has been so far no convincing evidence that kuru can be acquired by eating or drinking affected material or by any means other than direct invasion of the bloodstream.’

Even though isolated instances of anthropophagy have been well documented, as in the Donner Pass incident, to call a group of people ‘cannibals’ on the basis of such isolated incidents is a non sequitur. Arens’ argument is meticulously investigated and documented. When textbook citations of cannibalism were traced to the original sources, stories of cannibalism turned out to be based on the reports of informants from other tribe, not from direct observations. Moreover, the context of these reports often was unbelievable. Thus, an informant may report that the neighboring tribe practiced cannibalism, but also that the cannibals were women who are able to turn themselves into birds.

Sometimes, the story itself is fantastic. For example, Ronald Berndt in his book Excess and Restraint (1962) describes a scene in which a married couple is carving a corpse. The wife is carving the upper half of the body while the husband is copulating with the bottom half. As the spouse begins to butcher the pubic area, she accidentally cuts off her husband’s penis. As he says ‘now you have cut off my penis! What shall I do?’ she removes the end of the penis she had cut off, pops it into her mouth, and eats it. Arens comments on this scene in a Science Digest interview with Elizabeth Rosenthal as: ‘I do not care if Berndt claims to have seen this; it’s beyond normal human capability.’

Pair Comparisons

One of the pioneers of quantitative measurement of attitudes toward crime was Louis Thurstone. In 1926, Thurstone had subjects choose between all pairs of 19 crimes. Using the method of paired comparisons, he constructed a scale of crimes from the more serious, such as homicide, to less serious crimes, such as smuggling. This study was one of the earliest quantitative analyses of attitudes. We replicated his study 50 years later in an attempt to capture some of the changing patterns of attitudes towards crime. What we found was that with increasing affluence, the judged seriousness of crimes against the person and against the property has increased. However, what caught our attention was the unusually large increase in judged seriousness of burglary. The change we recorded was far larger than the average increase of the judged seriousness of offenses against the property. At the time of our study, the media were filled with reports about the Watergate burglary, events that eventually resulted in the resignation of President Nixon. We have always been convinced that the method of paired comparisons is one of the most sensitive methods of scaling, capable of capturing minute differences in scaled entities. For years, one of the most debated issues has been whether media, especially television, reflect attitudes and opinions of the public or whether they create the prevailing attitudes and opinions. In paired comparisons we found a method capable of capturing the effect of media on opinions and attitudes of the public. Would it be possible to use this method to capture the effect of a media campaign on the likelihood of opening hostilities against another nation? An opportunity to measure this effect presented itself seven years later when a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean airliner over the Sea of Japan.

Dehumanization

The importance of Arens’ thesis is in calling attention to the basic propensity of societies to ascribe non-human characteristics to their enemies in order to facilitate humans killing humans. The studies of Konrad Lorenz show that most social species have instinctive mechanisms preventing the killing of other members of the same species. Intra-species killing is rare among animals. Humans circumvent this inhibition by describing their enemies as so wicked as to be inhuman, another species. Eating human flesh excludes people from the human category. Killing a barely human being can be classified as a killing falling into the interspecies category. Thus justified, it circumvents the inhibition to intra-species killing. Would it be possible to experimentally validate this theory?

The shooting down of a civilian airliner is a rare event, occurring only four times in the history of civil aviation before shooting down of the Korean airliner in 1983. It was ordered by

         Israel in 1973

         Soviet Union in 1978

         Zimbabwe in 1978 and 1979.

 The United States joined this exclusive club when, on July 3, 1988, the US cruiser Vincennes shot down a commercial Iranian airliner, killing 290 persons aboard.

The shooting down of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983 and the ensuing media campaign following this incident were intense enough to induce the perception of the Soviet Union as inhuman, and thus likely to engage in inhuman activities, such as cannibalism. Verification of this assertion would constitute a strong empirical validation of Arens’ atrocity attribution theory.

 

Castaways of the Queen Maud’s Mountains

We attempted this empirical verification by using the method of paired comparisons. In the week following the Korean airliner incident we administered to a group of graduate students a list of 210 pairs of 21 nationalities with the following instructions: ‘A New Zealand airline is arranging for weekly champagne flights over the South Pole. During the flight you may enjoy your Sunday brunch and observe the endless plains of the Antarctica. Recently, the New Zealand Boeing 747 was forced to make an emergency landing close to the Queen Maud Mountains during a prolonged series of snowstorms. Before a rescue mission could reach the plane, the polar night set in, making the location of the plane extremely difficult. When the rescue party arrived two months later, about half of the 264 passengers were dead and partially eaten. Some of the surviving passengers apparently resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive. Since the South Pole trip is expensive, the recruitment of passengers was worldwide and the original 264 passengers were truly an international group. Knowing the nationality of particular passengers, you are to indicate whom you think resorted to cannibalism. On the attached list of paired nationalities, please consider each pair and mark the one nationality you believe would most likely resort to cannibalism in the situation described above.’ Following administration of the questionnaire, the number of times each nationality was selected in each paired comparison was tabulated. The obtained frequencies were converted to proportions, analyzed and shown on the right of the figure below.

 

 

Judged likelihood of anthropophagy as measured by pair comparisons

On the left side of the above figure are shown ratings of the same nationalities, obtained several months earlier. The abrupt shift in Russia’s scale location, as compared to the order of preference obtained before the Korean airliner incident, is dramatic. The media coverage of the incident influenced public perception to the extent that people felt the Russians were the most likely, of the nationalities listed in the survey, to commit cannibalism.

When these results materialized, we were thrilled. This was beyond our wildest expectations. Arens’ Atrocity Attribution Theory is one of the most profound theories of social science. But so far it was just a theory, a plausible theory, but difficult to substantiate. Arens had the personal integrity to challenge a most cherished myth of anthropology. He had the courage to follow the data and disregard the hearsay.

Among Comte’s methods of social research, the method of unexpected events plays a prominent role. Comte maintained that whenever the regular flow of social events is interrupted by a significant phenomenon, a social experiment takes place. The downing of the Korean civilian airliner was such an interruption of the ‘regular flow of social events’ and the method of paired comparisons showed itself as a quantitative tool par excellence for measuring its hypothesized effect. The experimental verification of a concrete prediction based on the central theorem of Arens’ Atrocity Attribution Theory, apart from its theoretical significance, also affirmed our belief that experimental social science is not only possible, but also feasible.

The atrocity stories frequently exaggerate the number of victims, especially if they are given in rounded thousands, millions, or numbers suggestive of numeric symbolism, as the 'number of the beast,' the number of stars forming halo of saints, etc.. Search for accurate numbers in this respect is often difficult, but ultimately rewarding.

Be Skeptical at Atrocity Stories as these stories could profoundly influence your heart and mind. Atrocities happen and it is imperative that we oppose them. On the other hand, false or exaggerated atrocity stories help to initiate violence, injustice or a war. When you hear an atrocity story, before accepting it at its face value, always look at the motivations of the tellers and promoters of such stories. Also, the awareness of the basic tenets of logical positivism can draw attention to biased statements and narratives. The humanization of society depends to a large extent on increased awareness, sensitivity, and immunity of its members against biased communications.

Modern epistemology is closely related closely to the methodology of data analysis. There are no ready-made methods permitting unequivocal solutions to problems of the verity of narratives. One should always ask Qui Bono? Avoid Socrates’ extreme skepticism: ‘All I know that I know nothing,’ on the one side and naive credulity on the other. Confucius knew it all to well when he instructed his disciples 'When you know a thing, maintain that you know it; and when you do not, acknowledge your ignorance.' However, a hallmark on an educated person is that he or she is open enough to consider alternative explanations of events.