causal

Violence Is Essential to a Compassionate Society

Violence is wrongly likened to a cancer because, unlike cancer, it is inevitable and essential; the threat of violence is necessary to make people honor contracts and refrain from raping, stealing, and killing, and by evolutionary accounts anger and the punitive appetite exist to keep people from preying on one another, so removing the human appetite for punishing wrongdoers would cause society to fall apart.

causalpending

Speaker

Paul Bloom

Evidence Quote

if you took away an appetite for violence for people a desire to inflict suffering on those who do bad i think the world would fall apart

Source

16 - The Dark SideMaking Sense with Sam Harris
Created: 6/14/2026, 2:24:40 AM

My Notes

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