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Cruelty

About: Cruelty is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2004 publications have been published within this topic receiving 27892 citations. The topic is also known as: mercilessness.


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Book
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender by Judith Butler as mentioned in this paper is an extended study of moral philosophy that is grounded in a new sense of the human subject.
Abstract: What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.

2,547 citations

Book
01 Jan 1976

417 citations

09 Nov 2011
TL;DR: A study conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in partnership with the Family Online Safety Institute and supported by Cable in the Classroom as mentioned in this paper found that 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites.
Abstract: How American teens navigate the new world of "digital citizenship" Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. 1 We focused our attention in this research on social network sites because we wanted to understand the types of experiences teens are having there and how they are addressing negative behavior when they see it or experience it. As they navigate challenging social interactions online, who is influencing their sense of what it means to be a good or bad " digital citizen " ? How often do they intervene to stand up for others? How often do they join in the mean behavior? Many log on daily to their social network pages and these have become spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified—in both good and bad ways. In our survey, we follow teens' experiences of online cruelty – either personally felt or observed – from incident to resolution. We asked them about how they reacted to the experience and how they saw others react. We asked them about whether they have received and where they sought advice – both general advice about online safety and responsibility and specific advice on how to handle a witnessed experience of online cruelty on a social network site. We also probed the environment around teens' online experiences by examining their privacy controls and practices, as well as the level of regulation of their online environment by their parents. We further sought insight into more serious experiences that teens have in their lives, including bullying both on-and offline and the exchange of sexually charged digital images. What follows are the main findings from a report conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in partnership with the Family Online Safety Institute and supported by Cable in the Classroom. The data discussed in this report are the result of a three-part, multi-modal study that included interviews with experts, seven focus groups with middle and high school students, and a nationally representative random-digit-dial telephone survey of teens and parents. The survey was fielded April 19 through July 14, 2011, and was administered by landline …

383 citations

Book
01 May 1999
TL;DR: Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime as discussed by the authors attempts to make sense of the current increase in violence, cruelty, hate and humiliation, which has come to permeate daily life.
Abstract: Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime attempts to make sense of the current increase in violence, cruelty, hate and humiliation, which has come to permeate daily life. The text argues that an overly organised economic world has provoked a widespread desire for extreme, oppositional forms of popular and personal pleasure. This desire has resulted in a cathartic 'second life' of illicit pleasures often deemed criminal by those in power. Amongst the exciting issues Mike Presdee addresses are:* joyriding* street crime* antisocial behaviour in private via the internet* hate, hurt and humiliation in popular culture* the popularisation and criminalisation of sadomasochism and dance music cultures.

378 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Findings support the construct validity of everyday sadism and its incorporation into a new “Dark Tetrad” of personality.
Abstract: Past research on socially aversive personalities has focused on subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism-the "Dark Triad" of personality. In the research reported here, we evaluated whether an everyday form of sadism should be added to that list. Acts of apparent cruelty were captured using two laboratory procedures, and we showed that such behavior could be predicted with two measures of sadistic personality. Study 1 featured a bug-killing paradigm. As expected, sadists volunteered to kill bugs at greater rates than did nonsadists. Study 2 examined willingness to harm an innocent victim. When aggression was easy, sadism and Dark Triad measures predicted unprovoked aggression. However, only sadists were willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. In both studies, sadism emerged as an independent predictor of behavior reflecting an appetite for cruelty. Together, these findings support the construct validity of everyday sadism and its incorporation into a new "Dark Tetrad" of personality.

362 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023131
2022332
202143
202067
201986
201885