ABSTRACT
Violence has always attracted a lot of attention in academic circles, for good reasons. People will always speculate on the question whether individual violence is inevitable, being part of our human nature, the inescapable enactment of a primal urge that cannot always be controlled, a reminder that even homo sapiens are, deep down, animals. And of course violence is the essence of politics, either because violence has always been (and to some extent still is) the most reliable instrument of conquer and domination, or because in a democracy we try to prevent conflict and disagreement from escalating into violence. In order to come to terms with the justification of violence, what is required is a background in normative and applied ethics, and perhaps even metaethics, all of which of course are branches of philosophy. The concept of rights is complex and contested, so defining violence as the violation of rights allows for excessive vagueness.
