This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Unprovoked physical violence, punching someone in the nose or deliberately stamping on their toes is morally wrong.

Most of us have strong intuitions about that. John Mikhail is a

philosopher and legal scholar. He argues that beneath such feelings may lie

fundamental moral principles, a kind of moral grammar, not dissimilar to Noam Chomsky's universal

grammar. At the heart of many of our moral intuitions suggests Professor Mikhail

is a basic prohibition on interpersonal violence, or battery, as it's sometimes called.

John McHale, welcome to Frostview Bites.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is battery and morality.

Could you just tell us what battery is before we get on to morality?

Sure. Battery is the term that's used in tort law, the law of personal injury, for a certain

kind of norm violation that involves trespass to the body, to the body of another person.

In the criminal law, sometimes that same act is called assault,

but for our purposes, we might think of the intentional act

that causes a harmful contact to another person. That would be battery.

So a classic case would be if I were to swing my fist now and connect with your

nose that would be an act of battery. Exactly. So a punch in the nose is a

perfectly good example of battery, but battery can take on some other more interesting forms.

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