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Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and my guest today is Tage Rye.

Tage is a social sciences editor at Science Magazine and a research associate at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. His background is in psychology,

and he's the co-author with anthropologist Alan Fisk of a recent book titled Virtuous Violence,

which even if you haven't come across the book, you might have seen some of the articles that have been written about it in the last few years.

The thesis basically is that most acts of violence are, you might have seen some of the articles that have been written about it in the last few years.

The thesis basically is that most acts of violence that people commit are motivated by moral feelings,

that people feel when they commit violence most of the time that what they're doing is defending morality. Their violence is righteous, basically. And this model of violence seems to

conflict, interestingly, with a lot of other common sense notions of violence and academic

theories of violence as well. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Tage,

welcome to rationally speaking. Thanks for having you. Tage, what was your prior going into doing this research?

What was your rough model or assumption about what causes violence? I think if you, you know,

...