Organized Violence vs. Natural Aggression: Toward a Criticism of Naturalistic Concepts of the Origin and Essence of Wars

The article provides a critical analysis of the naturalistic approach to explaining the causes and essence of war as a social phenomenon. The biologizing and sociologizing approaches to the study of man and society are presented and compared.
It is shown that the key methodological drawback of naturalistic justifications of the inevitability of wars consists in an attempt to deduce violent conflicts in society directly from the human biological properties. In human nature, both the ability for altruistic behavior and the propensity for aggression and conflict are equally embedded. It is necessary to distinguish natural forms of aggression from war as a form of organized violence in human society, since the latter is always carried out in socially conditioned, culturally predetermined forms. War as a phenomenon is impossible without the actions of people mediated by consciousness and the ability
for abstract thinking, complex forms of social interaction and communication. Consequently, in order to eliminate war as a phenomenon in the life of human society, it is necessary not to fight against natural aggressiveness and other innate and, therefore, ineradicable properties of a person, but to transform the behavior programs and the system of values perceived by a person through culture.