Beyond “Plain Death”: Montaigne’s Dialectic of Cruelty and Virtue
Abstract
The assertion that “Even in justice, all that goes beyond plain death seems to me pure cruelty” , put forward by Montaigne in his essay On Cruelty, lies at the heart of his reflections on violence and morality. At present, academic studies on Montaigne’s views of cruelty are scattered across three disconnected strands: “the ethics of punishment”, “the cultivation of virtue”, and “psychological mechanisms”. These separate approaches have failed to clarify the inherent connections among “cruelty, virtue, and cowardice”. By analyzing three texts—Of Cruelty, Cowardice, the Mother of Cruelty, and Of Cannibals—and combining them with their historical context, this paper argues that Montaigne uses “plain death” as the criterion to distinguish between legitimate punishment and cruelty. Cowardice serves as the psychological root that drives people to cross this line and commit cruel acts, while virtue functions as a practical defense against such “cowardice-driven cruelty”. This integrated analysis not only clarifies the dialectical relationship between cruelty and virtue centered on the concept of “plain death” but also fills the gaps in existing research, thereby providing a historical reference for contemporary discussions on humanitarianism.
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