Moral Monsters

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1988), 169.Google Scholar

The intellectual discussion of the Holocaust in this context is mired in controversy, controversy that emanates from a number of different corners of the scholarly, religious, and secular worlds. For example, scholars and theologians alike have disagreed over the very term Holocaust itself. For many Jews, the term Shoah, signifying catastrophic destruction, is a more appropriate term than Holocaust, which is “derived from the Greek holókauston, meaning ‘burnt whole’” and brings with it connotations of sacrifice. In this vein, Walter Lacquer argues that the term Holocaust is “singularly inappropriate” as “it was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind, and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim.” These arguments aside however, in most scholarship and general discourse, the attempted eradication of the Jewish race at the hands of the Nazis is known as the Holocaust. Richard Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 4–5. Walter Lacquer, quoted in Rubenstein and Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz, 5; although, as Rubenstein and Roth argue, the term Shoah is preferred in Israel, Israeli writers such as Adi Ophir and others still use the term Holocaust. Ophir, The Order of Evils.Google Scholar

Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Emmanuel Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 176.Google Scholar

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The exception to this is, of course, Sigmund Freud who argued that alongside overt agency, human action is also directed by impulses that are not apparent to them. He wrote: “Psychological—or, more strictly speaking, psycho-analytic—investigation shows instead that the deepest essence of human nature consists in instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature, which are similar in all men and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs. These impulses in themselves are neither good nor bad. We classify them and their expressions in that way, according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community. It must be granted that all the impulses which society condemns as evil—let us take as representative the cruel and selfish ones—are of this primitive kind.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: The Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 122.Google Scholar

The focus in this chapter is on individual moral agency, leaving aside the moral agency of groups. For a discussion of this, see Toni Erskine, ed., Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Evildoing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

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See, for example, Bruce Reichenbach, “Natural Evils and Natural Laws: A Theodicy for Natural Evils,” International Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (June 1976): 179–96; William L. Rowe, “Evil and Theodicy,” Philosophical Topics 14, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 119–32; John Hick, Evil and the Love of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); William L. Rowe, “The Problems of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (October 1979), 335–41; Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975), 29–59; Keith E. Yandell, “The Problem of Evil and the Content of Morality,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 17 (1985): 139–65. What is particularly interesting about this particular discourse about evil is that is revisited a number of themes that had been prominent in early modern literature on the subject, in particular, the claim that this is the “best of all possible worlds” and the “free will defense.”Google Scholar

Hans Jonas, “Mind, Matter and Creation: Cosmological Evidence and Cosmological Speculation,” in Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 189–90.Google Scholar

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Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish Christian Reality, vol. 1, Discerning the Way (New York: Harpercollins, 1987), 116.Google Scholar

Rubenstein and Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz, 335–36; see Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God After Auschwitz (Amsterdam: Polack & Van Gennep, 1965).Google Scholar

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Berel Lang, “The Evil in Genocide,” in Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, ed. John K. Roth (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 11.Google Scholar

Bruce Reichenbach, “Natural Evils and Natural Laws: A Theodicy for Natural Evils,” International Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 2 (June 1976): 179.Google Scholar

Ibid.Google Scholar

Nina H. B. Jørgensen, The Responsibility of States for International Crimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 73.Google Scholar

John Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 67 and 69.Google Scholar

Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 23.Google Scholar

Ibid., 24.Google Scholar

Ibid.Google Scholar

William A. Schabas, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108.Google Scholar

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Ibid.Google Scholar

Gaita, “Refocusing Genocide,” 160.Google Scholar

Justice Robert H. Jackson, quoted in James Owen, Nuremberg: Evil on Trial (London: Headline, 2006), 35.Google Scholar

Ibid., 39.Google Scholar

David Maxwell Fyfe, foreword to G. M. Gilbert Nuremberg Diary, (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), xi.Google Scholar

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John Kekes, The Roots of Evil, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 102.Google Scholar

Roy F. Baumeister, “The Holocaust and the Four Roots of Evil,” in Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, ed. Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 254.Google Scholar

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Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1998), xxi.Google Scholar

Ibid., 86.Google Scholar

Milton Himmelfarb, “No Hitler, No Holocaust,” Commentary 76, no. 3 (March 1984): 37–43.Google Scholar

Philippa Foot, quoted in Kekes, Facing Evil, 84; see Philippa Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” in Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 129.Google Scholar

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Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 1991), 243.Google Scholar

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Martin Buber, quoted in Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 20; see Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 16.Google Scholar

See also Joel Feinburg, “Action and Responsibility,” in Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1965), 134–60.Google Scholar