Thanks everyone for the thoughtful (both agreeing and disagreeing) messages and response posts. Thanks even for the not very thoughtful ones. Two of the better posts are at Jumping to Conclusions and at Kesher Talk. One of the not-so-good posts says that “Holocaust denial also includes the minimization of the Holocaust, or denying its uniqueness.” Like, I can say that the Holocaust is one of the most evil events in all of human history because so many people were murdered (and I’ve never disputed anyone’s numbers), and I’m a Holocaust denier? For reference, my past posts are #1, #2, and #3.
Here are some additional assorted thoughts; I can’t respond to everyone’s notes, but here’s a narrative that ties some of the strands together, just so you know where I’m coming from. (This may also give you ideas of what arguments to make that I would find convincing.)
My perspective begins and ends with individual rights (in the libertarian framework), one of which of course is the right to life. If no violation of rights, then nothing immoral or evil.
(Of course, one can always argue with the libertarian framework, and many of my disagreements with others can be traced back right there. But lest this spiral out of all control, I’m taking that perspective as given, for now. But clearly I still disagree with other libertarians (e.g., here), so this isn’t meant to be a debate-stopper… so here’s my take from within libertarianism.)
Suppose you have two different violations of rights, and you’re trying to rank them, as in, “Which one is more evil?” Some folks don’t believe in these rankings: evil is evil, and all evils are as bad as all others… I don’t go for that; clearly there’s a difference between living under Hitler and living under [fill in the blank for your most despised U.S. President]. So, the first step is to identify the rights violation; this includes both which right was violated, and the extent of the violation. (For instance, restrictions on political speech can be broad or narrow; both modern Germany and Nazi Germany restrict political speech, but clearly Nazi Germany is the worse actor; I’m not calling these the same right violation.)
Here’s the really controversial point: violations of the same right are equally bad.
What this does mean: suppose you murder a very productive and creative person with lots of family and friends who love him very much. Clearly that guy’s death is really harmful to the world, and makes more people more sad than if you murder an unloved homeless guy. But you’re violating the same right, so these acts are equally bad.
This is relevant to a common argument among my correspondents: wiping out an entire people kills the entire Jewish civilization, and that’s a particular harm which wipes out the entire achievement of a culture, akin to the extinction of the dodo bird. I agree with everyone who’s written or posted on how cultures are valuable, how getting rid of a culture removes something irreplaceable from the world, etc.
My only difference with these guys is that I don’t think the contribution of a person, or culture, to the world, affects the moral calculus: to me, it sounds just like the productive and beloved guy vs. the unloved homeless guy. Emotionally worse, culturally worse, makes more people sadder, but doesn’t make it more evil. (Hat tip: reader “Could Be Raining,” Teleologic Blog, reader Damon Katz, Kesher Talk, my friend David Bitkower, reader Shelby Clark, Strange Women Lying in Ponds, and The Truth Laid Bear. Incidentally, Damon Katz thinks my perspective “devalues the notion of civilization itself.”)
(A brief note: Also, obviously, because of the individualist focus, the Jewishness of the victims doesn’t do anything for us here. Contra, reader Justin Sobaje points to Deut. 7:6-8, Exod. 19:5-6, Isa. 49:22-23, Zech. 8:23, for those of you who may be swayed by that evidence.)
Now, what this doesn’t mean. Saying “violations of the same right are equally bad” doesn’t mean I consider accidental deaths to be the same as murder (because each leads to a death). I think you need intent to transform a killing into a Violation of the Right to Life, so pure accidents don’t violate the right, intentional murders do, and intermediate degrees of intent (negligence, recklessness, e.g. drunk driving) are tougher cases. (Hat tip: reader Moshe Krakowski.)
Nor does it mean I consider intentional killings in self-defense (including defensive warfare) to be the same as murder; to qualify for the “violations of the same right are equally bad” rule, the violation has to in addition be unjustified. The moral calculus, in this consequentialist framework, allows you to violate certain rights in order to protect others, so some rights violations are justified, therefore not bad at all.
So: once you have an intentional, unjustified killing, additional elements of motivation (or lack of motivation, see Jumping to Conclusions and David below) don’t do anything extra for you directly in terms of immorality. (Tim Burke says the moral continuum should involve motives, means, and consequences. By its very name, my consequential perspective only looks at consequences; and because it’s rights-based, the consequences I look at are consequences with respect to individual rights.)
This doesn’t mean that these additional motivations aren’t important. As I mentioned before, they may make a big difference emotionally, culturally, and so on.
Moreover, you measure the morality of acts not just by their direct effect (i.e., killing a number of people) but also by all their foreseeable indirect effects. I stressed that this is a consequentialist rights-based philosophy, so all consequences count.
So, totally random killings may have relatively few indirect effects. Killing soldiers or civilians in “regular” warfare has been around for a long time; but killing people in a new and unheard-of way might give more people ideas for the future. Race-motivated killings may encourage (i.e., raise the probability of) future killings, which means the total effect of a genocide is greater than the people directly killed in the event. Politically motivated killings squelch political debate, furthers other aspects of the killers’ illiberal agenda, and makes society less free in many other ways, which also increases the immorality of the event. Systematic killings may inspire more fear (hat tip: reader Anand Manikutty of The OracleBlogs). Reader Mark Wells points out that the Holocaust “required the corruption of an entire society” and that the Nazis “made millions of their own people into murderers,” which are also moral minuses.
But I take all the above to say: Look at all the indirect effects on individual rights, tally up the bottom-line rights violation; then, violations of the same rights are equally bad. All the
se factors, which have no independent effect under my theory, still come in with their indirect effects, since they affect what rights get violated in the end. Then, as I argued above, once you consider all the indirect effects on individual rights, there’s no room in this moral framework for non-consequentialist considerations like whether you were planning on killing more people than you did, whether you planned on wiping out an entire race, or whether you intentionally killed because of sex or money or racial hatred or for no reason at all. (And that, I think, is at the core of the uniqueness/non-uniqueness debate.)
Here comes another really controversial point. Clearly, if you’re saying that the Holocaust is “like” Stalin, or that Jewish Holocaust victims are “like” the politically persecuted, or that Holocaust victims are “like” the Allied war dead, there’s the counter-argument that it’s worse to be killed when you couldn’t avoid it (like being ethnically Jewish) than when you could (take off your glasses in Cambodia, don’t talk politics in the USSR, don’t enlist in the army). (Hat tip: reader Brian Harmon, my friend Eric Soskin, reader Michael Crane.)
I agree that there’s something different between saying “You’re dead because you are X” and “You’re dead because you’re doing X” (when you can choose to stop doing X). (Of course, provided you have the right to do X — say, political speech — it’s evil either way, but we’re talking about degrees here.) Here’s how I’d conceptualize it: The first case is a violation of the right to life; the second case is a violation of the liberty right to do X (even if you get killed in the end because you do X). Which of these rights is more important? A priori, I don’t like to say. I definitely don’t believe that life trumps everything else; many people would gladly die rather than do certain things.
So (here’s the controversial part): let’s let the victims speak for themselves. If you’re willing to die rather than shut up, then clearly you value your liberty right to criticize the regime at least as much as your life. (Those who aren’t killed, on the other hand, valued their life more, again by revealed preference.) So I’m inclined to give political victims — those who were actually killed — the same status as racial victims.
[UPDATE: A better way of putting this is that unconditional murders violate your right to life, while, say, political persecution gives you a choice between the right to life and the liberty right to speak out. They end up violating your right to life, because (by revealed preference) you consider your liberty right to speak out to be more valuable than your life right. (A less subjectivist view would say something like: you had a choice, and the liberty right violation is lesser, so we should judge the persecution on those grounds. That’s the perspective I’m rejecting.) Hat tip to Matt Rustler of Stop the Bleating! and reader Eric Rosenberg for pushing me to rephrase this paragraph.]
Of course, the Nazis are indeed a special case for moral philosophy because they’re so easy: everything they stood for was wrong, and so pretty much everything they did in pursuit of their goals was also wrong. Once you have good guys (i.e., the Allies), then it gets more complicated: they have the right to fight back against the Nazis, and of course you can’t run a war, even a just one, without killing some innocents. The moral requirement is to maximize “net morality”: take the moral benefit from defeating the Nazis, subtract the moral cost of killing innocents along the way, choose your war plans to maximize that difference. So some victims of the Allies were “justified”; others weren’t (for instance, if their deaths were avoidable and didn’t further war aims — some people may put Dresden or Nagasaki into this category, but I won’t get into an argument over that). So clearly I’m not saying that every dead German soldier or civilian is a moral tragedy on an equal basis with the Holocaust.
This is too long already, so I’ll leave all remaining posts for later, perhaps. I’ll conclude by recapping a bit from the top: The Holocaust is one of the most evil events in all of human history because huge numbers of people were murdered. It even merits a lot of special study and remembrance for all the reasons everyone has said. And, under the broad reading of “Holocaust denial” that includes “Holocaust minimization,” I’m a Holocaust denier because I don’t think plans for racial extermination change the already damning moral calculus? Puh-leeze.
P.S. Check out a post by a certain “Mike” in the comments section of both Solomonia and Strange Women Lying in Ponds (same comment) for someone who really doesn’t like me.
On an unrelated note, my friend David Bitkower notes that, while I wrote in a previous post that American criminal law only makes motive count in limited ways, international criminal law does treat genocide specially (ICC, ICTR, ICTY), at least on paper. Of course, neither American criminal law nor international criminal law is particularly authoritative as to the moral question of what should be; I just noted American criminal law because so many people wrote me asking, “Then why do we have different degrees of murder?” (these degrees are mostly based on degree of intent) and “Why does motive count for sentencing?” (lots of stuff counts for sentencing that’s separate from the moral status of the crime).
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