05-13-2011, 07:17 PM
Chakravartin wrote:
So, you kill 30,000 people and then you ask for clemency because "the system" made you do it.
. . .
But you'd forgive him because he wasn't responsible for his actions?
. . .
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse for genocide.
I've clearly struck a nerve. I didn't advocate clemency, nor that we excuse his actions. I never said he didn't belong in prison, or should be forgiven. I don't know if his acts are forgivable.
As you noted, i wrote:
rjmacs wrote: I also don't think there's anything morally ambiguous about genocide or mass slaughter.
I'm not sure i can be clearer about that. What i think is that when we focus the entire moral evaluation on the individual, we lose sight of the part of this evil that was collective. And collective evil, systemic evil, is more than just a group of morally deficient people. It's an entire set of practices that actually transform morally capable people into morally neutered people. Totalitarianism does more than just crush its enemies; it actually creates a universe in which people are changed from reflective, deliberative beings into well-trained, bureaucratized, obedient automatons. Hanna Arendt's work on this subject is particularly enlightening, as is her description of Adolph Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem.
There's more to the story of Nazism and the Holocaust than good guys who resisted, and bad guys who just followed orders. It doesn't make the enterprise any less evil. It makes it more evil, in fact, and more insidious and terrifying - because it suggests that it could happen to any of us. That we - good, moral, conscience-driven people - could become butchers, if we don't maintain a society in which morality is plural, contested, debated, and lively.