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Adolf Eichmann
The subject of war crimes has been on my mind lately.
The concept of “war crimes” seems to me to have a false dignity.
For one thing, because war crimes prosecutions are typically visited only on the losing party of a war — making them more like a theatrical extension of the triumph of the winners (like a victory dance or a taking of scalps) than an impartial judicial proceeding.
And secondly because so little of the deliberate and premeditated cruelty and evil of war falls under its statutes.
If you drop a bomb from an airplane that burns a young boy, rips his arms off and leaves him bleeding and screaming in the rubble, you’re infinitely more likely to be awarded a medal than to be indicted for your actions.
If you were to surgically remove his arms one-by-one in order to coerce his father into revealing state secrets, but you lose the war anyway, you might very well be brought up on charges.
The boy is no better off in either case, and the intentions of the perpetrator are not as different as they may appear.
We’re constantly being told that civilian casualties are an unavoidable consequence of aerial bombardment — usually by people who think that this constitutes a good reason not to raise a fuss when it happens — but to me this is evidence of premeditation and intent.
If you know that aerial bombardment is going to result in civilian casualties and you do it anyway, then you have intended to kill civilians.
You may believe that the cost in innocent lives was worth the results of this approach, but just to automatically declare this as if no evidence or argument were necessary doesn’t represent a defense.
I’ve heard the following sort of statement many times: “Of course we did not deliberately target civilians when we bombed the city.
Civilian casualties are inevitable in any campaign of this sort.”
The two phrases are in logical contradiction.
On the U.S. bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan in an attack that, if successful, could not have had any result that did not include thousands and thousands of civilian casualties.
Everyone who took part in that mission who cared to consider its results knew that they were going to be burning children alive, for instance.
Utilitarian debates continue over whether burning children alive is ever an appropriate thing to do, and if so under what circumstances, and whether the circumstances faced by the people who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima were among these.
Along with these debates is a good deal of convenient forgetting and denial of reality.
the Enola Gay is being exhibited by the Smithsonian:
[A] group of scholars, writers, activists and others have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay as “the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time” without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.…
The Enola Gay is exhibited at the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport in Virginia, with other vintage warplanes.
Its explanatory placard is two paragraphs long and includes the restored airplane’s dimensions and the information that, while it was originally built to be used in the European fighting theater, it found “its niche on the other side of the globe.”
Update: A press release from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum denies that the Enola Gay exhibit doesn’t mention the Hiroshima bombing.
The complete text of the exhibit display is included in the press release and explicitly mentions the Enola Gay’s role in both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
I don’t know whether to consider it a good sign or a bad sign that America is blocking out its memory in this way.
Is it bad, because in continuing to deny these awful facts it may behave as though they never happened — or is it good, because in trying to hide from this it exposes that there is still a conscience that can be upset?
(The denial of reality started early: President Truman, , called the city of Hiroshima “a military base” that was chosen “because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”)
Several weeks after Hiroshima was bombed, the Nuremberg war crimes trials began.
I’ve spent some time in recent days reviewing some of the history and the transcripts from these trials, and also that of Adolf Eichmann which happened many years later in Israel.
Eichmann, who as the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo was instrumental in implementing its mass-extermination policy, did not in retrospect think of himself as a war criminal, a murderer, or even particularly hostile to Jewish people.
He was merely carrying out policies which represented the enthusiasms of people higher than him in the chain of command, over whom he had little influence.
In a closing statement in his defense, he said: “My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values.
From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle.”
To me, this is a good summing up of our problem.
I’m tempted to make more of it than I should.
But after all, here’s Eichmann, head of operations for the Final Solution, on trial in Israel.
He’s been confronted with so much evidence and testimony that there aren’t enough lampposts to hang him on as many times as he clearly deserves, and he’s asked: “what’s your side of the story?”
It’s no surprise that his defense is pathetic.
On the other hand, I get this weird, perverse wish reading his testimony that he’d put forth something more vigorous.
He’s played a crucial role in the cold-blooded murder of millions of people — how could you do that without a passionate need, an urgent mission that you could now try to convey?
Instead, his testimony is day after day of “I was just passing on the policies of my superiors” and “the responsibility for what happened to the Jews once they got to the camps was in somebody else’s department” and “I can’t be blamed for that — the choice was never mine to make” and so forth.
You get the impression of someone who never really wanted to butcher millions of Jews, but just happened to have been transferred into a department where such work was, he would say, an unavoidable part of the job.
Why would a guy like me have wanted to commit such a ghastly crime?
No, that was someone else’s idea.
To some extent, this defense is just plain unbelievable.
There’s plenty of evidence that Eichmann not only knew what he was doing, but approved of it, and applied his expertise enthusiastically to making the butchery more efficient.
But the very fact that he clings so completely and pathetically to these excuses as the trial goes on is enough to make me believe that at some level he’s telling the truth about his motives or absence of motives.
He was willing to commit these acts of evil not because he thought they weren’t evil, and not because he was intentionally being evil, but because the protocol of his position did not allow for a consultation of his conscience to be part of his decision-making process and that was good enough for him.
After my first young suspicions about the evil of psychotic human hives were awakened by the book Alan and Naomi, as I related in ’s entry, my initial reaction was not surprisingly unsophisticated.
I remember as a young child having trouble sleeping for weeks after reading in the newspaper about local squirrels that had been found to be infected with the plague or rabies or something.
I’d seen squirrels, even fed them, patiently waiting for them to come take nuts out of my hands, and it terrified me that their seeming harmlessness had hidden a potentially fatal danger (that my parents had failed to protect me from and that I had only learned about in the paper).
Being wee, I became frightened of malicious squirrels hiding under the bed or coming through the windows at night to attack me.
My fear of the Nazis was at first of a similar irrational bent — but more easily countered.
The Nazis were on a scale between squirrels (which certainly existed, but which I was assured weren’t generally menacing) and wicked witches (which were undeniably malevolent, particularly toward children, but which didn’t actually exist) — the Nazis were real and evil, but no longer existed, and so I didn’t have to fear them.
And so I came to see the problem at first as something that was confined to the (to me) distant past, and that was essentially a battle between a group of evil people and a group of good people, and the good ones won, end of story.
One of my earliest attempts at creative writing was called “The Japs!
They’ve Found Us!” and is part love-story, part action-adventure and centers around a tunnel escape from a Japanese P.O.W. camp.
It was based almost entirely on the understanding of World War Two I had gleaned from my collection of Sgt. Rock comic books (which, comics though they were, did occasionally confront some ambiguities, ironies and tragedies of war that helped to break down my early naïveté, that is when they weren’t occasionally introducing super-robots or caped heroes in tights onto the battlefields of World War Two).
As I grew older, I came to understand that the evil I feared wasn’t an aggressive race of inhuman slant-eyes (nice to get our crudest bigotries out of the way early), or a strangely-mustached set of men in funny pants and jackboots from a country that existed in black-and-white.
It started to dawn on me that the evil was still around, and that if it came to where I lived, there’s a good chance it would come speaking my language, handing out gold stars to good boys, and looking far more respectable and civilized than its victims.
And I came to understand that I needed to learn how not to be one of the victimizers as much as I needed to learn how to keep from being one of the victims.
And literature helped nudge me along there, too, with books like The Chocolate War and Lord of the Flies feeding my thought experiments on human nature.
Recent history had given liberal adults a wariness and a respect for civil disobedience as well, and this had trickled down to me.
The civil rights movement was largely responsible for this, although Deep Throat’s Watergate leaks and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers were also examples of individuals defying authority for (what my parents and many teachers certainly believed to be) good reasons.
When I was born, a delusional and aggressive lunatic was in the White House, the country was at war, and the state security apparatus was out-of-control and was being used to silence and intimidate critics of the country’s war policy.
An unconventionally conservative adventure movie actor was California’s governor.
People wrote op-ed pieces about America’s imperial ambitions — although in those days they usually meant this rhetorically, and they considered it a bad thing.
Eichmann, as I discussed , went on trial in Jerusalem for Nazi crimes against humanity in after having been apprehended from his refuge in South America.
Eichmann was one of the Reich’s experts on the “Jewish problem” and on the practicalities of implementing its solution.
If you needed to get a bunch of Jews concentrated into a ghetto, Eichmann could help.
If you then needed to get those Jews into freight cars and transported to Auschwitz and sorted out properly, he’d make sure you got the right number of cars and the tracks were clear.
He’s a monster of history, and after his capture and during his testimony he’s all the more infuriating because he’s so relentlessly oblivious.
He doesn’t seem to have any grasp, except when he occasionally resorts to cliché, of the scale, or even of the sort of activity he was engaged in.
He uses the “I was only following orders” excuse, but not in the form in which it might have made sense (if I didn’t follow orders, I’d be shot) but in a shameless exhibition of moral surrender (I followed orders because I felt that completely replacing my conscience with the Führer’s will was the best and safest thing I could do under the circumstances).
Arendt’s subtitle is “a report on the banality of evil” (by which she means this grotesque obliviousness — Eichmann didn’t seem to even care about the evil he was doing; if Hitler’s Final Solution had been to cover Poland with racquetball courts, he would have just as cheerfully taken part) — but it reads more like “Hannah Arendt, concurring in part and dissenting in part in The People of Israel v. Eichmann.”
Not that the language is formal and tedious legalese — far from it — but that the tone resembles a legal opinion.
She’s reporting on the trial, she insists, and so she’s interested in judging the case (and the judgment) against Eichmann, which she finds legally and logically flawed (the prosecutor comes off as a grandiose buffoon, the defense lawyer inept, the applied standards of justice incoherent, the judges honorable but prevented by pressure from outside the courtroom from making a clean and worthy decision).
But although in the epilogue she retreats from some criticism (before her book was published, it had appeared in The New Yorker, and even before that people were criticizing what she was rumored to have written) by saying that she meant only to comment on the trial itself and the evidence raised in the trial without addressing larger issues the trial might have suggested, this is disingenuous.
Some of her conclusions are controversial and challenging and more far-reaching.
In the course of reviewing the evidence and the greater historical record it corresponds to, she explains the bureaucratic apparatus that accompanied the Final Solution — the overlapping and competing bureaucracies as it turns out — and how they accomplished their duties in different parts of Nazi-occupied and -allied Europe as the war ran its course and as Nazi policy about the “Jewish problem” changed.
One of the things she finds is that by and large, the Nazis expected more opposition to their plans than they encountered in the countries they occupied.
They instead often found a country eager or at least willing to turn over its Jews and a Jewish leadership eager to accept ultimately empty promises and flimsy concessions in return for their cooperation.
Furthermore, where popular resistance was encountered it often was at least somewhat successful in discouraging the Nazis from carrying out mass exterminations.
A case in point was Denmark, of which Arendt says:
One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.
It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had.
(“Students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action” can indeed learn from the story of occupied Denmark, as told in Gene Sharp’s books on nonviolent action and elsewhere.)
Arendt quotes a German Army physician who had witnessed some atrocities and who, after the war, tried to explain why it had been so difficult for him to oppose what he saw:
“Anyone who had seriously protested or done anything against the killing unit would have been arrested within twenty-four hours and would have disappeared.
It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don’t permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.
A good many of us might have accepted such a death.
The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity.
It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain.
This is not to say that such a sacrifice would have been morally meaningless.
It would only have been practically useless.
None of us had a conviction so deeply rooted that we could have taken upon ourselves a practically useless sacrifice for the sake of a higher moral meaning.”
Needless to add [Arendt adds], the writer remains unaware of the emptiness of his much emphasized “decency” in the absence of what he calls a “higher moral meaning.”
As Arendt points out, such protests were not necessarily “practically useless” at all:
[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere.
Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
If I wait to finish it before writing a review, I’ll pen one of those unreadable monster blockquote-dumps that goes on forever.
So I’ll try something different: I’ll break up my reading and write up my thoughts along the way.
Vetlesen is trying to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and “the banality of evil,” and the Milgram experiment.
He compares the conclusions of various thinkers in these disciplines, and examines their predictions in light of subsequent examples of collective evil, for instance the massacres in the former Yugoslavia.
He starts by offering a “commonsensical and minimalist” definition of evil: to “intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another human being, against her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm to her.”
This makes me defensive, partially because it seems too simple, and partially, I think, because it reminds me of the definitions of torture that the fine legal minds in the White House had so much fun drilling loopholes through.
But at least so far, Vetlesen’s definition plays very little role in his book, so I’ll leave it at that.
There is a school of thought in reaction to the Holocaust that sees its perpetrators — the people who actually did the day-to-day mechanics of murdering millions of people, not the ideologues in the newsreels — as having been swept along against their own inclinations by an overwhelming force that only extraordinary personalities were able to resist.
Arendt showed Eichmann to be not a conventionally wicked sadist delighting in evil, but a thoughtless careerist oblivious to the results of his actions.
Milgram showed that ordinary people would do awful things to innocent strangers if someone in a position of authority gave the word.
While reading Evil and Human Agency on public transit I have — twice now! — been interrupted by the person in the seat next to me who, reading over my shoulder, could not help but discuss it with me.
This is pretty remarkable, since for one thing it violates social taboos about talking to strangers on public transit and about interrupting people who are reading, and for another, I didn’t have any idea this was a topic that many people care about.
Anyway, one of these people had absorbed the school of thought I described above, and repeated it back to me in a way that really demonstrated how defeatist and excusing it can be if it is absorbed uncritically and superficially: looking at the perpetrators of the Holocaust and shrugging, saying “it could happen to anyone, human nature being what it is; they didn’t know any better, with the morality of their society gone all topsy-turvy like that.”
Arendt tried to head off this sort of sloppy thinking, insisting (and showing) that those who participated in administrative massacre had real choices, made them, and bear real guilt for the choices they made.
She also insists (and shows) that other choices were possible, and that other people could have (and did) evaluate their situations and make conscientious choices, even in the topsy-turvy morality of Nazi Germany.
But Vetlesen, though respectful of Arendt’s contributions to the study of collective and individual evil, thinks that her portrait of Eichmann is partially “naïve: in suggesting that he was ‘merely thoughtless’, she in fact adopts the very self-presentation he cultivated.… [T]his is a blindness in Arendt caused by her privileging the role of intellectual capacities over — morally crucial — emotional ones.”
Vetlesen is referring not only to Eichmann in Jerusalem but also to other writings of Arendt in which she puts thinking at the center of morality (see The Picket Line, ).
Indeed, in her view, conscience is a by-product of thinking, where “thinking” is an honest and curious inner dialog of the sort that would make Socrates proud.
Vetlesen doesn’t buy it.
Conscience and moral perception, he believes, has much more to do with empathy, and Eichmann’s problem was not that he was “thoughtless” but that he “was insensitive.”
Vetlesen also critically examines Milgram’s interpretation of his famous experiment.
Milgram believed that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role and something called the “agentic state, the state in which the agent finds himself once responsibility has been shifted away by his consent to the superior’s right to command” which leads one “to restrict one’s sense of responsibility to the purely technical aspects of one’s action” as opposed to their effects or ends.
The first objection to this “agentic state” is that it is illusory, and the way it is described often seems to grant it an undeserved reality.
When you enter the agentic state, you don’t really shift away your responsibility, you only agree to conspire with the authority figure to act as if you have done so.
This doesn’t excuse anything, and Vetlesen suggests that this conspiracy of dishonesty not only helps people to commit evil but is itself a sort of evil:
Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.
He summarizes Arendt’s own view: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”
If people are selfishly tempted to enter the “agentic state”, then their evil actions when in such a state are the sort of garden variety “sins” that come from being willing to harm other people in pursuit of selfish aims.
This in contrast to the usual interpretation of Milgram’s experiment: that people are willing to act against their own inclinations and interests to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, in certain contexts of authoritarian role-play.
Vetlesen extends this objection by considering what Milgram never allows himself to consider: that his subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses — that in subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being allowed by their situation to do things they were ordinarily inhibited from doing.
He quotes Ernest Becker, who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:
…[M]an brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures.
He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper.
He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt.
He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression.
He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: “You die, not me.”
The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings.
And this is where I’ve stopped for , not quite at the half-way mark.
Several years after composing this entry, I read H.L. Mencken’s Damn: A book of Calumny and found that he had anticipated this attack on Milgram before Milgram was around to attack:
The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely.
In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon.
He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.
…
In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members — in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious — perhaps 95 per cent.
All studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness.
They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels.
This is nonsense.
The lower orders of men are incurable rascals, either individually or collectively.
Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage — these virtues belong only to a small minority of men.
This minority never runs amuck.
Its most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all running amuck.
The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions.
A whoop strips off his disguise.
I’ve finished only one more chapter.
When Vetlesen reviewed Hannah Arendt’s philosophical wrestling with evil, and Stanley Milgram’s sociological experiments, I was on at least somewhat familiar territory, as I’ve read some of this directly and have also read other authors who have wrestled with the ideas these two raised.
But in this latest chapter, Vetlesen describes some of the approaches to evil in psychology — is evil a part of human nature, or do people become evil (and if so, how)?
Do people have a drive to do evil, or are their evil deeds secondary to some other motive?
What about people who do not do evil: how did they develop that way, or how did they come to channel their drives differently?
And here, I’m out of my depth.
I’m completely unfamiliar with most of the thinkers Vetlesen cites, and his summaries are too dense and require too much familiarity with the discipline for me to make much sense out of.
To me, many of the psychological theories he discusses strike me as just-so stories that either seem intuitive to you or don’t, but that don’t seem to have much else to go on.
There’s lots of talk of existential despair, self and other, inner and outer, object and symbol, and things like “the autistic-contiguous position” and “projective identification.”
I can’t tell for sure whether I’m just being baffled by the jargon of a technical discipline that’s not my own, or whether I’m being snowed by the hair-splitting dogma of a pseudoscience.
My rational mind rebels at reading about theories of developmental psychology that are long on new terminology and short on experimental data; or at discussions of motivations for evil that don’t acknowledge that the evolutionary psychology outlook even exists (or has produced a great deal of insight into this area: see Homicide for instance).
Vetlesen entertains several ideas about the psychology of evil, and also the idea that culture is (when it is working properly) a way to take the individual drives that lead to evil deeds and channel them instead into a symbolic realm where they don’t do any real damage. “Avoiding evil [says C. Fred Alford] ‘depends on the ability to symbolize dread’ ” — and this ability in turn relies on the cultural inventory of symbols and stories and such.
He also explores the idea that evil is rooted in envy, particularly envy of what is good in other people, and the resulting desire to destroy or defile that which is good.
This makes evil more destructive than it would be if it were simply motivated by greed, for a greedy person would want to preserve the good thing (but keep it for himself), whereas an envious person is destructive of goodness itself.
One of the questions Alford put to those he interviewed was: Was Eichmann evil?
Much to Alford’s surprise, …nearly everybody asked to reflect on the question identified with Eichmann. … Likewise, there was a deep reluctance to make — or accept — any attempt to judge Eichmann’s actions from a moral point of view.
In both groups [prisoners convicted of violent crimes and normals], the replies would take the following form: “Before we eventually judge Eichmann, we must bear in mind that he was acting within a hierarchical organization, receiving orders from his superiors; and surely he would have been killed if he had refused to do these things that others now call bad” (let me add: in fact, he would not).
And then, to offer a final thought — actually, an angry counter-question — “Who among us can really be sure what we would have done in his place?”
Vetlesen wonders how people would look at the story of Eichmann and the millions of innocent people he helped to exterminate and identify with Eichmann.
First, he asks if maybe it is “a kind of moral modesty” — hard to judge another unless you’ve walked in his shoes, that sort of thing.
Then he gets what I think is probably the right answer, which is that the question itself invites you to examine Eichmann and sympathize with him (if only hypothetically) while leaving his victims unimagined.
But Vetlesen reads more into this, and thinks that perhaps people have a motive to identify with the perpetrators and not the victims because they in a larger sense prefer to identify with perpetrators rather than victims.
In other words, it’s all well and good to say that you prefer to be neither victim nor executioner, but if you come to a fork in the road and only have the two choices, if you’re like most folks, you’ll take the executioner turnoff.
I wonder if maybe something else is at work.
I recently read a paper by Paul Slovic — “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide — in which he shows (using scientific studies, numbers, evidence, the sort of psychological studies I feel I can bite into) that people seem to have a decreasing sympathy for victims the more of them there are.
As Stalin’s apocryphal quote goes: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
For example:
Fetherstonhaugh, Slovic, Johnson, and Friedrich () documented this potential for diminished sensitivity to the value of life — i.e., “psychophysical numbing” — by evaluating people’s willingness to fund various lifesaving medical treatments.
In a study involving a hypothetical grant funding agency, respondents were asked to indicate the number of lives a medical research institute would have to save to merit receipt of a $10 million grant.
Nearly two-thirds of the respondents raised their minimum benefit requirements to warrant funding when there was a larger at-risk population, with a median value of 9,000 lives needing to be saved when 15,000 were at risk, compared to a median of 100,000 lives needing to be saved out of 290,000 at risk.
By implication, respondents saw saving 9,000 lives in the “smaller” population as more valuable than saving ten times as many lives in the largest.
Here’s another:
Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic () gave people leaving a psychological experiment the opportunity to contribute up to $5 of their earnings to Save the Children.
The study consisted of three separate conditions: (1) identifiable victim, (2) statistical victims, and (3) identifiable victim with statistical information.… Participants in each condition were told that “any money donated will go toward relieving the severe food crisis in Southern Africa and Ethiopia.” The donations in fact went to Save the Children, but they were earmarked specifically for Rokia [the identifiable victim] in Conditions 1 and 3 and not specifically earmarked in Condition 2.
The average donations are presented in Figure 8.
Donations in response to the identified individual, Rokia, were far greater than donations in response to the statistical portrayal of the food crisis.
Most important, however, and most discouraging, was the fact that coupling the statistical realities with Rokia’s story significantly reduced the contributions to Rokia.
Alternatively, one could say that using Rokia’s story to “put a face behind the statistical problem” did not do much to increase donations (the difference between the mean donations of $1.43 and $1.14 was not statistically reliable).
Another study found that people were more likely to contribute toward a set amount of money that would be used for costly, life-saving medical treatment needed by a single child than they were to contribute toward the same amount of money needed for the same treatment of eight children.
Slovik’s conclusion:
“[W]e cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide.
That places the burden of response squarely upon the shoulders of moral argument and international law.”
I don’t have much faith in international law, but I’m convinced by his arguments that empathy and moral feelings are inadequate guides to use when trying to decide on an appropriate attitude toward large-scale massacre or tragedy.
Virtue is found in the exercise of means (wishing for the correct
ends is presumably more a matter of wisdom than virtue). The
exercise of means (or the decision not to) is a matter of deliberation and
choice, and so is in our power, and therefore so is our virtue.
You are responsible for being reasonably informed about what you need to know
to make the right decisions in the circumstances you encounter, and if you
ignore this responsibility (or if you actively contribute to your own
ignorance, for instance by being drunk or by looking away from some
inconvenient truth), you cannot use your ignorance as an excuse for vicious
actions.
Since virtue is a habit (as is vice), it may be a choice to initially
acquire a vice or to neglect a virtue, but once you have
done this habitually, it becomes less voluntary over time. This is
interesting for a couple of reasons: first, if virtues and vices become less
voluntary as they become more habitual, it would seem that they become less
praiseworthy or blameworthy also; second, it seems to create another
obstacle in the path to becoming a virtuous person if you aren’t
one already — how do you go about changing bad habits if they aren’t even
very voluntary any longer? (Aristotle does not yet address either of these
points, but I hope he does eventually.)
In some recorded lectures about the
Nicomachean Ethics that I was listening to during a recent leisurely
train ride down California,
Joseph Koturksi emphasized that Aristotle defined moral virtue in particular as a habit of choosing the golden mean — that is to say that it differs from other varieties of habit in not constricting choice but in exhibiting itself as choosing.
It seems from this that the lack of moral virtue can take two forms, or a
combination of the two: not choosing, or choosing poorly.
(I suppose a third variety would be a failure to make correct choosing
habitual, but my reading of Aristotle suggests that this habituation
is an automatic process, and so its absence would be more suggestive of, say,
brain damage, than of anything correctable by philosophy.)
Anyway: “habit” in the case of moral virtue isn’t meant as a sort of
unthinking, repetitive, by-rote sort of behavior. Point made.
Next, Aristotle addresses the argument that while everybody aims for the
apparent good, what appears to be good to each of us is not under
our control but is just a given part of our temperament or constitution or
some such. Aristotle says that if this is true, then you aren’t really to be
blamed for deeds you perform under the misapprehension that you’re doing the
right thing. However, he says that to some extent, you are responsible for
your own temperament and constitution, and to that extent you can inherit
responsibility for the misdeeds you perform under its influence.
But in any case, if our virtues are voluntary and we can be praised for them,
our vices are too, and we can be blamed for them.
From here, for most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re going to go
into an in-depth look at particular virtues. The rest of this book will look
at courage and temperance. Book four will concern liberality, magnificence,
pride, industriousness, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, bonhomie,
and the quasi-virtue of shame. Book five is all about justice. Book six
concerns the intellectual virtues. Book seven concerns continence and also
contains a discussion of pleasure that will be continued in book ten.
Several days ago my sweetie and I were relaxing at home with a
DVD from the library: the movie
Secretary.
It’s a silly story about a mousy young woman (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal,
who also, coincidentally, played the vivacious tax resister in
Stranger than
Fiction) who becomes the secretary of an eccentric lawyer and who
finds her job transforming into an erotic dominance/submission scene in which
she learns to play the submissive and ends up personally flowering and
maturing in the course of doing so.
It’s not a very deep film, but some of her character’s comments about the
pleasures of submission — unthinking obedience to the commands of a trusted
dominant — and the sort of confidence and, oddly, “freedom” that results from
this, lodged in my head and got me thinking about this and that.
Much of this “freedom” is freedom from having to make up your own mind and
make your own decisions and assert your own risky initiative. What am I
going to do? Whatever the dominant wants me to do or tells me to do. If
that’s always the right answer, it makes deciding a snap and much
less of a burden, and permits you (or seems to permit you) to shift most of
the burden of the responsibility for the consequences onto the dominant
“decider.”
In a bedroom scene, that’s all fun and games, but when such things come out
of the bedroom and into society at large, this sort of evasion of
responsibility can be very dangerous. Hannah Arendt spent some time analyzing
Adolf Eichmann as someone who had decided to renounce his will and devote
himself to carrying out his Fuhrer’s will; once he was caught and put on
trial for this, he pathetically tried to excuse his behavior by saying that
having made himself an agent of the Fuhrer’s whims, he was no longer
able to behave according to his remaining ethical instincts.
I quoted Arne Johan Vetlesen’s summary of Arendt’s
argument: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the
promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free
of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”
Vetlesen says that indulging this temptation not only dangerously enables you
to commit evil, but is a sort of evil itself:
Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of
one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the
dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an
instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.
The military chain of command is another dangerous variety of
D&S
game in which essentially unquestioning obedience is expected. I suspect that
a craving for submission and for freedom from the burden of decision-making
and its consequences is a strong motivation for many people who join the
military. This burden can feel especially heavy to young people just
emerging from home and from institutional education into the freedom of
adulthood and all of the responsibility it entails.
In a Christian context, this is explicit: the Christian accepts Christ as his
or her Lord and Master, and says Thy Will Be Done, I will deny myself and take
up my cross daily, and so forth. Kant, for his part, thought that an act was
really virtuous only if it was unpleasant, painful, or difficult — whip me! beat me! make me virtuous!
How do you identify and correct for a decadent parody of virtue that really
amounts to a responsibility-denying
D&S
scene? That is, how do you know whether you’re being virtuous or whether
you’re submitting to a freedom-restricting straitjacket in the name of virtue?
How do you avoid getting in a situation where you do the wrong thing, but
“can’t help it” because you’ve obligated yourself to submit to Christ’s
teachings, or to think of the greatest good for the greatest number, or to
maintain Army discipline, or to obey the categorical imperative, or whatever
your dom happens to be?
And how would you defend against the argument that Aristotle’s model of virtue
is essentially a
D&S
scene in which a mental model of virtue is the
dom?
One possible line of defense would be to note that, in Aristotle’s scheme
(unlike Kant’s, for instance), virtuous acts are not necessarily painful or
difficult or against your inclinations — indeed, often quite the opposite:
virtue is a variety of excellence and an important path toward
eudaimonia — flourishing, thriving, happiness.
So at least this isn’t an
S&M thing,
where you martyr yourself and then take pleasure in your suffering. Also, as
Joseph Koturski pointed out, moral virtue
is the habit of choosing well, so it doesn’t unburden you of the
need to choose at all. To the extent that a
D&S
scene is partially about freedom-from-choice, an internal, non-dogmatic
dom doesn’t do the trick
(whereas a Categorical Imperative or a scriptural Jesus might do).
A few months after writing this entry, I picked up A Testament to Freedom, a collection of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In one of his early works on Christian Ethics, he wrote:
For Christians there are no ethical principles by means of which they could
perhaps civilize themselves. Nor can yesterday ever be decisive for my moral
action today. Rather must a direct relationship to God’s will be ever sought
afresh. I do not do something again today because it seemed to me to be good
yesterday, but because the will of God points out this way to me today. This
is the great moral renewal through Jesus, the renunciation of principles, of
rulings, in the words of the Bible, of the law, and this follows as a
consequence of the Christian idea of God; for if there was a generally valid
moral law, then there would be a way from the human to God — I would have my
principles, so I would believe myself assured sub specie
aeternitatis. So, to some extent, I would have control over my
relationship to God, so there would be a moral action without immediate
relationship to God. And, most important of all, in that case I would once
again become a slave to my principles. I would sacrifice our most precious
gift, freedom.
(Those of you reading this in a feed aggregator will probably want to follow
the link to read the post at my blog
where the formatting will make a lot more sense.)
You can find the rest of this series at the following links:
This is a sign and a warning. Don’t be sorry for the victims, but be thankful for the mercy shown to the survivors who now have a lesson in God’s promised end to worldly treasures.
Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, is nature’s plot against every living being — in many cases after tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of purposely inflict on their fellow living creatures.
Imagine that you are rebuilding the world with the object of making people happy — of giving them peace and rest at last — but to do this you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one small child, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears. Would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Will you believe that the people for whom you do this would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, remain forever happy?
Philosophy is out of its depth here. You don’t respond to Auschwitz by trying to make sense of it, but by acknowledging and trying to cope with the senselessness of it.
We must rationally grapple with this. It was refusal to think actively that enabled so many people to bring this evil about. We have to analyze, and judge, and condemn, and not just stare slack-jawed at this as though it were a natural disaster or an inevitable growing pain of historical progress.
In the history of the world, we see before us the concrete image of evil in its most fully developed form. If we consider the mass of individual happenings, history appears as an altar on which individuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed. But out of death new life arises, purified and rejuvenated.
Who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of thesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor?
This is a sign and a warning. Germany was the innovator in the creation of the concentration camp world, but she is not so different from the states that will follow her.
For example, the Soviet Union and its gulag world.
good Communists everywhere
Blasphemy!
anonymous
Why are we so shocked? The British created the concentration camp world in South Africa decades earlier, World War Ⅰ should have gotten you used to senseless mass murder already, and were you not paying attention to the Russian pogroms and the massacres in Armenia and the carnival-like American lynchings? There is nothing really new here. Philosophical responses to evil have never been able to keep up with evil itself.
Would Nietzsche ask us to will this evil? Could anyone consider himself blessed if his eternal recurrence included an eternally recurring Auschwitz? Were its victims made stronger by their suffering? Whatever else Auschwitz did, it decisively refuted Nietzsche.
If the world were not something that ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self evident.
My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values. From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle. I have nothing against the Jews, personally.
Nonsense. You could and should have chosen differently. Others did. Tremendous evil sometimes takes the banal form of a thoughtless bureaucrat, and to convict you of it does not also require that we discover in you a frothing malice that seems proportional to the crime. Why should we feel the need to trudge through the cesspit of your soul to inspect your motives and intentions? Your crimes speak for themselves.
Some people went along with the horror, but others did not. Some people said ‘no, I won’t.’ Evil is not a mighty, domineering, magnificent, calculating agent — it is a petty, threadbare, cowardly, weak, and vulnerable one. This allows me to still feel at home in the world and to have a childish trust in God.
I think, if we use our imaginations, we can envision a realistic, possible social and political order that minimizes injustice. Envisioning it is only the start, of course, but it gives us reasonable hope that we can again be reconciled with the real world.
In the midst of a murderous world, reflect on murder and make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers or accomplices, and those who refuse. Over the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.
By the way, in case it hasn’t been clear throughout, I’ve been playing fast
and loose with chronology, and have mixed actual quotes with paraphrases.
Neiman’s book puts all of these philosophers, from various time periods, into
a sort of conversation with each other, and I’ve just tried to somewhat
whimsically illustrate it as one.
Someone really did put a magnet on our refrigerator depicting an angel in
flowing gossamer next to the (unattributed) quote from Kant about how he is
filled with awe when he reflects on the starry heavens above and the moral law
within.
