Abstract
We compare for many purposes. We compare two or more items with an eye towards ranking one item over another. We compare an item to another to enhance or reduce the status or value of one of the compared objects. We also have many devices at our disposal for blocking comparisons. ‘You cannot compare apples and oranges.’ Or we declare that one thing is in a class by itself or that all of the items are incomparable as members of a certain set. If acts are intrinsically bad, it would be bizarre to claim that one of those acts is intrinsically worse than another For Aristotle, ‘there are some whose very name implies wickedness, as, for example, malice, shame-lessness, and envy among the emotions, and adultery, theft, and murder among the actions’ (Nichomachean Ethics, Book II, chaper 6). Comparing the wicked emotions to the wicked actions would be tantamount to comparing apples and oranges., and comparisons among the wicked actions seems strange indeed.
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Notes
Rony Brauman, Devant le Mal, Rwanda, un génocide en direct (Paris: Arléa, 1994).
Lawrence A. Blum, ‘The Holocaust and Moral Education’, Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 15 (Spring/Summer 1995), p.13.
Thomas W. Simon, ‘The Holocaust’s Moral “Uniqueness”’, in Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz, eds. Alan Rosenberg et al. (Amherst: Humanity Press, 2000), pp.83—94.
Is the Holocaust Unique?, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1996).
For arguments against comparing harms in this way see Kenneth Seeskin, ‘What Philosophy Can and Cannot Say about Evil’, in Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers, eds., Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Refections on a Dark Time (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp.91–104.
Alan Rosenberg and Evelyn Silverman, ‘The Issue of the Holocaust as a Unique Event’, in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (eds.), Genocide in Our Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1992), p.47.
Ernst Nolte, ‘A Past Will Not Pass Away — A Speech It Was Possible to Write, But Not to Present’, Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), pp.65–73.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘A Kind of Indemnification: The Tendencies toward Apologia in German Research on Current History’, Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), pp.75—92.
Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘Etiology and Sequalae of the Armenian Genocide’, in George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 113.
Pierre Papazian, ‘A “Unique Uniqueness”?’ Midstream 30 (April 1984), p.16.
George M. Kern and Leon H. Rappoport, ‘Discussion: Pierre Papazian’s “A Unique Uniqueness?”’, Midstream 30 (April 1984), p.22.
A more detailed analysis of the empirical uniqueness thesis is in Thomas W. Simon, ‘The Holocaust’s Moral “Uniqueness” in Alan Rosenberg et al. (eds.), Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz (Amherst: Humanity Press, 2000), pp.83–94.
Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, ‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust’, Philosophy and Public Affairs (Winter 1996), pp. 65–83.
Steven T. Katz. The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Vol.1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.28.
Jack Nusan Porter, ‘Introduction’, in Jack Nusan Porter (ed.), Genocide and Human Rights: A Global Anthology (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), pp.9—10.
R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
Natan Lerner. Group Rights and Discrimination in International Law (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1991).
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. International Documents on Human Rights, ed. Satish Chandra (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1990), pp. 171–174, at 171.
To show how far the concept of genocide can go consider Lemkin’s typography of genocides that included moral debasement of the population through, for example, exposure to pornography. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), p.90.
See Alison Palmer, ‘Ethnocide’, in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (eds.), Genocide in Our Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1992), pp.1—22.
Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), p.169.
George J. Andreopoulos, ‘Introduction: The Calculus of Genocide’, in George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p.i.
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd edn. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p.56.
Ronald Gossop, Confronting War: An Examination of Humanity’s Most Pressing Problem, 2nd edn. (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 1987), p.7.
Eric Markusen, ‘Genocide and Modern War’, in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (eds.), Genocide in Our Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1992), p. 122.
Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 3d edn. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982), pp.1—2.
See, Eric Markusen, ‘Genocide and Modern War’, in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (eds.), Genocide in Our Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pierian Press, 1992), p. 123.
Cf. ‘I cannot accept the view that… the bombing, in time of war, of such civilian enemy populations as those of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden does not constitute genocide within the terms of the [UN] convention’: Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 1981). Kuper cites the following estimates of deaths from Allied pattern bombings: In Dresden at least 40,000 people were killed; in Hamburg 40,000; and in Tokyo as many as 130,000 were victims:
Leo Kuper, ‘Theoretical Issues Relating to Genocide: Uses and Abuses’, in George J. Andreopoulos (ed.), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p.35.
Michael Walzer. Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 160.
As quoted in Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-F amine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
As cited in Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928—1941 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990).
Lyman H. Letgers, ‘The Soviet Gulag: Is It Genocide?’, in Israel W. Charney (ed.), Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide (Bolder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), p.65.
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Simon, T.W. (2001). Genocides. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_7
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