Abstract
In A marvellous film, Breaker Morrant, the lead character, Harry Morrant, on trial for following orders to execute Boer prisoners during the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), notes, as he is on his way to the firing squad: ‘these days it is so very easy to be on the wrong side.’ Harry phrased, concisely and eloquently, a central moral question: How does one choose, or even know, the ‘right’ side when so many choices appear morally repugnant?
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Notes
Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p.270.
Thomas E. McCollough, The Moral Imagination and Public Life: Raising the Ethical Question (Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House Publishers, Inc., 1991), pp.6–7.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Milgram made some further elaborations in a later work, The Individual in a Social World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1977).
See, for example: David R. Blumenthal, The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons From The Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999)
and Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
David P. Forsythe, The Internationalization of Human Rights (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1991), p.3.
Robert Jay Lifton and Erik Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat New York: Basic Books, 1990).
Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
Anthony Storr, Human Destructiveness (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991).
Rainer Baum, ‘Holocaust: Moral Indifference as the Form of Modern Evil,’ in Echoes from the Holocaust edited by Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p.56.
John Farrow, City of Ice (New York: Random House, 1999), p.402.
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Hirsch, H. (2001). Reflections on ‘Ethics’, ‘Morality’ and ‘Responsibility’ after the Holocaust. 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_70
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