Abstract
Given the brutality and coldness with which the Nazis murdered the Jews of Europe and the complicity and apathy of most bystanders, post-Holocaust social science and philosophy has seen renewed attention to ethics and moral psychology. Social scientists such as Stanley Milgram, Robert Lifton and Ervin Staub have focused on the kinds of social and psychological processes which were necessary to produce the Holocaust. Philosophers have taken a slightly different approach and viewed the Holocaust as a kind of moral barometer which revealed the flaws in Enlightenment rationality and ethics. This has led to a re-evaluation of modern Kantian ethics and a search for an ethical theory which could serve as a guide to prevent future genocides. For further resources to this end social scientists and philosophers have jointly turned to investigations of the statistically insignificant yet morally critical presence of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Ethicists and social scientists have been attracted to rescuers not only because they offer some hope for signs of moral life during the Holocaust but also because they believe that the rescuers may be able to provide models for an ethics of rescue which they could employ in the prevention of genocide today and in the future.
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Notes
Stanley Milgram, Obediance to Authority (NY: Harper and Row, 1974).
Robert Lifton The Nazi Doctors (NY: Basic Books, 1986).
Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Samuel and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (NY: Free Press, 1988).
Victor Seidler, ‘Rescue, Righteousness, and Morality’, Embracing the Other, eds. P. Oliner, S. Oliner, L. Baron et.al. (NY: New York University Press, 1992), pp.48–69.
Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (NY: Holmes and Meier, 1992).
Seidler , The Moral Limits of Modernity (London: Macmillan, 1990), p.17.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. T. Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1123b3.
Philip Hallie, Lest innocent Blood Be Shed (NY: Harper and Row, 1979).
Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), p.240.
Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity tr A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p.199.
Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs Reasoning After Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder: Westview, 1998).
For a carefully argued ‘post-enlightenment’ defense of the ethical power of particular cultures see Samuel Fleischacker, The Ethics of Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Kepnes, S. (2001). An Ethics of Rescue for the Future. 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_81
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_81
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