A lecture online at the ACUNS site (Academic Council on the United
Nations System)
http://www.yale.edu/acuns/NEW_publications/95_Holmes_Lecture.html
includes this unintended insight into how atrocities are used in
politics:
"...at a more practical level, even the [moral] relativists balk in the
face of the morally atrocious--human sacrifice, ritualistic mutilation,
slavery, genocide, apartheid, concentration camps, gulags, and gas
chambers. To explain why such atrocious behavior is immoral invariably
requires reaching for universals, and when presented with such behavior
most relativists accordingly reach out..."
This is right about the political effects. Today I read that a UN report
has described group rapes, and claimed that Serb soldiers had cut open
pregnant women and impaled the foetus on their knives. That is an
ancient atrocity story, but on the Bosnian evidence the rape reports are
plausible. And indeed the response, which I saw from some on this list
as well, is to abandon opposition.
It is difficult to understand, how the right gets away with this
repeatedly. The genocide example is classic. I openly advocate genocide
in a text online, without any legal problems. Although the text is
accessed about 300 times a month, only one person has ever complained,
and no-one has written a response. The explanation is simple: the ethics
of the genocide prohibition are so weakly formulated, that any
second-year ethics student could undermine them completely. Far from
being a horror, genocide is so reasonable, that anyone can write a
defence of it, offending almost no-one. Yet as the quote above
indicates, the right can use genocide as an emotional sledgehammer,
against any criticism of liberal-democratic values, and the trick always
works. It certainly works in the academic context: it is impossible to
advocate genocide in an academic setting.
If Kosovar women could only be rescued from group rapes by the free
market economy, would I abandon Kosovar women to group rapes? Yes. So
should you, it is your moral duty. The trick with the logic (which is
repeated in the lecture linked above) is to pretend that the there is
only one moral universalism, and to contrast that to atrocities. In fact
there are many moral universalisms, and probably there are no true
relativists on this planet. There is no way you can logically derive an
obligation to accept the free market economy, from group rapes or their
prevention. The moral objections to the market remain, even if all
ethnic Albanians are sacrificed, ritually mutilated, genocided,
enslaved, put in the Gulag, etcetera. It is not a question of relativsm
versus universalism, but of competing universalisms - a crude
utilitarianism versus non-utilitariansism, for instance.
--
Paul Treanor
http://www.diagonal.demon.nl/koseth.html
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