In this essay an attempt is made to transcend the divide between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of history by proposing an alternative account of understanding the past, one based on the nature of testimonies, specifically theirscopeanddepth. This is done through a critical engagement with the works of prominent realist and anti-realist philosophers of history ; other philosophers working on relevant topics such as epistemology, and historians who have written on historical method. The alternative account thus developed is then (...) tested by applying it to the case of theHistorikerstreit, the bitterly waged historian's struggle concerning the history and legacy of Nazism. On the surface it appears to affirm the anti-realist position that posits historical narratives as being inherently normative/aesthetic given the inadequacies of the ‘thick’ realist position, but upon closer scrutiny it demonstrates the merit of my alternative, testimony-based ‘thin’ realist account. (shrink)

This case is designed to help students analyze decision making from various ethical perspectives and to use stakeholder analysis. The case perspective is that of the CEO of Degussa AG, a multispecialty chemical company, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. Degussa is considering whether to submit a bid to supply its anti-graffiti coating, Protectosil ® , for a new Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe being planned for Berlin. Degussa’s ethical dilemma is that a former Degussa subsidiary, Degesch, manufactured and supplied (...) the Zyklon B nerve gas used by the Nazis to kill Jews in the concentration camps during World War II. Although Degussa has made attempts both to acknowledge and to atone for its war-time Nazi collaboration, public disclosure of its bid has the potential to engulf Degussa in controversy when activists and Jewish leaders learn of it. Students are asked to evaluate the bid’s benefits and costs to Degussa’s stakeholders, to consider the relevance of a company’s historical legacy to contemporary decision making, and to explore how German corporate history during and after the Holocaust has parallels to human rights issues in other countries. (shrink)

Holocaust museums record and memorialize deeply affecting historical events. They can nevertheless be described and criticized using standard categories of museum analysis. This paper departs from previous studies of Holocaust museums by focusing not on ethical or aesthetic issues, but rather on ontological, epistemic, and taxonomic considerations. I begin by analysing the ontological basis of the educational value of various objects commonly displayed in Holocaust museums. I argue that this educational value is not intrinsic to the objects themselves, but rather (...) stems from the extrinsic relations established between objects in museum exhibitions and displays. Next, I consider the epistemic, or knowledge-creating, function of Holocaust museums. I argue that the structure of public displays in such museums reflects the particular, document-based epistemology that continues to characterize Holocaust historiography and other fields of Holocaust research. Finally, I turn to examine taxonomic features of Holocaust museums. As I explain, both professional and ‘artefactual’ networks link the activities and display strategies of national, regional, and local Holocaust museums. A brief conclusion sketches some implications of my analysis for ongoing debates about the ethical function of Holocaust museums. (shrink)

The events of the Holocaust of European Jews (and others) by the Nazi state between 1939 and 1945 deserve to be remembered and studied by the nursing profession. By approaching literary texts written by Holocaust ‘survivors’ from an interpersonal dimension, a reading of such works can develop an ‘ethic of responsibility’. By focusing on such themes as rationality, duty, witness and the virtues, potential lessons for nurses working with people in a variety of settings can be drawn. Implications for the (...) teaching of nursing ethics are made in the areas of the virtues, relationships, professional ethics and the moral community of nursing. (shrink)

Few books within the field of Jewish studies have caused so much anger and intense debate as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. The author was considered to be a self-hating Jew because she accused the Jewish leaders during the Holocaust for having complied with Nazi orders and thus having facilitated the mass murder. Her view of the personality of Eichmann was considered to be wrong, and her way of writing was seen as inappropriate (...) in its lack of humility in dealing with an issue like the Holocaust. Although much of the critique was unfair, Arendt’s non-diplomatic style of writing contributed to the negative reactions. (shrink)

The aim of our special issue is to deepen our understanding of the role moral emotions play in organisations as part of a wider discourse on organisational ethics and morality. Unethical workplace behaviours can have far-reaching consequences—job losses, risks to life and health, psychological damage to individuals and groups, social injustice and exploitation and even environmental devastation. Consequently, determining how and why ethical transgressions occur with surprising regularity, despite the inhibiting influence of moral emotions, has considerable theoretical and practical significance (...) to management scholars and managers alike. In this introduction, we present some of the core arguments in the field; notably, the effect of organisational life and bureaucracy on emotions, in general, and moral emotions, in particular; the moral standing of leaders, managers and followers; moral challenges raised by obedience and resistance to organisational power and ethical blindspots induced by what may appear as deeply moral emotions. These issues are explored by a collection of geographically diverse articles in various work contexts, which are thematically organised in terms of moral emotions, ethical behaviour and social pressure, moral emotions and their consequences within/across levels of analysis, psychoanalytic perspectives on the management of moral emotions, virtue and moral emotions and moral emotions and action tendencies. We end by suggesting certain avenues for future research in the hope that the endeavour initiated here will inspire improved practice at work. (shrink)

Recently in Porter v. McCollum, the United States Supreme Court, citing “a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service,” held that a defense lawyer’s failure to present his client’s military service record as mitigating evidence during his sentencing for two murders amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel. The purpose of this Article is to assess, from the just deserts perspective, the grounds to believe that veterans who commit crimes are to be blamed less by the (...) State than offenders without such backgrounds. Two rationales for a differential treatment of military veterans who commit crimes are typically set forth. The Porter Court raised each, stating that we should treat veterans differently “in recognition of” both “their service” and “the intense stress and mental and emotional toll” of combat. The former factor suggests there being a “social contributions” or gratitude-based discount, whereas the latter factor points towards a “mental disturbance” discount. This Article analyzes the two accounts and raises some doubts about both. This Article then argues that a military veteran who commits a crime should not be blamed to the full extent of his blameworthiness, not necessarily because of his mental capacity nor because of his social contribution, but because the State’s hand in producing his criminality undermines its standing to blame him. (shrink)

Denmark is one of the only European countries that can speak of its involvement in the Holocaust with some sense of pride. In October of 1943, the Danes pulled off a substantial rescue mission during which they led the majority of the Danish Jews to safety in Sweden. Traditional representations of this event attribute its success to the outstanding moral character of the Danes. This paper challenges this popular view and explores a variety of factors which together facilitated the rescue (...) of the Danish Jews. (shrink)

In the wake of the Cold War a characteristic style of genocide narratives emerged in the West. For the most part, philosophers did not pay attention to this development even though they are uniquely qualified to address arguments and conceptual issues discussed in this burgeoning genocide genre. While ostensibly a response to a specific recent article belonging to the genre, this essay offers an outline of an ethics of genocide narratives in the form of four lessons on how not to (...) write about genocide. It is argued that to the extent that works on the subject of genocide are dominated by narrativism, genocidalism, activism, or extreme pacifism, they cannot properly be classified as scholarly endeavors and must be met with resistance per the requirements of academic ethics and proper scholarly methodology. (shrink)

Résumé Après la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale, un débat s’est instauré autour de la question du temps mémoriel qui lie passé et présent. Avec le statut historique acquis par la mémoire collective, une contradiction apparaît alors entre une mémoire multiple et une histoire univoque qui a suscité la défiance d’historiens. Ils optent pour « une histoire critique de la mémoire » et scrutent les « filtres des expériences vécues ». Après une décennie de refoulement du passé, une rupture (...) s’opère au début des années 1960. À la question d’une « histoire critique de la mémoire » des années trente, du IIIe Reich et de ses crimes, les historiens répondent par des théories des fascismes et des analyses de la fin de la République de Weimar. À la fin des années 1970 – alors qu’apparaît le terme Holocauste – le débat sur le temps mémoriel prend en compte la thématique victimes-bourreaux. S’ouvre dès lors en Allemagne de l’Ouest des lieux de mémoire locaux ou régionaux, des itinéraires mémoriels inscrits dans le pavé des villes avec mention nominative des victimes et des « acteurs » directs de l’époque. De vives polémiques apparaissent. Le travail de mémoire reste alors pour l’historien un travail critique qui doit intégrer dans la remémoration volontaire du passé l’interrogation du futur. (shrink)

The question on guilt that Jaspers poses to the Germans was not only valid after the Holocaust, it can be raised to other peoples who must answer for the crimes committed by the state which act on behalf of the people that gave support to them. In this paper, I elaborate a notion of citizens’ political responsibility in order to argue to what extent—and under what circumstances—the citizens of a political community must respond for the deeds of the political institutions (...) that govern them. For that purpose, I try to explain Spinoza’s notion of political authority in relation to Jaspers’ notion of political guilt. This Spinozistic approach has the advantage of freeing us from moral guilt—a misleading notion in political arena as I will argue—but it demands from us a genuine self-reflective and therapeutic procedure that if applied to politics would reveal a different path from Jaspers’ guilt. The aim of this therapeutic is to bring about a profound change in the personal and political identity of both citizen and political community. (shrink)

Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially minority groups. The failure of the 2011 German census to produce reliable numbers on the country’s largest religious minority, Muslims, could be viewed as a case in point. However, this ignores the fact that in the late 1980s officials successfully counted Muslims. This article traces how officials changed their approach to Muslim enumeration over the course of designing the (...) 2011 census. Drawing on internal ministerial documents and interviews, I show that the reversal of statistical visibility was the result of a recoupling process. Through this process, old state-religion laws that officials had previously ignored now became rigorously applied to the census. An extra-statistical debate on religious education triggered this recoupling by reviving narrow, legal categories of religion and alerting church representatives and legal experts to imprecise census terms. Using the German case and other empirical examples, I describe a more uneven influence of historical legacies than commonly suggested by research on categorization. Rather than viewing legacies as having a stable, or even growing, influence on categorization, I argue that they only take effect when they become politicized and enforced by powerful actors. I call for a more nuanced analysis of the role historical factors play in determining trajectories of census categorization, especially those that are invoked to explain the reluctance of European states to collect ethno-cultural data. (shrink)

With the last Holocaust survivors quietly passing away, one might also expect to see accountability debates slowing to a trickle. Surprisingly, however, recent years show an upswing in corporate World War II-related atonement debates. Interest in corporate participation in mass atrocity has expanded worldwide; yet what constitutes ethical corporate behavior during and after war remains understudied. This article considers these questions through a study of the French National Railways’ roles during the German occupation and its more recent struggle to make (...) amends. This study demonstrates that ethical business leadership requires taking responsibility for past as well as current decisions. Most executives grappling with complex corporate histories work in isolation, in part because the scholarship on business ethics fails to provide guidance. Without such guidance, corporations often respond to accusations about their pasts with carefully crafted statements and legal strategies rather than deep expressions of moral leadership. To assist in remedying this tendency, this paper simultaneously encourages companies to engage in deeper reflection on corporate history, while urging scholars to help guide corporations through critical ethical conversations. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings were central to her thinking about the human condition and engaged with the dialectics of modernity, universalism and identity. Her concept of the ‘conscious pariah’ attempted both to define a role for the public intellectual and understand the relationship between Jews and modernity. Controversially she accused Jewish victims of lack of resistance to the Nazis and argued that their victimization resulted from apolitical ‘worldlessness’. We argue that although Arendt’s analysis was original and challenging, her characterization of (...) Jewish history as one of ‘powerlessness’ is exaggerated but, more importantly, her underdeveloped concept of ‘the social’ is insensitive to the complex modalities of resistance and consciousness among subaltern Jewish communities. Furthermore, her lack of interest in religious observance obscures the importance of Judaism as a resource for resistance. This is illustrated by the ‘hidden transcripts’ of Jewish resistance from the early modern period. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, the Internet seemed a perfect medium for business: a facilitator of unlimited economical propositions to people without any regulatory limitations. Cases such as that of Yahoo! mark the beginning of the end of that illusion. They demonstrate that Internet service providers (ISPs) have to respect domestic state legislation in order to avoid legal risks. Yahoo! was wrong to ignore French national laws and the plea to remove Nazi memorabilia from its auction site. Its legal struggle proved (...) futile and may have harmed its business. This essay argues for the adoption of standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR considerations may trump some forms of antisocial, highly offensive expression. (shrink)

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, (...) Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism. (shrink)

In this article I examine recent debates surrounding the publication of Daniel J. Goldhagen's controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners. I do so against the `backdrop' of contention regarding the (historical) centrality of the Nazi Holocaust and the role played by Holocaust Studies - a burgeoning area of academic special interest, involving mainly historians, but also sociologists, theologians and philosophers. In particular I consider the charged disputation(s) which have flowed from Norman G. Finkelstein's critique of Hitler's Willing Executioners and ponder what (...) this tells us about the way in which (political) identity is configured in the post-Holocaust era. In so doing I examine the political investments at stake in these debates and challenge the degree to which academics working within this field have been able to transcend the ideological subject-positions in which they are embedded. (shrink)

Explaining the seizure of power by the National Socialist Party and the totalitarian workings of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich is still difficult not only with respect to the atrocities committed but also to understanding whether the German population and society had to be terrorized into complying with the regime or were part and parcel of it. The paper introduces a notion of swarm to advance the idea that the German population was terrorized into a deliberate compliance with (...) the regime. The notion of swarm is sociologically controlled by a complementary notion of form, which serves to reconstruct and model the social calculus realized by the swarm to differentiate and reproduce itself inside a complex society. The data I use are the results of historical research done in the last 60 years. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his Homo Sacer-cycle, has developed a new paradigm for thinking the Shoah. Departing from Michel Foucault’s biopolitical thought, he argues that modern political power is made possible by the helix-structure of sovereign power and homo sacer. Sovereign power is situated at the threshold of the prevailing juridico-political order and can, in a state of exception, violently suspend or establish the law. In this decision, homo sacer is legally excluded from the law. When the state (...) of exception is made general, the law of sovereignty governs all life and everyone becomes homo sacer. This happened concretely in the Shoah. In the concentration camps, the Muselmann is produced. During the Shoah by Bullet, as happened in Lithuania, the generalised sovereign biopolitics turns into radical thanatopolitics. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

In this panel, we explore the future of value sensitive design (VSD). The stakes are high. Many in public and private sectors and in civil society are gradually realizing that taking our values seriously implies that we have to ensure that values effectively inform the design of technology which, in turn, shapes people’s lives. Value sensitive design offers a highly developed set of theory, tools, and methods to systematically do so.