In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hypatia 18.2 (2003) 227-229 [Access article in PDF] Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Jonathan's Glover's considerable reputation rests on the philosophical inquiry into the nature of human identity and on his critical deployment of consequentialist ethics to address a number of urgent issues regarding the beginning and end of life. In his latest book, Humanity: (...) A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (2001), he brings some of these themes together to try to make sense of the disturbing record of mass brutality and inhumanity that stretches through the last century. The deaths he addresses are those of countless millions of noncombatants, caught up in successive waves of atrocities that vary in their geographical location, scale, and duration, but not in their capacity to overwhelm the moral expectations and moral restraints in which we usually put our trust. Glover spares no feelings in his detailed and relentless charting of both the sociopolitical context of decline into moral chaos and the specificities of each torturous and murderous assault.Drawing on a range of material—from contemporary documentation and eyewitness accounts to the subsequent reflections of historians, politicians, and social theorists—he attempts to find common explanatory threads for a catalogue of killing, rape, and mutilation that is the work not only of those given over to abandoned excess, but of those perpetrators who held fast to rational principles. A series of supposedly exceptional events, such as that at My Lai, is set against the enormities of Hiroshima, Rwanda, Stalinist show trials, the Gulag, and the Cultural Revolution in China, where state interests and state policy are expressly involved. Not surprisingly the atrocities of Nazi Germany, and particularly the holocaust, are given the deepest consideration, but Glover's wide-ranging approach makes clear that little distinguishes mid-century Germans as especially open to moral dereliction. The resolution that it must never happen again has been breached time and again in various places and in various forms.Despite a plethora of endorsements from philosophers such as Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum, it would appear that Humanity is intended primarily for the lay reader. Certainly at a time when Israelis and Palestinians remain in a murderous face-off, when the world's primary military power, the United States, appears unmoved by "collateral" killing, and when India and Pakistan ratchet up the possibility of nuclear attack, every one of us could benefit from a little more insight into the often unchallenged slide from threat to war to moral atrocity. Glover clearly lays bare the mechanics of such developments, and effectively traces the ways in which each person might feel him or herself morally blameless by failing to grasp the outcomes of discrete individual acts [End Page 227].In his extensive account of Nazi Germany, Glover unravels the effects of distancing, of mindless obedience to authority, of putting efficiency before feeling, and of turning away rather than intervening in obvious wrongs. The hatred felt for the Jews and other less-than-ideal Aryans, and the desire to create by whatever means a purified state are paralleled worldwide by other conflicts, driven by what Glover calls "tribalism," or by a ruthless consequentialism in pursuit of putative social utopias (144). As he remarks of the Pol Pot regime: "As so often with social engineering, those doing the calculations of happiness became so immersed in means ("the Revolution") that they lost their grip on ends" (305). And, one assumes, vice versa. But what does this really tell us that is not already apparent in the description? The drawback of Glover's straightforward approach is that it eschews any deep level of analysis, and relies for insight, for the most part, on our existing moral beliefs and intuitions in the face of an accumulation of horrifying evidence of individual and state brutality. To make, and offer empirical support to, similar points over and over again, albeit with some significant variations, did not enhance my comprehension of the moral enormities, but rather served to reinforce their seeming inevitability.It is... (shrink)

Learning about martial sex crimes against men has made me rethink some of my ideas about rape as a weapon of war and how to respond to it. Such crimes can be as racist as they are sexist and, in the case of male victims, may be quite simply racist.

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible (...) or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

This essay examines how rape of women and girls by male soldiers works as a martial weapon. Continuities with other torture and terrorism and with civilian rape are suggested. The inadequacy of past philosophical treatments of the enslavement of war captives is briefly discussed. Social strategies are suggested for responding and a concluding fantasy offered, not entirely social, of a strategy to change the meanings of rape to undermine its use as a martial weapon.

Learning about martial sex crimes against men has made me rethink some of my ideas about rape as a weapon of war and how to respond to it. Such crimes can be as racist as they are sexist and, in the case of male victims, may be quite simply racist.

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

Two profound atrocities in the history of Western culture form the subject of this moving philosophical exploration: American Slavery and the Holocaust. An African American and a Jew, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other. Rather, he pronounces these two defining historical experiences as profoundly evil in radically different ways and points to their logically incompatible aims. The author begins with a discussion of the nature of evil, exploring the fragility of human (...) beings and the phenomena of compartmentalizing, unquestioning obedience to authority, and moral drift. Citing compelling examples from history and contemporary life, he characterizes evil acts in terms of moral agency, magnitude, and intent. With moving testimony, Thomas depicts the moral pain of African Americans and Jews during their ordeals and describes how their past as victims has affected their future. Without invidious comparison, he distinguishes between extermination and domination, death and natal alienation, physical and mental cruelty, and between being viewed as irredeemable evil and as a moral simpleton. Thomas also considers the role of blacks and Jews in the Christian narrative. _In Vessels of Evil_, Thomas also considers the ways Jews and blacks have gone on to survive. He analyzes the relative flourishing of Jews and the languishing of blacks in this country and examines the implications of their dissimilar tragedies on any future relationship between these two minorities. (shrink)