The purpose of this paper is to direct attention to a challenge—referred to as the threshold challenge —facing a non-absolutist retributivist view on international criminal justice. It is argued, on the one hand, that this challenge constitutes a practically pertinent problem for the retributivist approach to the punishment of mass crimes and, on the other, that it is very hard to imagine any principled way of meeting this challenge.

Mass atrocities are commonly explained in terms of changes in legal or moral norms. This paper examines the role that changes in social norms can play in precipitating or prolonging mass atrocities. I focus specifically on manipulative transformations of social norms. I first distinguish between the manipulative introduction and the manipulative activation of social norms. I then explain how both forms of manipulation can contribute to mass atrocities. Finally, extending a line of thought first suggested by Hannah (...) Arendt, I present a case study of the manipulative introduction and activation of language rules amongst the Nazis during World War Two. (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)

Philosophical accounts of moral progress commonly acknowledge the problem of mass atrocities. But the implications of such events for our ability to perceive, and achieve, progress are rarely considered in detail. This paper aims to address this gap. The paper takes as its starting point Allen Buchanan’s evolutionary theory of moral progress in his 2020 book Our Moral Fate. Through critical analysis of Buchanan’s theory, the paper shows that moral philosophers seeking to draw evidence from atrocities must pay closer (...) attention to social scientific research into such crimes, and particularly to findings concerning the diverse motives, intentions, and ideological influences on perpetrators. At the same time, the paper suggests that mass atrocities exhibit the action-guiding influence not only of moral norms, but also of social and legal norms. The paper concludes by briefly considering the significance of mass atrocities for theories of moral progress beyond Our Moral Fate. (shrink)

The study of genocide and mass atrocity abounds with references to emotions: fear, anger, horror, shame and hatred. Yet we don't understand enough about how 'ordinary' emotions behave in such extreme contexts. Emotions are not merely subjective and interpersonal phenomena; they are also powerful social and political forces, deeply involved in the history of mass violence. Drawing on recent insights from philosophy, psychology, history, and the social sciences, this volume examines the emotions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. (...) Editors Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang have brought together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars to provide an in-depth analysis of the nature, value, and role of emotions as they relate to the causes and dynamics of mass atrocities. The result is a new perspective on the social, political, and moral dimensions of emotions in the history of collective violence and its aftermath. (shrink)

Longer terms offer room for more complex responses: strategizing, learning from mistakes, choices of how or whether to try to survive, to hide, resist, flee, or comply with oppressive demands. This chapter explores the specific conceptual issues regarding the meaning of survival. "Surviving" refers both to an activity and to what remains. Picking up on the ambiguity of "surviving", there are two ways to understand true survival. Preservation survival requires one to come through with mental and physical health in basically (...) decent shape. Combining the two models of survival, it is tempting to see some less than true survivors as analogues of Aristotle's friendships of utility and pleasure. In long‐term atrocities, "survivor" often designates those who live through to the end and then function at a decent level. With illness or accident, survival can mean simply being alive at the end. "Survivor" is judgment‐laden in that it discriminates among those who live through an atrocity. (shrink)

Starting with the French Revolution Massacres and Morality studies mass killing as perpetrated by states. In particular it examines the role that civilian immunity has played in shaping the behaviour of perpetrators and how international society has responded.

Starting with the French Revolution Massacres and Morality studies mass killing as perpetrated by states. In particular it examines the role that civilian immunity has played in shaping the behaviour of perpetrators and how international society has responded.

Alongside other types of mass atrocities, genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing, however, is the contribution of economists to better understand and prevent such crimes. This edited collection by 41 accomplished scholars examines economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. Chapters include numerous case studies, probing literature reviews, and completely novel work based on extraordinary country-specific datasets. Also included are chapters on the demographic, gendered, and economic class nature of genocide. Replete (...) with research- and policy-relevant findings, new insights are derived from behavioral economics, law and economics, political economy, macroeconomic modeling, microeconomics, development economics, industrial organization, identity economics, and other fields. Analytical approaches include constrained optimization theory, game theory, and sophisticated statistical work in data-mining, econometrics, and forecasting.A foremost finding of the book concerns atrocity architects' purposeful, strategic use of violence, often manipulating nonrational proclivities among ordinary people to sway their participation in mass murder. Relatively understudied in the literature, the book also analyzes the options of victims before, during, and after mass violence. Further, the book shows how well-intended prevention efforts can backfire and increase violence, how wrong post-genocide design can entrench vested interests to reinforce exclusion of vulnerable peoples, and how businesses can become complicit in genocide. In addition to the necessity of healthy opportunities in employment, education, and key sectors in prevention work, the book shows why new genocide prevention laws and institutions must be based on reformulated incentives that consider insights from law and economics, behavioral economics, and collective action economics. (shrink)

On September 9, 2013, diplomats and civil society activists gathered in a ballroom in New York to welcome Jennifer Welsh as the UN Secretary-General's new Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect. In her first public appearance in that role, Special Adviser Welsh explained that one of her top priorities would be “to take prevention seriously and to make it meaningful in practice.” “In the context of RtoP,” Welsh added during the discussion, “we are talking about crimes, and crimes have (...) implications in terms of how we deal with them. You'll hear me say that a lot.” Welsh's approach of treating RtoP as a principle that is primarily concerned with prevention and is firmly linked to international crimes neatly captures the evolution of RtoP since its formal acceptance by states at the 2005 UN World Summit. Paragraphs 138 to 140 of the World Summit's Outcome Document not only elevated the element of prevention to a prominent place within the principle of RtoP but also restricted the scope of RtoP to four specific crimes under international law: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The crime and prevention–focused version of RtoP has subsequently been defended and promoted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and by UN member states. This article seeks to systematically explore some of the implications of linking RtoP to the concept of international crimes, with a particular focus on the preventive dimension of RtoP, the so-called responsibility to prevent. What, then, are the consequences of approaching the responsibility to prevent as the prevention of international crimes?In order to systematically examine this question, this article turns to literature from criminology. While the criminological perspective has so far been neglected in debates on RtoP, the prominent criminologists John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond argue vehemently that “criminology is crucially positioned to contribute understanding and direction to what the United Nations has mandated as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ groups that are threatened with mass atrocities.” For the purpose of this article, the label “criminology” comprises domestic criminology, supranational criminology, and international criminal law. While insights from supranational criminology and international criminal law are directly applicable to international crimes, translating knowledge generated in relation to crimes at the domestic level to atrocity crimes at the international level is, of course, not without challenges. Reasoning by analogy is an important method in this regard, though given the anarchical nature of international society some analogies will inevitably be imperfect. The benefits of such an approach, if carefully employed, however, outweigh the risks. (shrink)

The Failures of Ethics concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite us human beings to inflict incalculable harm. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Our senses of moral and religious authority have been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of civilization that have taken (...) us from a bloody twentieth century into an immensely problematic twenty-first. Salvaging the fragmented condition of ethics, this book shows how respect and honor for those who save lives and resist atrocity, deepened attention to the dead and to death itself, and appeals for human rights and renewed spiritual sensitivity confirm that ethics contains and remains an irreplaceable safeguard against its own failures. (shrink)

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) as a form of intelligence has recently made a prominent public appearance in the theater of war. During the early months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities relied on FRT as part of the country's defensive activities, harnessing the technology for a variety of purposes, such as unveiling covert Russian agents operating amid the Ukrainian population; revealing the identity of Russian soldiers who committed war crimes; and even identifying dead Russian soldiers. This (...) constellation of uses of FRT—in a war increasingly waged on the digital and information front—warrants ethical examination. The essay discusses some of the most serious concerns with FRT in the context of war, including the infringement of informational privacy; the indiscriminate and disproportionate harms it may inflict, particularly when the technology is coupled with social media intelligence; and the potential abuse of the technology once the fog of war dissipates. Some of these concerns parallel those to be found in nations that are not engulfed in war, but others are unique to war-torn settings. (shrink)

We tend to think that mass atrocities and attempted genocides call for humanitarian intervention by other states. (Nonviolent intervention if possible, military intervention if need be.) In this chapter, I discuss these two related claims in turn. What, if anything, justifies humanitarian intervention in certain states by other states? Ought such interventions, if justified, be pacifist in nature, or is it legitimate in some cases to intervene violently? To discuss these questions, I draw primarily on principles and arguments found (...) in just war theory, pacifism, international relations, and analytic political philosophy more generally. (shrink)

The article addresses the question when the advocacy of forgiveness in the wake of political mass violence can be harmful and immoral. It engages with this question primarily by probing the value of different pictures of forgiveness, most importantly Rembrandt’s painting Return of the Prodigal Son and a photograph from post-genocide Rwanda. The critical examination of the value of particular pictures in the advocacy of forgiveness also involves attention to particularly problematic ‘pictures’ (in the sense of notions, imaginaries, representations) (...) of the unforgiving victim, of the choices available to societies responding to a violent past, and of unconditional forgiving. (shrink)

Research on perpetrators of genocidal processes and especially of the Holocaust is still puzzled by the fact that most of the atrocities and killings have been executed by ‘ordinary men’, i.e. by persons with a self-concept which would not have indicated that they could become killers. The guiding question of research on genocidal perpetrators is therefore how given moral inhibitions and moral values could have been overcome, or, to put it simply, how good people could have been turned into bad (...) ones. The following article proposes the opposite question: Is it possible that particular moral commitments and principles gave the perpetrators a sense of continuing moral integrity that enabled them to carry out the killings? This socio-psychological proposal is first elaborated theoretically and then illustrated with a case study on Franz Stangl, the commander of the extermination camp of Treblinka. (shrink)

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their weaponisation (...) as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

Researchers have recently documented the unexpected opportunities war can present for women. While acknowledging the devastating effects of mass violence, this burgeoning field highlights war’s potential to catalyze grassroots mobilization and build more gender sensitive institutions and legal frameworks. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina serve as important examples of this phenomenon, yet a closer examination of both cases reveals the limits on women’s capacity to take part in and benefit from these postwar shifts. This article makes two key contributions. First, it (...) demonstrates how the postwar political settlement created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and fractured women’s collective organizing. Second, it argues that while war creates certain opportunities for women, a revitalization of patriarchy in the aftermath can undermine these gains. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with women in both countries, this article ultimately questions the extent to which postwar mobilization can be maintained or harnessed for genuine gender emancipation. (shrink)

What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In _Sing the Rage_, Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak—to cry, scream, and wail—about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public (...) emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities. Chakravarti takes up the issue from Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, who famously understood both the dangers of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. Building on their perspectives, she argues that the expression and reception of anger reveal truths otherwise unavailable to us about the emerging political order, the obstacles to full civic participation, and indeed the limits—the frontiers—of political life altogether. Most important, anger and the development of skills needed to truly listen to it foster trust among citizens and recognition of shared dignity and worth. An urgent work of political philosophy in an era of continued revolution, _Sing the Rage_ offers a clear understanding of one of our most volatile—and important—political responses. (shrink)

"Die Logik der Erfahrung" stellt eine Systematisierung der wissenschaftsphilosophischen Gedanken der klassischen Pragmatisten (Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey) dar. Die pragmatistische Erfahrungstheorie sowie die Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Theorie und Praxis bilden die Grundlage einer holistischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie, deren Aktualität durch die exemplarische Anwendung auf klassische wissenschaftstheoretische Fragestellungen gezeigt wird. Die AutorinTina Massing ist Akademische Rätin am Institut für Philosophie der Universität Koblenz. In ihrer Forschung beschäftigt sie sich insbesondere mit wissenschaftsphilosophischen Themen und dem Klassischen Pragmatismus.

A funny, touching look at the life of a social media influencer who starts to question the #goals life she has created for herself. Every day, Élie motivates her hundreds of thousands of followers to become the best versions of themselves by posting videos of exercise routines and high-protein breakfast recipes. Far from the shy teenager that she was, she is now in a very public relationship with singer Samuel Vanasse, and together they have become one of the most popular (...) influencer couples in the country. She has succeeded. She shines. And yet, Élie worries that her life is not as flawless as she makes it seem on YouTube and Instagram. Between her obsession with the "ideal weight," her growing attraction to another man, her family's disdain for her career as a content creator and a collaboration with another influencer who Élie can't stand, a thought haunts her. What if, by trying to become everything she wanted to be, she's lost herself along the way? Suck it In and Smile is an intimate exploration of our obsession with appearances and the hypocrisies that appear when you must craft the perfect online life. (shrink)

Qu'entend-on par enchantement et désenchantement du monde? Quelles seraient les voies à suivre pour susciter un réenchantement du monde qui sera le fait de l’humain lui-même? La raison et la rationalité sont-elles les causes des maux de nos errements ou des outils pour les contrer? Suffira-t-il d’avoir « foi en la raison » pour surmonter les défis que l’humanité s’est elle-même imposés par négligence et irresponsabilité.

This essay responds to Esther Reed's recent critique of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in this journal. It argues that Reed fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents R2P. Her critique of R2P would have served well as a critique of the earlier concept of humanitarian intervention had it been penned in the late 1990s. But most of the problems and dangers that Reed identifies are in reality the very problems and dangers that R2P seeks to overcome, and I suggest that it (...) does overcome them quite successfully. R2P does not impose Western ideals on the rest of the world, weaken the legal restrictions on the use of force, or promote abusive interventionism. Rather, it offers a bold but carefully constructed framework that holds the promise of promoting the protection of vulnerable populations from mass atrocities. (shrink)

The text confronts the elements of which Luhmann theorizes the educative system, from a critical form to center the suitable approach to know the multiplicity of elements from the educative system. Luhmann’s foundations are criticized and other levels are proposed, from a critical vision of social..