Q&A: The Nazis and the Question of Moral Judgment
The Nazis and the Question of Moral Judgment
Question
Regarding your approach to judging evil actions and the connection to the Nazis, I have a certain lack of clarity. I’ll phrase it this way:
According to you, there is no justification for saying that the Nazis were immoral people. Because when judging a person, one must take into account his own positions. And from this it follows that the act may indeed be immoral (murder), but since it is possible that the Nazis had a different theory—for example, that the Jews want to kill us—then from their point of view the killing is not immoral. At most, there is a mistake about the facts or a lack of motivation to think properly, but that does not really make the person blatantly immoral.
My question: I agree with this framework, but it seems that sometimes one can more or less identify whether the act was done as a result of an excuse or out of evil. For example—if the Nazis truly thought that the Jews were problematic and so on, then they should have imprisoned the Jews, wanted proportionate punishment, and so forth. The very fact that they carried out horrifying experiments and other atrocious acts shows that this was pure evil.
If so, why did you reach the conclusion that they were not immoral people?
Answer
I did not reach that conclusion. I only said that if that was their theory, there is room for the claim that they were not immoral. Since I do not know what was in their hearts, I did not enter into a diagnostic discussion about them themselves.
Your argument regarding the abuse is correct in principle. But it is possible that this too follows from their theory. Harmful creatures should be abused so that others will see and fear. Or that Jews do not count as human beings, and therefore abusing them is not so severe. And so on. But as I said, the discussion of the Nazis was not my goal. I used them in order to clarify the map and the different possibilities.