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Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1988 3(4):383-393; doi:10.1093/hgs/3.4.383
© 1988 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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Articles

‘Faith, Ethics and the Holocaust’

ESSAY: THE MORALITY OF AUSCHWITZ: MORAL LANGUAGE AND THE NAZI ETHIC*

PETER J. HAAS

Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee

The Holocaust radically challenges contemporary moral philosophy's assumption that a common set of premises exists for defining good. The Holocaust shows that ethical systems are linked not by a common rational content, but by a common pattern of discourse. Therefore, almost any content can be adapted to the pattern of discourse of an ethical system. The Holocaust did not happen because people are evil, nor was it a case of banality run amok. Rather, the Holocaust was possible because a significant critical mass of people did not find it to be an evil from which they should abstain. Hence, the question to be asked regarding the ethics of various groups, such as churches, physicians and academics, is not why they were absent, but how they were co-opted by the Nazi ethic.

*Presented at the ‘Remembering for the Future’ Conference, Oxford, 10–13 July 1988.


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