>> It's my great pleasure to

introduce my colleague, Claudia

Card, who is a UW Alum.

I'm not going to tell you

exactly when she graduated, but

she's one of ours.

After having taken her

undergraduate degree here, she

went off to Harvard to earn her

PhD.

During the point at which she

was completing her PhD she came

back to her Alma Mater and began

teaching for us, and has been

doing for about 47 years.

Not only is Professor Card a

member of our department, she's

also affiliated with the Jewish

Studies program, the Women's

Studies program, the Institute

for Environmental Studies and

the LGBTQ Studies program as

well.

She's the author of four books.

She's edited six more.

She's the author of over 90

articles, many of which are

reprinted in anthologies and

translated into a variety of

languages.

Professor Card has delivered

over 300 talks in her career.

She's currently working on two

books, an introduction to

feminist philosophy, and a third

in a trilogy on evil.

This first two installments of

which were published to great

acclaim, The Atrocity Paradigm,

that was published by Oxford

University Press in 2006 and

Confronting Evils published by

Cambridge in 2010.

Professor Card has earned a

number of awards including the

Distinguished Woman Philosopher

of the Year in 1996, and the

NEH, an ACLS award.

She's been a resident fellow

with the Institute for Research

and Humanities here, as well as

a senior fellow.

And she's won the university's

Hilldale Award, a kind of

capstone career award for

excellence in teaching service

and research.

She's been a past-president of

the Central Division of the

American Philosophical

Association.

And her work has been the

subject of three volumes of

collected essays by those who've

been impressed by her impact

within the field.

Professor Card has been an

influential mentor to

generations of graduate students

here at UW.

She is renowned for her

groundbreaking work in feminist

philosophy, and in moral

philosophy more generally.

She's been quite generous with

her time, giving dozens of

public lectures.

This is only the latest of

which, and over 20 times she's

been invited to talk on the

radio and on television.

I hope you'll join me

enthusiastically in welcoming my

colleague, Claudia Card, who

will be talking this night about

genocide and social death.

[applause]

>> Thank you, Russ, for that

generous introduction.

Genocide has become the

paradigm atrocity of our time.

Etymologically, the word

"genocide" which was coined less

than a century ago, should mean

the killing of a tribe.

But most victims of genocide

today are not what we would

naturally call tribes.

For this reason, among others,

not everyone understands

genocide in the same way.

The International Association of

Genocide Scholars asks on its

membership application form,

what definition of genocide do

you use in your work?

Here are some questions commonly

asked by those who think about

genocide and those who may have

obligations to respond to

genocides.

The basic philosophical question

would naturally be, what is a

genocide?

Under that, widely discussed

questions are, how does it

differ from non-genocidal

mass-murder, such as the

Oklahoma City bombing or the

Tokyo subway gassing, the

bombings of 9/11, or even the

Columbine High School massacre?

Is mass murder even necessary

for genocide?

As a crime, is genocide

redundant, given the already

existing war crimes and crimes

against humanity?

That is, does it identify

something new?

Is genocide the worst crime, or

the most evil, that you can

imagine?

Against what kinds of groups can

genocide be committed?

Could there, for example, be a

gay genocide?

Would femicide be a kind of

genocide?

What about people with

disabilities?

What about evil groups?

What kinds of acts can be

genocidal?

What underlies the judgment that

genocide is never justifiable or

even excusable?

I begin with the idea that

genocide is the murder of a

people or other significant

community.

My hypothesis is that social

death is utterly central to the

idea of murdering a people.

Social death is a concept I

borrow from historian Orlando

Patterson's book, Slavery and

Social Death, which was

published in 1982.

You'll see on your handout, on

the back, there's a bibliography

of works, some of which I will

refer to, and others of which I

have found helpful.

Patterson used the concept of

social death to describe the

plight of slaves who were

captured in Africa and survived

the middle passage to the

Americas.

They were torn from their roots,

chained together with others who

spoke different languages.

And in the New World they were

robbed of the security of even

their own family connections by

the practice of selling off

children, spouses, and other

kin.

In the Americas, Patterson

argued, relationships among

slaves had no social security,

and so slaves, he

concluded, were socially dead.

Later generations of slaves who

were born to a condition of

social death were said by

Patterson to be natally

alienated, cut off from social

ties in both directions, both to

their ancestors and to their

progeny.

These are controversial

hypotheses among historians of

slavery in the Americas who take

seriously the idea of a slave

culture.

To the extent that those critics

are right about slave culture,

genocides may offer clearer

instances of social death than

slavery offered, at least,

slavery in the Americas.

To understand social death,

I start with the idea of social

vitality, and then understand

social death as a deprivation or

loss of social vitality.

By social vitality I understand

the meanings, shapes, and

contents given to the lives of

individuals by social

relationships, both personal and

institutional, contemporary and

intergenerational, that unite

them into a people or other

significant community.

Social vitality takes many

forms.

Linguistic, educational,

political, economic, artistic,

and religious institutions all

contribute, as do friendship and

kinship networks.

Major loss of social vitality is

a loss of social identity, and

consequently, a serious loss of

meaning for your existence.

Putting social death at the

center takes the focus off body

counts, and puts it instead on

the kinds of relationships that

give meaning to the lives of

individuals.

Social death, so understood, has

degrees, and as we will see, it

typically has stages.

Sometimes, social vitality is

recoverable or re-creatable in

new forms.

Often it is not.

Social death sounds like

something suffered by a group.

It is.

But what makes social death

morally significant is that it

is suffered by individuals,

members of the group, in virtue

of their group membership.

It robs their lives of meaning,

or robs them of the ability to

give meaning to their lives, and

in so doing, robs them of

fundamental aspects of their

humanity.

The social death of individuals

can have other sources than

genocide; slavery, banishment,

disfigurement, illness, even

self-chosen isolation, becoming

a hermit.

But in most of these cases, one

is not ordinarily cut off from a

shared language, history,

traditions, and so on.

In genocide, social death is

extreme.

I take seriously Nietzsche's

observation that only what has

no history is definable, that

is, in terms of necessary and

sufficient conditions.

And so, I want to leave the

notion of being "utterly

central" relatively undefined.

But when I say that social death

is utterly central, I mean at

least that it is a salient

characteristic of most paradigm

instances.

Also, that it is a useful

concept for appreciating the

kind of evil that genocide is.

Social death enables us to

distinguish genocide from other

mass atrocities.

It is useful for explaining in

what sense genocide is a form of

murder and how it differs from

other murders.

It helps for identifying the

sorts of human groups that can

be victims of genocide, which is

a matter of some consequence in

international law.

It should be useful for

identifying a

genocide-in-progress, where

intervention might interrupt it

before it ran its course.

It is a gross understatement to

say genocide is wrong.

Genocide is not just wrong.

It is an evil, and not in the

popular loose sense of "evil"

that applies to anything bad or

wrong but in that stricter,

narrower, more specific sense in

which "evil" is a very strong

term of approbrium.

According to some, including my

teacher, Emeritus Professor

Marcus Singer, it is the

strongest term of approbrium

available to us.

For the past decade and a half,

I have focused my research and

writing on evils and the concept

of evil.

In doing so, I have taken on two

tasks.

First, I try to distinguish

evils from lesser wrongs and

lesser bads.

Evils, on my view, are not just

worse, they are also more

complex.

The second kind of task has been

to work through some tough moral

and conceptual questions

regarding particular evils,

especially, torture, terrorism,

and genocide.

To give you a quick overview, I

come to different conclusions

regarding terrorism, torture,

and genocide.

In the case of terrorism, I

found I had to allow the

possibility that in some

circumstances, in response to

some atrocities, there are forms

of terrorism that are not evils,

even if they are wrong, but

those forms do not include

torture or genocide.

And by the way, genocide tends

to include both torture and

terrorism.

The reason I find some forms of

terrorism not evils is not that

they are not extremely harmful,

obviously they are, but that

they can be if not justifiable,

then at least partly excusable.

In the case of torture, I defend

the view that torture is an evil

that should never be on the

table as a permissible option,

whether for an individual or a

government, whether for a

particular act or as a policy,

even though, like slavery,

torture is not wrong by

definition.

We can construct logically

possible cases in which all the

alternatives appear worse.

I appeal, rather, to the moral

costs of torture as well as to

empirical probabilities

regarding what we can know and

what we can control.

Because neither torture nor

terrorism is wrong by

definition, there is room for

argument about their

justifiability or excusability.

In contrast, if genocide is

understood as the murder of a

people, there is no room for

argument regarding its

justifiability.

Murder is, by definition,

wrongful.

Homicide can be justified, in

self-defense, for example,

murder cannot.

Killing in justifiable

self-defense is not murder.

In this respect, the philosopher

who confronts the phenomena of

genocide is in a position

analogous to that of the

philosopher who confronts the

phenomena of rape.

The question is not when, if

ever, it is justified.

The questions are, rather, how

we are to recognize instances of

it and how it might be morally

justifiable to respond.

And yet, it might seem an

arbitrary stipulation, it seemed

so to some of my first year FIG

students a couple years ago, to

say that genocide is wrong by

definition.

So I'll have more to say about

that and in defense of my view

that it is not an arbitrary

stipulation.

No scholars or politicians that

I know of who have tried to

define genocide have taken the

view that it could ever be

anything but wrong.

The genocide convention of 1948

took as its task the definition

of a crime that had not

previously been defined in

international law.

Still, it is a philosophically

interesting question how, apart

from size of the target,

destroying an evil group differs

from genocide.

Consider, for example, the

organization known in the 1940s

as "Murder, Inc."

and later as "the Syndicate"

and "the Mob."

This organization was described

by authors of the book

Murder, Inc. as a "fantastic

ring of killers and

extortionists" that constituted

organized crime in the United

States.

They report that in one

decade, Murder, Inc. was

responsible for a thousand

murders "from New England to

California."

If you think this group was too

small or too thin to constitute

a people, then, consider the Ku

Klux Klan, a group much larger

and more complex in its

activities.

When sociologist Kathy Blee

interviewed women in Indiana who

had been members of the Klan in

the 1920s, they described it

nostalgically as a way to

socialize with like-minded

others.

Or, consider the Nazi Party.

One reason I cite Murder, Inc.

and the Klan is that I don't

like to always be citing Nazis.

[laughter]

It seems more appropriate for

me, as an American, to mention

homegrown evil organizations.

The vitality contributed to the

lives of members of these

organizations was easily as

important to their lives as the

vitality contributed by a

national or religious culture.

Many mass atrocities are

recognized as genocides even

though it is not clear that

their victims are, strictly

speaking, a people.

The Cambodian genocide, for

example, in which both

perpetrators and victims

belonged to the same people.

On the view that social death is

central to genocide, it should

be natural to ask whether it

would be committing genocide to

destroy an evil group that gave

meaning to the lives of its

members.

If it were, we could no longer

define "genocide" as the

" murder

of a people" but would have to

allow the possibility of

justified genocides.

I regard this as

"the Murder, Inc. problem,"

and I will return to it.

To show that genocide is always

an evil, it is necessary first

to say something about what

conception of evil is in play

here, and I turn to that next.

Mine, of course.

In my first evil book,

The Atrocity Paradigm,

I developed a theory of evil

that takes large-scale mass

atrocities as paradigms.

By a "paradigm," I mean an

uncontroversial instance,

something that is

uncontroversially an evil.

If large-scale mass atrocities

are not evils, I cannot imagine

what would be.

My approach is secular.

I do not presuppose a

theological context, although my

approach is compatible with most

aspects of the theological

problem of evil, which ponders

how an omnipotent and perfectly

good creator could create a

world as flawed by evils as

ours.

My initial definition was that

evils are, "reasonably

foreseeable intolerable harms,

produced, maintained,

aggravated, supported, and so on

by culpable wrongdoing."

I changed "culpable wrongdoing"

to "inexcusable wrongs" in my

second evil book, that is,

Confronting Evils: Terrorism,

Torture, and Genocide .

The resulting revised definition

is that evils are reasonably

foreseeable intolerable harms,

produced, maintained,

aggravated, supported, and so on

by inexcusable wrongs.

So understood, evils have two

basic, irreducibly distinct

component, an agency component

and a harm component, connected

by reasonably foreseeable

causality.

Notice that I take the noun

"evils," plural, as the basic

concept.

I am not interested in the idea

of evil as a mysterious or

metaphysical force.

I treat adjectival uses of

"evil" as derivative from the

noun use.

An evil intention, for example,

is an intention, without excuse,

to do reasonably foreseeable

intolerable harm.

An evil practice is one that

inexcusably does reasonably

foreseeable intolerable harm.

A practice that is inexcusable

today might have been excusable

in the past, not then an evil

but an evil today.

Perhaps some forms of slavery

My motivating interest is in

identifying deeds, practices,

and institutions that are evils,

not in labeling perpetrators,

even though I think that can

sometimes be done.

I want to highlight more the

plight of victims and resist

becoming immersed in perpetrator

psychology.

This is an ethical conception of

evils in that it presupposes the

idea of moral wrongs.

Atrocities do not include

natural catastrophes, although

natural catastrophes can be just

as harmful.

I will not try to define

"wrongs."

But my definition of evils is

compatible with many

non-utilitarian theories of the

distinction between right and

wrong.

Key concepts that require

clarification then are

"intolerable" in the

"intolerable harm," and

"inexcusable" in "inexcusable

wrongs."

To show that social death is

necessarily evil I need to

to show that it's intolerably

harmful.

I take it that's obvious, so I'm

not going to spend any time on

that.

That it's always wrong.

There's where I'm going to focus

my attention.

And that there's no excuse for

it.

To show that there's no excuse

for it would require me to get

into perpetrator psychology in a

way that I don't want to do

tonight.

By intolerable harms what I

mean is substantial deprivations

of basics that are ordinarily

necessary for a life or a

death to be decent.

That is, decent for the person

whose life or death

it is.

Such basics, in the case of a

life include such things as

access to non-toxic air, water,

and food, the ability to move

your limbs, to sit, stand, or

lie down, to make choices and

act on some of them, to have

affective bonds with others and

interaction with some of them,

to be free from severe and

unremitting pain or humiliation,

and so on.

These are things that cut across

cultural differences and stem

from our common needs, not only

as members of a species but

as mammals.

How much deprivation?

Enough to make a life or death

indecent, and so intolerable,

for the person whose life or

death it is.

What makes a harm intolerable is

not primarily a matter of

subjective preference, even if

subjective preference is not

totally eliminable.

This is a normative conception

of the intolerable, not what

you cannot in fact tolerate but

more like what you shouldn't

have to.

Millions tolerate the

intolerable daily.

Next, let's consider inexcusable

wrongs.

Wrongs can be inexcusable in

either of two ways, and evils

are inexcusable in both.

First, what I call a

metaphysical excuse exists when

you act under diminished

capacity, such as physical

disability or mental illness.

Second, what I call a moral

excuse exists when you have a

partial moral justification.

There is some excuse, morally

speaking, when you have some

good moral reason for what you

did, even though that reason is

not good enough to justify your

deed on the whole.

What is justified, of course,

needs no excuse.

There is usually some reason for

any deed.

But not every reason carries

moral weight.

When it does not, if the deed is

wrong, there is no moral excuse

for it.

Evils, on my view, are

inexcusable both metaphysically

and morally.

Perhaps it is too strong to say

there is absolutely no moral or

metaphysical excuse for an evil.

It may be more plausible to say

there is nothing approaching a

very good moral reason, allowing

that there may be trivial ones,

and there is no significantly

diminished capacity to act,

allowing for the possibility of

some degree of difficulty.

Those are basically friendly

amendments.

Further, as I understand a moral

reason, a reason that carries

some moral weight for some deeds

may carry none at all for

other deed.

For example, the fact that

someone's feelings would be hurt

if you did or didn't do

something carries some moral

weight as a reason to not always

speak frankly, but carries no

moral weight at all as a reason

to kill someone.

The etymology of "genocide"

leaves open the question whether

it is necessarily an evil.

The word "genocide," as I

mentioned, is of relatively

recent origin.

It was not a crime charged at

Nuremberg in 1945.

But scholars tend to agree that

the practice is ancient,

extending at least back to the

5th century destruction of the

people of the island of Melos by

the Athenians.

Archeological evidence suggests

that it goes probably further

back than recorded history.

By the way, although the

destruction of the people of the

island of Melos is generally

regarded as a genocide, the

Athenians did not kill everyone.

They killed the men, and

enslaved women and children

which was a common practice at

the time.

The result was that the people

of the island was destroyed as a

people.

The hybrid term "genocide"

was coined by Raphael Lemkin

who was a Polish Jewish attorney

who came to the United States

as a refugee from Hitler.

He combined the Greek "genos"

which meant tribe or race,

with the Latin "cide," killing,

to form the hybrid "genocide,"

the "killing, or cutting down,

of a people."

Genocide is one of those

Greek/Latin hybrid concepts,

like homosexual, where "homo"

means "same," as in Greek, not

"man," as in Latin;

anthropocentric, human centered,

is another.

The Latin "cide" is from a verb

that meant "to cut down."

It could be applied cutting

down trees but was also used to

mean "to kill."

I have to thank to my colleagues

who read Latin for this bit of

information, Steve Nadler and

Paula Gottlieb.

And so, etymology seems to leave

open the question of

justifiability, which means that

more needs to be said to justify

understanding genocide as not

just a kind of destruction but

as a kind of murder.

Knowing something of the history

of Lemkin's coinage of this

concept is helpful.

Lemkin began agitating for an

international recognition of the

crime of genocide in the 1930s.

His paradigm was the Turks'

slaughter of the Armenian

Christians in 1915, under cover

of WWI and led by Talat Pasha,

one of the leaders of the

Committee of Union and Progress

that controlled the Ottoman

Empire during the First

World War.

The slaughter of the Armenians

was also a paradigm for Hitler,

who asked, "Who today speaks of

the Armenians?"

To this day, Turkey denies

that the slaughter of the

Armenians was a genocide, and

the United States officially

agrees, presumably to maintain

good relations with Turkey.

But there appears to be

consensus among genocide

scholars that it was.

Lemkin's issue was this: Piracy

was a crime under international

law, but there was no crime for

which Talat Pasha could be

prosecuted under international

law for master-minding the

slaughter of the Armenians.

This struck Lemkin as absurd;

surely, the extermination of a

people is worse than an act of

piracy.

Eventually, Talat Pasha was

assassinated by a young Armenian

survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian who

was then tried and acquitted on

grounds that we would call today

"temporary insanity."

Again, Lemkin was outraged.

This time he was outraged that

it could be a prosecutable crime

for Tehlirian to assassinate

Talat Pasha but not a crime for

Talat Pasha to have the

Armenians slaughtered, and that

the only way to hold Talat Pasha

accountable was assassination,

rather than due process of law.

And so Lemkin agitated for years

for an international convention

to define the crime of genocide.

It took place in 1948.

The 1948 Genocide Convention

was accepted by the U.N. the

same month as the International

Declaration of Human Rights.

Its definition is the most

widely cited.

"Genocide means any of the

following acts committed with

the intent to destroy, in whole

or in part, a nation, ethnical,

racial, or religious group, as

such--

And here are the following acts;

killing members of the group,

causing serious bodily or mental

harm to members of the group,

deliberately inflicting on the

group conditions of life

calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or

in part, imposing measures

intended to prevent births

within the group, and forcibly

transferring children of the

group to another group."

Not until the 1990s was this

Convention actually enforced.

The United States did not ratify

it until the late 1980s under

President Reagan.

Wisconsin Senator William

Proxmire had made a speech to

the Senate every day for 19

years urging its ratification.

Every clause of the U.N.

definition has been

controversial: the scope and

content of "intent," the meaning

of "in whole or in part," and

the scope of the whole

definition: is it too narrow

because it names only four kinds

of groups and only five kinds of

activity?

Does it threaten to be too

broad, because of the

non-homicidal acts it includes

as apparently sufficient when

coupled with the right sort of

intent?

Let's start with intent.

If intent is understood narrowly

to mean aim, then the

destruction of a people as a

reasonably foreseeable

consequence that was neither an

aim nor a means to an aim would

not count, on this definition,

as genocide.

It would be merely

"collateral damage".

And so, for example, the deaths

of millions of Native Americans

from diseases brought over by

Europeans would not count as

genocides except where those

deaths were aimed at.

Using this narrow understanding

of "intent," Hugo Adam Bedau

who is known for his campaign

against the death penalty wrote

an essay defending the United

States in Vietnam against the

charge of genocide raised by the

Jean-Paul Sartre/Bertrand

Russell genocide convention that

was held-- I'll bet you didn't

know about that.

That was held in 1967 in

Stockholm and Copenhagen.

But if we understand more

broadly as part of one's intent

the reasonably foreseeable

consequences that one is

prepared to accept as the price

of attaining one's aim, even

though they are not instrumental

toward its attainment, then

maybe the case of at least some

of the Native American nations

that died from European diseases

is not so clear.

On this broader understanding of

intent, it has been argued that

Josef Stalin's economic policies

that resulted in the starvation

of millions of Ukrainian

peasants in 1932-33 were

genocidal, because those

consequences were utterly

foreseeable by those who were

responsible.

It was not a means but a price

that Stalin was willing to pay

to achieve his aims.

I'll save, for the moment, the

questions regarding "in whole or

in part," because addressing

those questions will lead me to

Lemkin's alternative definition

of genocide.

Regarding the scope of the U.N.

definition, the question of

narrowness has been raised both

in regard to the acts and in

regard to the groups enumerated.

In regard to acts, some have

asked why only these and not

others, such as forcible

expulsion or rape aimed at

enforced pregnancy?

But the U.N. definition, as

stated, does not preclude a

continuation of the list of

acts.

It doesn't say these are the

only ones.

Since the 1990s wars in the

former Yugoslavia, it has come

to be widely understood that

mass rape can be among acts

constitutive of genocide.

That war also raises the

question of mass expulsion,

which should get us to think

about whether Spain's expulsions

of the Jews in the late 15th

century and of the Moriscos in

the 17th century were instances

of genocide.

Depending on how it is done,

mass expulsion has the potential

to become genocidal.

Expulsion of the Armenian

Christians could be argued to be

genocidal not only because of

the shootings but because of the

well-known harsh environmental

conditions under which the

Armenians were forced to flee.

In regard to groups named, many

have asked, why limit possible

targets of genocide to

"national, ethnical, racial, or

religious" groups?

Why not include political

groups?

And what about targeting the

disabled?

What about gays?

females?

evil groups?

Whether to include political

groups was controversial during

the convention.

Political commitments are as

important and definitive for

some people as religious

commitments are for others.

Political communities as well as

religious communities give

meaning and shape to the lives

of their members.

Some have argued that the

definition should include only

groups into which you are born,

about which you have no choice.

But that is not necessarily true

of religious groups and national

groups.

Some prefer the term

"politicide" for elimination of

political groups, even if the

elimination is massively

homicidal, and "ethnicide" for

cultural genocides that are not

massively homicidal.

A commonly cited example of

"politicide" is Josef Stalin's

purges of his perceived

political opponents.

A commonly cited example of

cultural genocide is the

transportation and reeducation

of children, as was done to

Native American children in this

country, and to mixed race

children in Australia.

The apparent objective in each

case was assimilation into a

cultural group other than their

culture of origin, and the

policies included such measures

as forbidding the children to

use their native language or

communicate with their families

of origin.

Those who favored including

"politicides" in the definition

lost at the 1948 convention

whereas those who favored

including forced cultural

assimilations won their point.

That inclusion means that, on

this definition, a genocide need

not be massively homicidal.

A philosophically interesting

question that the convention

apparently did not consider is

the Murder, Inc. problem.

What about evil groups?

If a group is so evil that its

destruction appears to be

justified, why should that

destruction not count as a

genocide?

When the Southern Poverty Law

Center destroys white

supremacist groups by

bankrupting them, why is it not

committing genocide?

Why was de-Nazification not a

genocidal process?

Dismantling of those groups

might sound like condition "c"

of the U.N. definition:

deliberately imposing conditions

of life calculated to bring

about the group's destruction.

A first response is that these

ways of destroying evil

organizations still respected

the human rights of the members

of those organizations.

Genocides do not.

And that is true.

A second response might be that,

aside from the truth or falsity

of things attributed to members

of a people, a people cannot be

evil because a people is not

the kind of group that can act

and so cannot be guilty of

inexcusable wrongs.

I think that is also true.

And yet, some targets of

genocide have been groups that

can act: the ancient city of

Carthage, for example, and the

inhabitants of the island of

Melos who refused to pay tribute

to the Athenians.

Here is another way to think

about what distinguishes the

destruction of evil groups from

genocides.

It is not just that these groups

are too small or too thin to

constitute a people, although

they are.

Some peoples are larger and

richer, more layered, than

others.

Sometimes the "tribe" targeted

by a genocide is better thought

of simply as a community that

significantly gives meaning and

identity to its members.

We might get an interesting

answer it we can explain the

following disanalogy between

killing an evil person and

destroying an evil group.

Killing an evil person is still

murder, unless it is done in

self-defense, understood fairly

narrowly.

The fact that you are evil is

not sufficient to justify

someone in killing you.

But it can be justifiable to

destroy an evil group, as the

Southern Poverty Law Center does

when it bankrupts white

supremacist groups with

lawsuits.

Why is killing an evil group not

murder, if killing an evil

individual is?

A possible rationale is that the

principles or projects that a

person endorses at a particular

time do not define or determine

the value of the person.

The person is someone who has

the capacity to evaluate such

things, to adopt or reject them,

to discover errors, correct

mistaken judgments and identify

other mistakes.

Persons have the capacity to

correct or improve themselves,

even when they don't do it.

With a different set of

principles and projects, you are

still the same person, morally

speaking, who did what you did

when you espoused a different

set of principles and projects.

You may feel like a new person.

But you are responsible for all

of it.

But, for some human groups, for

example, some evil organizations

principles and projects really

do define the organization.

There is no way to reject those

defining principles while

preserving the organization.

Other human groups, such as

states that have a constitution

and organized religions that

have processes for re-evaluating

and re-interpreting their

positions or policies, are, like

individuals, capable of

self-correction.

A people has within itself

resources for evaluating

positions taken by some of its

members, and the value of a

people, somewhat like the value

of a person, is not a function

of particular projects that

might be found within it.

But organizations like Murder,

Inc. have as their

raisons d'etre the perpetration

of such deeds as murder for

hire and extortion.

There was no way to eliminate

those policies without the

organization's ceasing to have

its reason for existing.

There is no meaningful

distinction to be drawn here

between the principles and

projects that define the

organization and the

organization itself.

The German state under Third

Reich had too little capability

of self-correction.

People within Germany tried to

get rid of Hitler.

There were at least 13 failed

attempts, according to one

documentary on this topic.

But there was no effective

internal mechanism, such as

impeachment, for doing so.

What is destroyed when such a

group is destroyed are,

basically, the inhumane projects

to which it is committed.

Likewise with Murder, Inc.

and, I suspect, with the Ku Klux

Klan.

If there is any plausibility in

this kind of explanation, then

to be a potential target of

genocide, it would not be enough

that the relationships defining

the group in question gave

meaning, shape, and content to

the lives of their members.

They must give a decent sort of

meaning, shape, and content.

The group must, at any rate, not

have as its raison d'etre an

evil project or set of evil

projects.

A people is a kind of group that

evolves, not something that is

ordinarily deliberately

constituted, the way an

organization is deliberately

created.

A people as such is not the kind

of group that can be said to

have defining projects, although

a state might have them.

But not all peoples have states.

The Diaspora Jews and the Sinti

and Roma of Europe during the

reign of Hitler were peoples

without states.

Perhaps the idea that it is not

necessarily evil to destroy an

evil group might partly explain

how some ordinary Germans, not

Nazis or members of the

government or military, could be

as complicit as so many were in

Hitler's Final Solution.

Nazi propaganda portrayed the

Jews as an evil people, and

paranoid propaganda portrayed

that people as embarked on a

project of world domination.

I don't think the idea of an

evil people makes sense; it

presupposes that a people can be

an agent.

But a people does not have

enough internal cohesion for

that to be the case.

That point aside, Nazi

propaganda portraying the Jews

as an evil people could at best

only partly explain the

complicity of ordinary Germans.

For it matters when a group is

destroyed how that is done.

Individual members of even an

evil group would still have

human rights.

The Southern Poverty Law Center

does not kill white

supremacists.

It bankrupts their

organizations.

And so, even the misguided and

confused belief by ordinary

Germans that the Jews were an

evil people would not explain

their complicity in the killing

of individual Jews.

I want to move on now from the

non-arbitrariness of

understanding genocide as a kind

of murder, which I don't think

it is arbitrary, to consider

some other groups that are not

mentioned in the U.N.

definition.

What about the idea of a gay

genocide?

Would that idea make sense?

Gays are not a people or any

kind of tribe.

If the question is about all the

gays in the world, they do not

form a community and never have,

although there have been many

gay communities.

Men who were identified as

homosexuals and forced to wear

the "pink triangle" in Nazi

camps suffered losses of social

vitality specific to their being

gay if they had been members of

gay communities.

Gay communities can shape and

animate the lives of their

members in positive ways which

is especially important in the

context of a larger social world

that rejects them.

Does the forcibly imposed loss

of such social vitality

constitute a gay genocide?

The philosopher James Nickel, in

an interesting essay on four

ways of getting rid of groups,

mentions the case of forcibly

re-educating homosexuals as

analogous to the forced

assimilation of cultural groups,

which he regards as not

ordinarily genocidal.

But the men of the pink

triangles were persecuted and

ostracized, not re-educated.

They resemble victims of a

genocide to the extent that

their lives had importantly

gained positive meaning from gay

communities to which they

belonged, which were destroyed.

Yet those communities were far

younger, transitory, in flux and

inevitably less richly textured

and layered than communities

constituted by sharers of a

natural language, religion, and

multi-generational traditions.

Gay communities are like many

political communities, and many

are political communities,

pockets of resistance to

prevailing norms.

Still, those communities were

only part of what gave shape and

meanings to the lives of their

members.

The members of gay communities

also had many other communities

of origin.

Gay communities can have a

life-saving impact on those who

are otherwise cultural rejects.

But many then as now did not

belong to gay communities.

Many have been, and are today,

married to someone of another

sex.

The men most likely to be

rounded up and sent to

concentration camps were those

who met at gay bars or gay

parties or were activists.

The philosopher Ludwig

Wittgenstein's idea of family

resemblance concepts is useful

for thinking about the extent to

which the idea of a gay genocide

makes sense.

Destruction of gay communities

is hardly a paradigm of

genocide.

But it does bear some relevant

similarities and so, when the

assault is systematic, it might

find a place in the extended

family of genocidal assaults.

The way to think about it, on

the social death hypothesis, is

to consider to what extent the

destroyed community had

contributed meaning and identity

to its members and whether the

loss of those meanings would

leave those individuals socially

dead.

The idea of a genocide of the

disabled stretches the concept

of genocide even further.

And yet, there are communities

built around the needs and

interests of persons with

specific kinds of disabilities,

and it is not impossible that

they might be targeted for

elimination.

Hitler's euthanasia program

targeted individuals with

disabilities, not communities.

But were a tyrant with similar

ambitions to come to power

today, such communities might be

targeted.

But what some feminist scholars

call "femicide," the systematic

murder of females, for example,

by exposing infants, is not a

form of genocide.

Females are a class, a category,

but not a community.

Classes or categories are not

the right sorts of groups to be

targets of genocide.

The class of all the individuals

who were in the Twin Towers on

9/11 does not define a group

that it would make any sense to

regard as a target of genocide.

When Marc Lépine entered a

classroom in Montreal in 1989,

announced that he was "fighting

feminism," separated the men

from the women, shot nine women,

killing six, and then roamed the

hallways shooting more women,

14 all told, he became a mass

murderer but not a perpetrator

of genocide.

Feminist scholars rightly call

this a femicide.

But femicide is not an instance

of genocide.

Last month a cadet at the U.S.

Air Force Academy in Colorado

Springs posed the following

question to me after I gave a

version of this talk.

Was Hitler's destruction of the

Czech city of Lidice in response

to the assassination of

Reinhard Heydrich, a genocide?

Was Hitler's destruction of the

city of Lidice a genocide?

I thought that was an astute

question.

If the city of Carthage was a

victim of genocide, why not the

city of Lidice?

Again, I would say the way to

think about it is to consider to

what extent that city defined

the social vitality of its

members.

The city of Lidice was part of

the larger Czech state that was

surely also a contributor to the

social vitality of the

inhabitants of its cities, which

makes the case more complicated

than that of Carthage.

There is more to be said, but I

want now to leave the worry that

the U.N. definition may be too

narrow and turn to the worry

that it may be too wide, because

of the phrase "in whole or in

part."

On the commonest interpretation

of "in whole or in part,"

that phrase invites the

question, how big does the part

have to be?

For example, how many need be

killed?

One person is a part of a group.

Yet the murder of one person is

not a genocide, though it can be

a hate crime.

And what if there are survivors?

Has a people really been killed

if there are survivors?

And by the way, there are almost

always some survivors.

How severe must the harm be?

Must it be irreversible?

how many need be harmed?

How many children need be

transferred?

Must they be permanently lost to

their communities of origin?

How much physical destruction

must there be?

How much birth prevention, and

so on?

The U.N. definition invites

these sorts of questions.

One of the provisos with which

the United States eventually

accepted the genocide convention

was that the "part" had

to be "a substantial part."

It seems there is no

non-arbitrary way to draw a line

between genocides and less

massive atrocities.

In contrast to the U.N.

definition, Raphael Lemkin's

approach, which fits well with

my social death hypothesis, does

not so naturally invite

questions of "how many?"

On his view, genocides victimize

members of a group generally.

Instead of interpreting "in

whole or in part" as a matter of

how many individuals were killed

or harmed, Lemkin looks at the

kinds of relationships and the

kinds of social institutions

that define a group as a people.

For example, its educational

institutions, it child-rearing

practices, its language, its

economic practices, its

political practices, its

religion or religions.

These are what he regards as the

group's essential foundations.

He defines genocide as "a

coordinated plan of different

actions aiming at the

destruction of these essential

foundations of the life of

national groups, with the aim of

annihilating the groups

themselves"

The aim of annihilating the

group is attached, in Lemkin's

definition, to the overall plan

that aims to destroy foundations

of the life of the group.

The U.N. definition, in

contrast, attaches the aim of

destroying the group to the

enumerated kinds of actions,

thereby inviting the question

how many such actions need be

performed?

How many people need be killed,

in order for that action to be

constitutive of a genocide?

On Lemkin's view, the group is

destroyed by destroying the

relationships, contemporary and

intergenerational, personal and

institutional, that are created

by these social institutions

fundamental to defining its

members as a people.

This destruction can, and

typically does, take place in

stages, over time, as social

restrictions and prohibitions

are imposed.

It's not as though religious,

ethnical, and national groups

are different kinds of targets

of genocide.

Rather, religious, ethnic, and

political institutions are all

part of what bind individuals

together into a people, and it

is the people that is the

target.

Like the U.N. definition,

Lemkin's understanding also

allows for genocide to be a

matter of degree.

But on Lemkin's approach,

degrees are the kinds and ranges

of social vitality destroyed,

which tends to affect

individuals in the group

generally, not just a part of

them, even if not all are

affected in the same way or to

the same degree.

Here is an illustration of the

difference between the U.N.

approach and the Lemkin

approach.

Take the case of Rwanda.

After the Rwandan genocide,

President Clinton said he did

not realize how many were being

killed, as though that were key

to defining genocide.

He was thinking in terms of the

U.N. definition.

But on Lemkin's approach, we

would look for destruction of

social vitality in terms of

practices, institutions, and

relationships.

Given what is commonly known and

not known in the United States

about the Rwandan genocide,

it might appear, initially, to

us as though Rwanda were a

counter-example to my social

death hypothesis.

What seems most salient in the

case of Rwanda is the rapid mass

slaughter by machete.

Where is the social death?

But, in fact, the mass

slaughters were preceded by a

series of social restrictions

and prohibitions that actually

did destroy the social vitality

of those perceived as Tutsis,

making it much easier for Hutus

to kill them.

Samantha Powers writes in her

historical survey which she

titled A Problem from Hell, that

the Hutu newspaper Kangura

published in December 1990 a

list of "Ten Commandments of the

Hutu," governing relations

between Hutu and Tutsi.

They included such statements as

that any Hutu who marries,

befriends, or employs as a

secretary or concubine a Tutsi

woman shall be considered a

traitor, and likewise for any

Hutu who makes a business

partnership with a Tutsi,

invests money in a Tutsi

enterprise, or lends to or

borrows money from a Tutsi, and

the list goes on.

Similarly, she writes, in the

town of Celinas in northern

Bosnia non-Serbs were given

"special status" prior to

expelling them or concentrating

them in camps.

A curfew was imposed from 4 PM

to 6 AM.

Non-Serbs were prohibited from

meeting in cafes, restaurants,

or other public places, bathing

or swimming in the nearby

rivers, hunting or fishing,

moving to another town without

permission, carrying a weapon,

driving or traveling by car,

and that list goes on as well.

The restrictions were less

dramatic and less visible to

outsiders than were the mass

slaughters that followed.

But what is most dramatic and

most visible is not necessarily

what is central to the evil of

destroying a people.

A similar point can be made

regarding terrorism.

What is dramatic and most

visible is usually a spectacle,

such as a bombing; but what is

central to terrorism is a

pattern, a systematic program of

credible threats.

Lemkin also understands a

genocide as having two phases:

the first phase consists in the

destruction of a people, and the

second phase consists in the

imposition of a new people on

the land or individuals

remaining after the first phase.

Destruction of a people does not

always require mass slaughter.

Hitler reserved that measure

only for those whom he

considered un-Germanizable.

In conclusion, let's return to

the some of opening questions.

Some of them have already been

addressed at some length.

Take that first one.

How do genocides differ from

non-genocidal mass murders?

The idea of social death is

helpful.

First, the victim of genocide is

a people or a substantial

community, and the aim, or

foreseeable consequence, is to

destroy the social vitality made

possible by social institutions

and connections that make of its

members a people or community.

Mass murders can victimize

aggregates of individuals, or

categories or classes, who do

not constitute a people or

community.

Second, genocide need not be

massively homicidal on either

the U.N. definition or

Lemkin's definition.

Some genocide scholars think it

stretches the concept of

genocide too much if mass murder

is not considered essential,

with the result that genocide no

longer seems as serious a crime.

My view is, first, that it is

not obvious that social death is

less serious than physical

death.

And second, that not all

genocides are equal.

Some are much worse than others.

Much depends on how the death is

brought about.

Consider the mass rapes aimed at

enforced pregnancy perpetrated

in the former Yugoslavia in the

1990s.

This atrocity left some female

survivors little more than

gestating corpses, social

outcasts, unmarriageable, their

offspring unassimilable.

What had they to look forward to