Well, “praise” might not be exactly the right word, but I do want to argue that by and large, genocide is the least objectionable form of mass murder—for the simple reason that, when successful, it leaves no mourners. Other things being equal, meaningless deaths are best clustered among people who care about each other. I’m pretty sure I prefer the home invader who wipes out a family of five over the serial killer who takes four lives at random, leaving four devastated spouses and twelve grieving children. And likewise I prefer the mass murderer who wipes out an extended “family” of five million to the one who kills, say, four and a half million at random. Taking the death and destruction as given, sowing less misery earns you a little slack.
The countervailing argument is that when you destroy an ethnic group, you also destroy a culture. Of course, that’s of little additional consequence if the primary aficionados of that culture are all among the dead. You could counter-argue (correctly) that we all benefit from being able to dabble in a wide variety of cultures, tasting their food, listening to their music, hearing their stories, assimilating their insights. And that might very well be a significant argument in a world where a series of genocides had reduced the world’s stock of cultural diversity far below its present level. But as the world stands today, I suspect that cultures are worth very little at the margin (that is, we could stand to lose any one culture without missing it very much). There’s only so much you can assimilate in a lifetime, and to a considerable extent, time spent in contact with one culture is time not spent in contact with another.
So I’m not sure why the adjective “genocidal” is so often taken to be pejorative. I’m also not sure there’s any point to condemning some mass murderers more fervently than others, but if we’re going to play that game then I’m inclined to count genocidal intent as a mitigating circumstance.
Genocides may cause less pain in the form of grieving family members, but they cause more pain in terms of the horror felt by others around the world recoiling at the mass murder, who might not have noticed if the murders had been randomly distributed among the population.
Hitler would have caused more pain to surviving family members if he had killed taken some action that indirectly killed 6 million people at random around the world. But he wouldn’t have caused the pain that is still felt by people even today, who may lose faith in all humankind just thinking about the Holocaust.
(OK, this has been a nice intellectual exercise, but I’m pretty sure the reason we consider “genocidal” to be so perjorative is because the absolute the death toll is typically so much larger than in other types of murders. If a mass murderer really did manage to kill an equivalent number of people selected completely at randomm, I’m sure most people would have no problem condemning that person as “genocidal”, or equivalently evil!)
What a fascinating–albeit it bizarre and perverse–point of view. :-)
Do you consider it a problem with your argument that to generate the “mitigation” your viewpoint grants the genocidist, he must be totally successful. The mere goal to wipe out all Armenians, if you are successful only at wiping out 95% of Armenians, still leaves you with a grieving and horrified 5%. It does seem strange to suggest that, had you only be more successful in your efforts to kill large numbers of people, things would have been better.
Likewise, one would presumably think poorly of a murderer in court who argued that if only the judge gave him probation, he would do what he could to wipe out everyone else who knew the victim, thereby making his original crime less socially upsetting.
RL that’s comparing something else. You’re comparing someone who killed only person A and left their friend B alive, with someone who killed person A and B. Everyone agrees the double murder is worse in that case. Landsburg is considering the case where A&B know each other, and C&D know each other, and saying it’s less harmful to kill A&B vs. A&C.
An interesting and reasonable piece, but you really aren’t looking to make friends, are you :)
Which is the least bad form of mass murder? Assuming the life of each victim to be equal, then it is only the survivors that matter. The immediate family suffer far more than anyone, so on the face of it, your analysis seems correct. However, we must ensure we have accounted for all the costs.
Part of the problem is that no-one has actually caused murder on such scales without a genocidal motive, so we are only guessing what it would look like. Genocide requires the brutalisation of the committers of the atrocity, the complicity of many people who are damaged. We must include this cost. I suppose random mass murder would also require lots of contributors, so perhaps we are back where we started. The difference is that it is possible to recruit the former, but not the latter.
Any survivors of genocide are a cohesive group, with an easily identifiable perpretrator group to seek revenge on. The survivors of a random mass murder have no-one to attack. This makes attempted genocide more likely to cause reprisals, unless it is completely succesful.
There is the matter raised by Benett Hasleton, that the cumulative pain of millions is not insignificant, and continues for generations. Could this add up to more harm than greater pain of a small number of immediate family?
And finally, the matter of the value of a culture – is this really only that we can dabble in it? I tend to recoil against this assertion – surely there must be some greater intrinsic value to an entire culture – but what is it? Does a culture have a value over and above the sum of the individuals within it?
This is extraordinarily disappointing. Are you, in fact, surprised that genocides stand out among mass murders? People compare genocides not to other forms of killing millions of people but to desirable and humane behavior. do you truly desire that er do otherwise?
Genocide is not a humane act, simply for not leaving devastated mourners, and it appalls me to see it “praised”, even to make a point in a thought experiment. I understand the value of taking the controversial position, but lauding one form of atrocity over another fails to take into perspective the whole world of evil behavior. Just because one is worse than another (by your lights – I’m not sure I agree with you on this “ranking” and certainly no genocide I know of have left NO devastated survivors) doesn’t make it not fundamentally atrocious.
Harold:
Part of the problem is that no-one has actually caused murder on such scales without a genocidal motive, so we are only guessing what it would look like.
Would you count Stalin as an example?
A little early for April Fools Day, yes?
Due to network effects, I don’t think you can minimize suffering by maximizing exterminations.
Rosa: Thanks for your comment.
Are you, in fact, surprised that genocides stand out among mass murders? People compare genocides not to other forms of killing millions of people but to desirable and humane behavior. But….surely NO mass murder is desirable or humane. So I’m not sure how undesirability and inhumanity would cause genocide to stand out from the others.
I’m not sure I agree with you on this “ranking” This leaves me unsure what you’re saying. “I’m not sure I agree” seems to suggest “I might possibly agree”, which in turn seems not entirely consistent with “This is extraordinarily disappointing”.
certainly no genocide I know of have left NO devastated survivors No, but surely it tends to leave fewer devastated survivors than an equally large but more widely dispersed killing spree.
Just because one is worse than another … doesn’t make it not fundamentally atrocious. I hope you didn’t think I was disputing this.
The comments are kind of fun to watch. You argue, “genocide is bad, but murder of X people via genocide is less objectionable than murder of X people via non-genocide.”
And the commenters can’t help writing, “but genocide is bad!!”
There’s something about people that won’t let them argue about taboo subjects without acts of ritual condemnation. You say, “X is really bad, but not as bad as you think,” and they say, “BUT X IS REALLY BAD!”
That would be merely amusing, but when they get mad at you for making the point in the first place, it gets frustrating. They see “genocide” and “not bad” in the same sentence, and their logic chip gets turned off, and their self-righteousness chip gets turned on, and it’s game over for that conversation.
I’m Canadian, and I like to argue about our health care system. I say, “it’s unfortunate that the USA doesn’t cover everyone, but, if you have coverage, you get much better health care than you get here. We should keep covering everyone, but stop making it illegal for people to buy extra care than the government provides.”
And they say, “I can’t believe you’re looking to the USA as a model when they leave millions of people uninsured.”
Sometimes, once you let them get their reflex ritual condemnation out of their system, you can have a productive discussion. But usually not.
What a strange thing to think about and write about. Questioning whether killing a million similar people is less bad than killing a million less similar people isn’t a big question, it’s a really strange, small, and dumb question. You may have answered it question but you’re a huge weirdo for even bringing it up.
What next, a post about how anal incest rape is less bad than vaginal incest rape because of the lack of pregnancy risk?
You are making a relative claim of the badness of genocide of 5 million people to the random murder of 5 million people, concluding that the random murder is worse.
You admit that this does not make genocide good. It’s still bad. The part where I get confused is this:
So I’m not sure why the adjective “genocidal” is so often taken to be pejorative.
Isn’t the obvious answer that it’s pejorative because genocide is still really really bad, even if it’s somewhat better than random murder?
On a more subtle level, the coordination required to pull off complete genocide of 5 million people is different than 5 million murders at random. It seems to me that we see genocide in the same class as “cold blooded premeditated murder” and 5 million random murders in the same class as manslaughter.
I think the reason we see it this way is that the people who has the intelligence and administrative skills to pull of genocide also have many, many repeated opportunities to stop. All of which are ignored. This relatively small group of people may have maybe a million opportunities to stop before their actions are considered “genocide” and they ignore all of them. Meanwhile 5 million random each only have 1 opportunity to stop. And they ignore it alone.
The former seem like people who have no hope of being reformed into productive members of society, while we may retain some hope for the latter.
So I’m not sure how undesirability and inhumanity would cause genocide to stand out from the others.
The size and scope isn’t sufficient to you, then? It is to me. But in addition, I see a unique evil in the desire to snuff and entire people.
This leaves me unsure what you’re saying. “I’m not sure I agree” seems to suggest “I might possibly agree”, which in turn seems not entirely consistent with “This is extraordinarily disappointing”.
I’m not sure I agree — and I might possibly agree — with your ranking, though I’m not that interested in ranking atrocities, and I think it depends on the criteria one uses. What’s extraordinarily disappointing is not the ranking itself, which is merely uninteresting to me, but the title of the post and the closing question. They bookend the post such that …
“Just because one is worse than another … doesn’t make it not fundamentally atrocious.” I hope you didn’t think I was disputing this.
Although I am certain you don’t dispute this, your argument’s frame does. And that’s what’s disappointing.
“Genocide” is pejorative because it’s an evil and atrocious act. Even if we agree that there are more evil and atrocious acts, “genocide” does not cease to be so. Reframe it, sure. Praise it, no.
What about genocide vs. gendercide?
Let’s take China as an example. By 2020, there will be an estimated 35 million surplus males from sex-selective abortions — in other words, the same number of mysteriously missing females. However, these abortions are somewhat randomly spread through the population (though strangely enough, more common in wealthier areas, because of ultrasound and the like). If instead the Han Chinese decided to sterilize the entire population of the Zhuang (16 million), the Manchu (10 million), and the Hui (9 million), would this destruction of three ethnic groups be “better” or worse than the randomly spread but gender specific abortions currently happening?
I’m not even sure where to begin, here; others have already brought up good points, and all I’m left with is, why did you write this post? If you are not, in fact, praising or in any way uplifting genocide (which is itself debatable), what is your purpose?
On a slightly more specific note: we are losing cultures even without genocide. We are already impoverished for that, and many people are working hard to preserve cultures on the brink of disappearing. Using genocide to eliminate cultures is not by any means a blip on our radar; it furthers our intellectual, artistic, philosophical poverty.
Some cultures are better left for dead. (eg – ones that commit genocide).
I know we’re supposed to be economists, but do we really have to give no weight to the revulsion people feel about racism, sexism, etc.?
I want to agree with your reasoning here but I’m uncomfortable simply dismissing as a mistake the fact that people are much more fascinated and horrified by Hitler than by Stalin or Mao, despite the fact that by this standard, Stalin or Mao were far worse.
It is a fact of human nature, like it or not, that we fear random killing more than targeted killing, so long as we do not belong to the targeted group. The Green River serial murderer killed prostitutes. Had he been more random in his selection of victims, like the D.C. sniper, there would have been more effort to catch him sooner.
I meant to add that we make up for the relief we feel at not being in the targeted group by expressing our horror and revulsion that the murderer would target a certain group.
I suspect that people find genocide to be more objectionable than other forms of murder for two reasons: why the people are selected for death, and the fact that someone chose to commit murder. Approx. 70 million people were killed during WWII, of which 6 million died in the Holocaust. Why were the Holocaust deaths more horrific? Because groups of people were selected for death because of some characteristic: religion, ethnicity, or sexual identity; and because there was no rational reason to kill those people.
Contrast that with the 40 million or so civilian deaths. Those were (in a sense) randomly distributed across national populations, so no particular group was targeted; and for the most part those deaths were an incidental consequence of war. And yes, I know that many of the deaths were intended to kill large numbers of people, such as in the fire bombing of Tokyo, I’m speaking in generalities here.
So which was more morally objectionable? 6 million targeted murders, or 40 million civilian casualties? Isn’t this really an alternate version of the trolley problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem ?
The distinction between genocide and other forms of mass murder is based on intent, as far as I can see.
May I suggest that Americans and Germans, for historical reasons, are particularly inclined to see racist intent as morally aggravating? In the same way, I think that English people, for cultural reasons, are inclined to see greed as morally aggravating, and might therefore think Leopold II worse than Hitler — if they know about Leopold II. (Likewise, I understand that the 35 millions or thereabout killed by the Great Leap Forward were killed by Mao’s greed, or something very similar to greed.)
On top of that, history is to some extent written by the winners, and the Americans and British fought against Hitler, but not directly against Stalin or Mao. (In fact, both Stalin and Mao were allies at some stage.)
I myself think of Leopold II and Pol Pot as the most evil rulers of the xx century, based purely on the percentage of people under their control who were killed. (There might be others, of whom I am unaware, who killed a similar percentage; but if so they killed less than 10 million people.)
Another issue that deserves consideration: for equal number of victims, is it worse to persecute people because of their race or their political beliefs?
On the one hand, it can be argued that people can change (or hide) their political beliefs, but can do nothing about their race; and it is evil to persecute people because of something that they cannot do anything about. OTOH genocide, in itself, does not destroy democracy; killing political opponents, by destroying democracy, makes it more difficult to remove a genocidal ruler. So I cannot decide either way.
It seems to me that it depends on the form of the preferences of the people killed. If their dis-utility is convex and increasing in the number of folks killed in their community then it is better to kill more independently than in a correlated “genocidal” way.
BTW if anybody thinks that this post is provocative (which it is), then what about this:
The truth is that in modern Europe, genocide has been exclusively a socialist idea, ever since Engels proclaimed it in Marx’s journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January-February 1849.
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/watson.html
Vika: why did you write this post? Well, for the obvious reasons, namely that I think it’s worthwhile considering a) why some hideous crimes strike us as worse than others, b) whether our instincts in those matters are trustworthy, c) whether the loss of a culture is a tragedy that goes significantly beyond the loss of the lives that constitute that culture and d) if so, how to weigh that loss against the loss associated with human suffering. You appear to agree that c) and d) at least are worth considering, since you’ve addressed them, at least tangentially, in your second paragraph.
I haven’t visited his blog in quite a while, but some of your posts remind me of Scott Adams’.
Phil, I can’t believe that you want to commit a genocide of the Inuit by denying them health care!
Pat, what a wonderful point! On the one hand, anal incest rape is less bad than vaginal incest rape because of the lack of pregnancy risk, and besides, it is non-gender-discriminatory. On the other hand, it increases the chances of STD transmission. This matter obviously merits further examination. I am grateful to you for bringing it up.
Here I am trying to have a discussion about “anal incest rape,” and my comment gets held for moderation! How bizarre. :-)
if the population in question believes in an afterlife of eternal bliss, isnt one actually doing them a favor by hastening their demise? rapture = genocide?
In general, our hatred of a person as a function of the number of people they killed is non-linear. Most people would agree that killing n+1 people is worse than killing n people, but at large numbers of people, gauging ‘evilness’ is difficult (I, for one, would like to see a Marginal Evil graph on this blog :-)) Jeffrey Dahmer was certainly evil; he killed 17 people. Hitler killed about 12 million in the Holocaust. Is Hitler a million times evil-er than Dahmer? Chrisopher Columbus killed a bunch of people of the same race (though, probably just because he wanted their land) but his name isn’t immediately associated with evil (and I doubt there will ever be a Hitler Day). Mark David Chapman only killed one person (John Lennon), but he left millions of mourners. At the Kent State Massacre, only four people were killed, but the event really got people angry because of the symbolism of the whole thing, the continuing war, and so on.
Here are my best reasons for why this is true. First of all, the list of people we hate is not really a well-ordered set. For one, we can hate people ‘differently.’ I hate rapists, murderers, and the band Alice In Chains, but I hate them in different ways. Plus we generally don’t assign ‘values’ of hatred for a person. I hate Hitler a bunch and I hate Mark David Chapman alot. That alone doesn’t say Hitler was worse than Champan, just because emotions are hard to quantify.
Secondly, because hatred of a murderer is a function of several variables, it is hard to compare them. I generally find racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. repulsive. As a result, given two people who are equal in every way except that one of them is a racist, I would probably hate the racist more regardless of how many people they have (or have not) killed. If Hitler talked during movies, I’m pretty sure I would hate him (slightly) more than I do now.
So, I think that, ultimately, mass murders and other various negative qualities are all very bad, but comparing murderers is like comparing calculus exams to kidney stones. I hate both, but for different reasons and in unequal ways.
I am reminded of Neimoller’s poem “First they came for the jews, etc.” Perhaps the purpose of our outrage about genocide is to remind ourselves that we could be next.
You’re wrong for a number of reasons:
1. Few genocides are completely “successful”, and those which fall far short of 100% (that is, almost all genocides) leave a much larger set of “mourners” who aren’t merely mourning, but significantly traumatized, orders of magnitude more than the typical murder-victim-mourner. They pass on this trauma to their descendants for generations sometimes. And because it’s a genocide, it hits everyone from that group, not just those who were personally connected to those killed, so the ratio of killed:affected may be much higher than with randomly distributed deaths. (this, incidentally is part – though not all – of the rationale behind treating “hate crimes” as different from similar crimes not targeted at a vulnerable group).
Furthermore, their descendants are likely to be materially affected for generations, by loss of institutional power, loss of ancestral or family land, etc. Since they’re all in a “clump” this ends up hurting them a lot worse than the same loss inflicted on a random set of people, each of whom is as likely to have good social/family/etc. connections to make up for it as anyone else.
Since anyone who intends genocide can’t know whether they will reach the very unlikely goal of nearly 100% success, we have to treat their intent in light of the likely consequences above, not the unlikely consequences.
This is the #1 reason you’re wrong, because it completely undermines what you’re saying within its own frame. There are several other reasons you’re wrong as well (some problems within your frame, some simple errors of judgement or opinion, some things you just didn’t consider) but I’ll leave them out.
Another reason why you’re wrong, also mostly within your frame, though I have to add something first.
Preface: Which is worse – a) a murderer who picks a random victim, and shoots them in the head; b) a murderer who abducts the victim, tortures them for a while, then shoots them in the head? Reason #2 assumes you believe b is worse, for imposing extra suffering.
2. Imagine if the murderer didn’t have to even find and abduct the victim to begin torturing them – imagine if they could begin torturing all of their victims right at the beginning, and then set about killing them one by one. That’s what happens when a genocide begins. As soon as someone(s) in a position to commit a genocide begins doing so, and word gets out, *all* of the targeted group are effectively being tortured. The longer it takes, even if it eventually gets all of them, the larger the total product of people being tortured X time they suffer. And the total set of people is generally very very large, especially at the beginning.
Of course, if the genocide fails and ends before it is complete, then all those people remain alive after that experience, which leads to reason #1 in my earlier comment. But #2 applies even if nobody remains alive at the end.
Im going to argue against you. Genocide is worse than random mass murder.
Genocide eliminates an entire genetic lineage (as its name suggests). Killing a family, or a specific isolated population of humans completely removes the genetic diversity of that group, which in turn lowers the availability of their unique genes. Lacking those genes could lower the survival rate of the population in the future. From a genetic standpoint, genocide is worse than mass random murder.
From a cultural stand point, I’ll make the same argument. Randomly killing 200,000 people will have little effect on the culture of a nation, but selectively killing all of the people in a small community effectively removes any memes they may have generated that might have contributed to the larger society they exist within.
Genocide does more than kill people, it removes a piece of human heritage that can never be recovered.
Cos:
First, I don’t see that the “falling short of 100%” as relevant. If I kill 100 people at random, I leave several hundred mourners. If I kill 100 people out of an ethnic group of size 200, I leave at most 100 mourners (assuming members of the group are generally married to other members of the group, etc.)
Second, I agree with you that the advance torture makes it worse. And I agree that as soon as the genocide begins, every member of the targeted group is essentially being tortured. But likewise for a random mass murderer: When there were snipers picking people off at random around Washington, DC, a large fraction of the population felt some fear. Now it’s true that in the case of genocide the fear is much greater, but it’s also true that in the case of the snipers, a much larger number of people feel the fear. So it seems to me that in either case, there’s a lot of “pre-torture” going on.
Third, the same applies to your point about trauma. Yes, the survivors of genocide are horribly traumatized. The survivors of random sniper attacks are more mildly traumatized, but you have to multiply that trauma times a much larger population.
Fourth, I think your best argument is the one about clumping. To put this another way (and do correct me if I’m misinterpreting you): For the survivors, losing your family *and* your community is a whole lot worse than just losing your family. Point taken here.
Bart Mitchell:
First, regarding genetic diversity, I am skeptical that wiping out one ethnic group makes much difference. If we were already down to a few dozen ethnic groups, of course it would matter a lot, but that’s not our current situation.
Second, I’m not sure we really care very much about the survival rate of the population in the future. If we all knew that all human life was due for extinction 1000 years from now, would it bother us very much? My guess is no. (Of course that’s just a guess.)
Third, regarding your point re culture, I addressed this in the post. If we were already down to a few dozen cultures, each would be precious. But as it is, there’s not enough time to enjoy all the cultural diversity around us, so I’m not sure we’d miss one group all that much.
In my opinion it is totally understandable that a society condemns genocide more than other forms of mass murder.
First of all it takes a very twisted and sick mind to make a serial killer. In contrast to that even very rational and intelligent or what we might call “normal” people are capable of participation in genocides. In my opinion the reason for this is that genocides are easier justified than just random killings (as, one could argue, you have proven with this post).
And since there seems to be broad agreement that actions are more condemnable if it is my free decision to perform them rather than an obsessive compulsion or something similiar (as it seems to be the case with serial killers) it is clear that genocides condemned more fervently than random killings.
Secondly genocides are potentially more dangerous than random killings by a serial killer. If the serial killer satisfies an emotional need he will probally be less clear-headed, less organized and therefore less effective than a person, who can to some degree rationally justify his killings.
Finally I would argue that a genocide is more horrible than other forms of mass murder in comparable scale is that as a potential victim in a genocide I have fewer ways of improving the probability of my survival. If I live within a society, where critics of the government are killed I can refrain from critizing the government for example.
I think your hypotheticals fail to account for reality, repeatedly.
Genocide is generally applied to attacks on communities many orders of magnitude larger than 200, so the number of people affected starts out huge. To affect that many people directly via random murders, you’d have to be a mass killer on a much larger scale. You should be comparing genocide to large-scale war here, not run of the mill mass murder. And indeed, although there are some differences that make the effect worse in the case of genocide, the parallels are a lot stronger. Genocide may be on the same order of badness as large scale war.
When you bring up cases like the DC sniper, you’re talking not just about multiple murder, but also about terrorism, and this is indeed what terrorism is about: A form of attack deliberately designed to cause fear in large numbers of people you don’t have the capacity to directly attack. However, I think your implication that the fear caused by terrorism to otherwise-unaffected people is similar to the trauma that genocide causes the members of the targeted community, underscores your nearly-complete lack of understanding of what genocide actually does.
There are many other reasons why you’re wrong that I left off the initial list, and there are several other ways in which your responses to the reasons I did give are hypothetical in ways that happen not to match reality. Overall, I think you’re making an interesting philosophical point in this post, but one that happens to be completely inapplicable to the example you’re using to illustrate it (genocide vs. random killing). The example simply does not fit the parameters within which you’re applying your reasoning. Your reasoning is logical; your application overwhelmingly off-target.
3. (presented without elaboration) You’re also quite wrong about what the value of “one more culture” or ethnic group is, and what the cost of wiping it out is.
Steve, you say “I suspect that cultures are worth very little at the margin (that is, we could stand to lose any one culture without missing it very much).”
So please say explicitly what you are so definitely implying. Could you write out “I Steven Landsburg believe that we could stand to lose the entire culture and identity of the _____X________ people without missing it much.” so that we can quote you on it? (where X = some ethnic, racial, or tribal identity). From what you say I think you could just pick one at random right? Or might some racial identities be more valuable than others? Could we lose the Basque, for instance, without feeling the sting, but maybe the Tibetans or the Han Chinese being destroyed would cause more pain?
Benkyou:
Fifteen years ago, the Finnish culture came to an end. Finished, kaput, no more. All Finns abandoned their culture and adopted Swedish culture.
You noticed, right?
Bob: Thanks for that terrific comment.
Benkyou: I have nothing to add. Feel free to insert Basque, Tibetan, Han Chinese, or Jewish in your blank.
The value of a culture to its adherents is high, to everyone else not so much. That is a given. The cost we place on wiping out cultures is based on cost we place on the possibility of our own culture wiped out.
Bob: I don’t know if Benkyou would’ve noticed (though he might not even know if he had, because the effects of such a thing would be vast and indirect) but I’d certainly have been very distressed! Fortunately, it did not happen.
Note that I did not have any enforced or given connection to Finnish culture. I was born in Israel and have lived most of my life in the Boston area in the US. But I have a large collection of Finnish CDs and love their music, far more than Swedish music; I find the Finnish language fascinating and beautiful; and my life has been enriched both by the direction and indirect contributions of Finnish culture, including Finnish hacker culture (which gave us, among other things, IRC and the core Linux) and literary culture (the Kalevala, and associated myths, which feed into the songs of the band Värttinä which I love, as well as being the inspiration for JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth). I very much hope that Finnish culture continues producing the kinds of effects on the world that it has in the past, and I feel an emotional connection to it due to its past contributions that would make me extremely distressed if it were forcibly eliminated.
Just goes to show you that you never can tell: Just because *you* don’t see know the value of a culture doesn’t mean you actually know how many people outside that culture have benefited from it.
Darn, my nefarious hidden agenda has been exposed! I can only hope that my check from Bill Gates has already cleared.
really? I mean okay. But really?
“The Han Chinese can be wiped off the face of this earth and the world won’t miss them very much.”–S. Landsburg
I get the part where you pose that such a thing is no worse or even better than “900 million random people across the earth die”. But to me that is like saying that having one of every classic artists painting destroyed is worse then having every Renoir or Picasso destroyed.
I don’t buy it. Your view is that most of the people mourning the Han Chinese would also be Han Chinese so that grief is eliminated. But you neglect the value that the Han Chinese culture would have added to future generations that is now also at a loss.
I don’t have time to read through all of this, and I’m not a philosophy major, but let me give it a try. So you’re main point is that genocide is better than the random murder of an equal number of people, because there are less externalities in a genocide. You’re an economist, let’s turn this horrible event into something not quite as evil, but still immoral, and turn deaths into dollars!
Instead of murder, let’s think about robbery. So in one case (genocide) a thief goes into a store and steals $10,000 worth of goods. In the other case (random murder) the thief goes into 10,000 stores and steals $1 worth of goods in each store. Which one is worse. By your logic, the $1 worth of goods in 10,000 stores is by far worse. I agree! Imagine the pain and suffering 10,000 people are subjected to when they lose that $1. And how about all of those people’s friends. What if they are all public companies? The number of people affected could be in the millions! Woe is he who bought stock in any of those companies.
Bringing it back to earth, it is clear (maybe not through philosophical logic) that the one store that lost $10,000 worth of goods is in a much worse position. Regardless of if it is a mom n pop store, or a walmart.
So can we bring this back to genocide and random murder. While surely random murder effects a much larger network, and the people who are most close to the murdered will feel be in despair, people have a much larger network to help them get over that death. They can “spread” the death around, softening the impact. This is not the case with a genocide. Assuming that the genocide is not 100% effective (without blowing up the entire earth, I don’t think it would even be possible), there are a small number of people that have to cope with the death of countless others, without that same network.
I crossed a few borders here, but I’m curious if this argument holds any water. What do you think?
I got you AP. With a genocide of 100 million Elbonians perhaps a few thousand people remain who feel the loss of those deaths but they feel the loss of every one of those deaths. with the random murder of 100 million un-related persons the same amount of grief is experienced but it is carried as smaller parcels by a larger network of mourners.
This is intuitive. if 10 families who don’t know each other each experience a tragic death there is a certain amount of suffering. But if a family of 11 people suffers the death of 10 of them there is a certain economy of scale involved.
I would say that as my supply of family is tragically reduced the value i receive from each remaining family member increases.
There were 55 1961 Ferrari 250 GTs made. There’s 12 left. The last time one was sold it went for about 11 million bucks. When there is only one left in the whole world it’s value will be even greater. If I picked 12 random collector carts to detroy I would destroy a smaller value than if I destroyed every last one of the 12 remaing ’61 Ferrari’s
This argument assumes that every ethnic group is homogeneous, and closed of to the outside world to the extent that its members have no friends outside the group.
This is clearly not true in general, and may be even generally untrue. In the infamous example of the holocaust, the jews were spread all over europe, most of them quite strongly integrated with the larger populations.
This argument would only work on rather small and isolated groups, living in far away places. But no other group would have any interest in attacking such groups.. Even colonisation rarely lead to the planned destruction of complete ethnic groups (though bad things did happen).
….
The same argument is more applicable when discussing the problem of culling elephants in nature reserves like the Kruger park, where good conservation resulted in very large numbers. Let’s assume you can agree that culling is necessary. In that case, the usual policy is to shoot off complete groups (mainly females), to avoid creating groups of traumatized and dangerous elephants. Shooting mostly single males does not help to reduce population growth, as it is anyway only the strongest males that are allowed to mate with the females.
Phil wrote:
“The comments are kind of fun to watch. You argue, “genocide is bad, but murder of X people via genocide is less objectionable than murder of X people via non-genocide.”
And the commenters can’t help writing, “but genocide is bad!!””
No Phil, that’s not what happened. Landsburg entitled his post, “In Praise of Genocide.” Then he tried to backpedal in the first sentence.
Then he later in the post said he doesn’t understand why the term “genocidal” is pejorative.
So if Landsburg wanted to have an academic discussion and not mislead people, who would have titled his post, “Why I Can Imagine People Worse Than Genocidal Killers,” and he would have said, “I don’t know why ‘genocidal’ is considered the most pejorative term imaginable, when in my mind is should be maybe the 2nd most pejorative term in the English language.”
Bob Murphy: I agree that the title of the post is hyperbolic, but I stand by the clause about the adjective “pejorative”. In the phrase “genocidal mass murder”, it seems to me that the adjective is mitigating, not pejorative.
Or to put this another way: We are sometimes reminded that Mr. X was not just a mass murderer but a genocidal one, as if the “genocidal” part made it worse. I don’t think that part makes it worse. That’s exactly the sense in which I object to the use of “genocidal” as a pejorative.
Steve, fair enough. For what it’s worth, when I was in junior high (maybe high school, can’t quite remember) we had a class where we had to rank people’s responsibility for the Holocaust. Obviously Hitler was high up, and then you had to figure out the role of silent Germans, the Pope, etc., and one of the groups was “businessmen who produced poison gas for profit.”
So I raised my hand and said, “Isn’t it good that they were in it for the money, and not because they hated Jews?”
But I have long since learned why that was not a wise thing to say. :)