Jonathan Glover's Humanity

After the horrors of the twentieth century it is particularly hard to believe in God or any kind of moral law.  People had thought that humanity was progressing but this now seems naive.  We now have the technology to kill in greater numbers and to learn about atrocities around the world. 

Nietzsche saw traditional morals as dead or dying.  He wanted this to happen, to make way for something else: self-creation, imposing one's own meaning on one's life.  Thee is no room for sympathy here.  Others might well need to be sacrificed.  BUT couldn't self-creation involve imposing restraints on oneself so that one would not trample on others?  [Is Glover taking Nietzsche too literally?  If Nietzsche is a kind of Stoic, determinist or fatalist, then "imposing meaning on one's life" can only mean conceiving it in a certain way.  "Sacrificing" others then would not mean killing them or anything of the sort.  What it would mean is unclear.  Perhaps just rejecting their values, which could be cruel too (think how your mother might feel if you rejected hers).]

Selfishness often supports altruism (see Glaucon, Hobbes, et al.).  R. M. Hare says we are best off when we seem to others to be moral, and the best way to do this is to be moral.  BUT there could be exceptions, especially when the best way to fit in is to do evil, or when one is powerful enough to get away with murder.  [International relations are often thought of in Hobbesian terms.  If there is only one superpower in the world, what reason does it have to take the interests of others into account?]  

We are good because of social restraints on selfish behavior and because of "moral resources" that make it natural for us to be relatively good. 

One such resource is our moral identity, a sense of what kind of person one is or wants to be.

Others are sympathy and respect.  We tend to respect those with higher social rank than us, and manners often require us to treat all people with some respect.  When this respect is broken down massacres can occur, but it takes some breaking down.

Sympathy is natural, especially for close friends and family, and if we have suffered and so know what it is like.  We can also feel sympathy for distant people we see on television BUT this sympathy can be eroded by overexposure to repeated tragedies.

Aristotle says that our individual choices and actions for habits which can harden into character traits.  Sometimes these choices are themselves based on which character traits we want to have or like to think of ourselves as having. 

Socrates thinks that to be happy we need integrity or inner peace.  Such peace will only be possible for those of us with respect and sympathy for others, and a sense of our own moral identity.  It is not compatible with ruthless selfishness, Plato argues. 

BUT respect and sympathy are often strongest for those close to us.  In our dealings with others we might resort to a more brutal 'realism'.  Such realism is characterized by Stalin:

"Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.  Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so.  It cannot be otherwise."

[Really, strict realism would be the idea that everyone imposes their will, not social system, as much as they can, so that talk about ethics is irrelevant.]

So amoralism or realism can be understandable in international affairs.  BUT how can people go so far as to torture others?  Answer: the love of cruelty, emotional inadequacy leading to a desire to dominate others, and neutralization of the moral resources.

Torture is not a good way to get reliable information (people might say anything to make it stop) and what usefulness it has does not explain the elaborate pains and humiliations often inflicted on people.  Power, sex, and pure sadism are clearly motivating factors.

Torturers tend to be immature men who are obsessed with sex, humorless, and afraid to be alone.  [Does this tell us much?]  Often they are led gradually into torturing.

The victims are often treated as alien.  They are often humiliated.  They are often made the butt of jokes.  These "cold jokes" can humiliate but they also display power.  They might also provide euphemisms to help those involved avoid acknowledging what they are doing (in contravention of their moral identity).

BUT sometimes sympathy wins through, so there is hope.  Barbarism is our history, BUT it is not inevitably our future.

*****

Normal human responses are often absent in war, when soldiers are far from home, in unfamiliar surroundings, in a very unusual situation.

The enemy's humanity might be denied (by using racist terms to refer to them, for instance).  The number of casualties might be so large that callousness is the only way to cope.  Soldiers might think of themselves-as-soldiers as different people, with a different moral identity, from themselves-as-civilians.  Military training sometimes aims at this kind of effect.  Seeing one's comrades die can lead to a desire for revenge.  Some people like the spectacle, the comradeship, and the excitement of war.

Lieutenant Broyles, who served in Vietnam, writes: "For all these reasons, men love war.  But these are the easy reasons, the first circle, the ones we can talk about without risk of disapproval, without plunging too far into the truth or ourselves.  But there are other, more troubling reasons why men love war."

Glover writes that: "These are seeing death close up, the excitement of killing and destruction, and the heightened sexuality which is linked with all this."

War, according to Broyles, "is, for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death.  It is like lifting off a corner of the universe and looking at what's underneath."   

So war isn't likely to go away, and in war people are likely to do terrible things.

The massacre at My Lai happened partly because the men followed orders so well, BUT also because the unit did not have good discipline.  Cut off from other Americans it went rogue with its own values and ideas about who the enemy was.  BUT not everyone joined in the massacre.

A key feature of modern warfare is killing at a distance.  This is easier to do psychologically.  Respect and sympathy have less power when we cannot see who we are killing.  Moral identity is less threatened when civilian deaths are collateral, not intended.  Mass actions spread and dilute the sense of moral responsibility.  It helps too if victims die passively, from starvation say, rather than being actively killed. 

[Does this mean, as a utilitarian like Glover might say, that it is psychologically easier for us now to do things that are just as bad as they have always been (i.e. kill people)?  Or does "psychologically easier" mean "less troubling to the conscience", i.e. less bad?  If we judge morally, mustn't we judge from or with the conscience?  If so, whose conscience counts?  The soldier's or the impartial observer's?  Should we try to think from inside or outside the situation?  Is impartiality possible or desirable in ethics?  What can it mean?]

In World War II, the British bombing of German cities began because civilians had already been accidentally bombed (precision was not possible then) AND as revenge for German attacks on London.  Effectively the choice was no bombing or area bombing, and area bombing made it harder for the Germans to fight the Russians.  

BUT precision bombing did become more possible and would have been more effective, probably, than area bombing, which did little to weaken German resolve.  Policies can take on a life of their own and tend to continue, even when they no longer make much sense.  Glover calls this "military drift".

In judging the rightness or wrongness of such things as bombing cities (i.e. civilian targets) one thing to bear in mind is the long-term effects or precedent.  The blockade of Germany in World War I (which caused starvation) caused bitterness that helped lead to World War II.  The bombing of Hamburg and Dresden paved the way for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which perhaps helped make 9/11 thinkable.

[Are we responsible for such future effects of our actions?  How far ahead should we try to look?  Does this show that Nietzsche is right that we cannot judge individual actions but instead must simply accept or reject the world as a whole?]

General Eisenhower said that Japan was ready to surrender without using the atomic bomb, but it was unlikely to surrender unconditionally.  President Roosevelt had accidentally used the phrase "unconditional surrender" in a speech and then the demand for unconditional surrender had become agreed policy for the sake of unity and saving face.  

The decision to drop the bomb on a real target rather than make a demonstration was also taken with little real thought.  Those involved did not want to waste time, or waste one of their few bombs, or risk a demonstration that failed.  They also wanted to impress the Soviet Union with U.S. military power.  They did not try hard to think of other ways to end the war.

[Is Glover being fair here?]

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe opposed President Truman's honorary degree because of his use of the bomb against civilians.  This, she said, is murder.  Anscombe, like other Catholics, supports the doctrine of double effect.  This says that it is never all right to do something forbidden, e.g. deliberately kill an innocent person, but that it is all right to bring about, say, the death of an innocent person (think of collateral damage in war) as long as i) their death is neither your intention (although it may be foreseen) nor the means for achieving your goal, and ii) the probable good to be achieved by your action outweighs the probable evil.  [The doctrine depends on distinguishing between two kinds of effects our actions might have, the intended and the foreseen.  If I run, my intention will be to get in shape, but I can foresee that I will also sweat.  If I bomb the enemy, my intention is to destroy their military power, but I can foresee that some innocent civilians are likely to get killed too.]      

BUT where do we draw the line between the intended and the foreseen?  Unwanted consequences are surely not thereby 'unintended' since then wishful thinking could justify atrocities.  Perhaps intentionally killing innocent people is NOT always wrong.

    "Take the case of the ferry carrying the heavy water from Norway, which was blown up.  If the heavy water had reached Germany, a Nazi atomic bomb would not have been certain, but would have been more likely.  Letting Hitler have an atomic bomb would risk huge numbers of deaths and perhaps a Nazi victory.  With so much at stake, it seems worth paying a substantial price to keep the chance of such a bomb as low as possible.  No one wanted the deaths of the twenty-six people who were killed when the ferry was blown up.  But it would be hard to argue that it would have been better to have risked the heavy water reaching Germany.

    "The absolute prohibition on intentional killing of innocent people seems a good deal less plausible if it tells us that Knut Haukelid and his colleagues were wrong to sink the ferry.  But it may have this consequence."   

So Glover rejects the absolute prohibition on killing innocent people deliberately.

Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons also raise the question of how to stop them being used by the wrong people.  The cost of their misuse would be so terrible that it is worth giving up some national sovereignty to an international body that would keep the peace.  

[Is this a good idea in theory?  In practice?]

Glover attributes the slaughters he discusses to:

a) institutional momentum, b) moral inertia, c) the fragmentation of responsibility, d) relative moral identity (am I worse or better than others before and around me?)

These things are hard to fight, but not inevitable.  Just being aware of them might help us fight against them.  

[Agree?  Can philosophical reflection help stop killing?]

*****

Racism on the part of a minority can lead to racial, ethnic, or tribal thinking more generally.  The genocides of the 1990s in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were NOT spontaneous outbreaks of ancient hatreds.  These people had lived much more peacefully for years.

Resentments were stoked by politicians who wanted power and support at any cost.  Once mass media were taken over by extremists there was also a barrage of misinformation and propaganda.  This created fear, which caused aggression, which increased the fear.

It didn't help that the rest of the world was so unwilling to get involved.

Perhaps some disputed territories, e.g. Ulster and Jerusalem, should be shared by more than one nation.

[Could this work?]

Otherwise we seem to need some supernational power, a Hobbesian Leviathan. The United Nations is not this yet, since it has no army of its own.  Member states are often unwilling to provide troops because of potential conflicts with their national interests and/or electoral unpopularity.

We need "a powerful international police force".

Group-thinking is natural and has survival value, but why do we think in terms of tribal and national groups?  Nation-states are a relatively recent development.  A nation is a kind of tribe.  Its members share certain identifying characteristics and a tribal or national self-image.  History, culture, geography, and religion are all important to this identity.  Our self-respect depends on respect for these things, which makes 'political correctness' important, even if it is sometimes taken too far.

BUT identity-through-history keeps old grudges alive AND tribal identity helps prevent universal solidarity.  Nationalism and tribalism cannot be removed immediately, BUT they can be eroded gradually by paying attention to how (or that) these identities are created.  We can also work to enlarge our sense of who "we" are by symbolic acts of forgiveness and solidarity, and to focus on interests beyond the tribe (e.g. sport, music, etc.).

[Are tribalism, nationalism, and patriotism the same thing?  Are they all bad?  Would a world government be good?]

*****     

As a cause of war, entrapment is more important than aggression.  People come to fell as though they have no option but to fight, and so they do.

This happened to soldiers who volunteered in World War I.  After a while, though, they developed strategies of cooperation with the enemy to minimize casualties (e.g. firing at predictable times, Christmas truces, etc.).

This is partly a tit-for-tat survival strategy, BUT empathy and sympathy also play a part in it. 

The trap is created not by soldiers but by senior officers, newspapers, and civilians back home who do not know the reality of war.  [So here the outsider, 'impartial' view is bad.  To know the reality it seems one must actually be in it, or have experience of it, but how big is the relevant reality?  In this case it seems quite small: the soldier's immediate environment.  In the case of killing at a distance, both the killer and the killed must be included, at least as Glover sees it.  What is relevant is controversial though.  Wittgenstein, who fought in World War I, said that if it came to hand to hand combat one would have to stand aside and let oneself be killed.  His ethics, apparently, were concerned with what kind of person one is (so that killing at a distance is less bad than killing with one's hands).  Glover cares much more about what one does, so that what it takes psychologically to achieve one's goals is more or less irrelevant.]

The media often encourage war because they are fed propaganda by the government.  Governments do this to protect their troops and deter the enemy.  There is also a desire to protect the public from the awful truth.  And journalists tend to tell people what they want to hear--that the truth is simple, that all is going well, etc..

[Does the free market lead to news distortion?  Does 'embedding' reporters with troops?  Can there be true democracy without a fully informed electorate?  How free should the press be?]

We take the death of one person very seriously, BUT the concern per person goes down as the deaths increase.  We might care less about a disaster than about a single death, even of someone we don't know.

World War I started like this: teenage Serb nationalists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary; Austria-Hungary reacted rudely to Serbia; Serbia accepted all but one of their proposals; Austria-Hungary declared war, hoping that Serbia would just submit; Serbia turned to her ally Russia, who had recently let her down; Russia made a point of not doing so again; Germany sided with Austria-Hungary when Russia refused to demobilize; Germany threatened France in an attempt to keep her out of the brewing conflict; France refused to be cowed and so joined in; other countries were invaded in order to secure borders; Britain joined in to help her allies and to fight for neutral Belgium, which had been invaded.

So hot-headedness, bluff-calling, posturing, rudeness, and bad diplomacy led one country after another into war.

Divided governments and ambiguous policies send mixed signals, leading to misunderstanding (and fear).

Preparations against attack helped make war inevitable too.  Once one country mobilizes troops in self-defense, others are likely to feel threatened and do the same.  Then a 'pre-emptive' strike is likely.

Arms races can lead to war.  Backing down can appear as (and feel like) weakness.  

Alliances too make larger wars more likely.

Behind all this lay a certain psychology, a Darwinist idea of nations competing in a struggle for dominance and survival.

There was also a strong sense of national honor that refused to tolerate insults.  Death was considered preferable to the dishonor of betraying a friend.

[Is this noble or naive?]

In the Cuban missile crisis many hawks believed there were far fewer Soviet troops on Cuba (10,000) than was in fact the case (43,000).  They also believed that Krushchev would not respond with nuclear weapons to a conventional attack because this would be irrational.  So they wanted to destroy most of the Soviet missiles with a conventional air attack.

BUT Krushchev did not have complete control over the Soviet troops, who tended to follow standing orders.  AND the response to a humiliating defeat might NOT have been rational.  So an attack like this would have been very risky, immorally so.

"Kennedy's deception [of the American public over the deal he struck with Krushchev] and Krushchev's climbdown are not the stuff of conventional heroism.  But, in the nuclear age, such heroism is outdated."

[Do we need new ethics for a new age?]

The obvious solution to the Hobbesian trap is a Hobbesian Leviathan.  BUT this power might be abused.

Kant advocated a co-operative federation of nation-states (NOT a world government).  Each state would be completely free except to wage war on others.

Both self-interest and morality suggest that states should join such a federation.  To have moral authority such a federation should be democratic, and ideally all member states would be democracies too.

[Would such a federation be likely to act in the general interest, or the specific interests of member states?  I.e. would it do the right thing, or simply pander to the majority of its constituent members?]

Peace in future is more likely if:

a) countries are democracies, not dictatorships

b) people have better access to information

c) people are more critical about what they read and hear

d) people are more prepared to swallow their national pride

e) people develop more moral imagination (i.e. value moral considerations more and assume less that others will behave in strictly rational and self-interested ways)

f) people care more about people in other countries

[Given that b-f are somewhat idealistic, how democratic should an international federation be?  Would it be better if it were more like the US Constitution and Supreme Court, i.e. a set of rules about when force should be used and a body of experts to interpret it, something like Plato's philosopher-kings?]

*****     

Stalin had millions of people killed in a kind of war on his own people, using executions, starvation, death marches, and work camps.

Lenin started the terror, but Stalin escalated it.

Informing was encouraged and quotas were set of the number of "enemies" to be identified and killed.  No one was safe.  This made organized opposition difficult, and the terror went right up to the highest levels.

Stalin himself lived in fear of everyone, which fed his murderous desires.

Marxism was supposed to be scientific.  Ethics were thought of as merely the dominant values of the ruling class.  So Marxists had little sympathy even for their own ethical misgivings about Stalinism. 

The aim was to transform human nature itself, from the selfish egoism of capitalists to the public-spirit of true communists.  To many, a high price in human "raw material" seemed worth paying to achieve such a valuable prize. 

[Did they just get their facts wrong, or is there something immoral about this kind of ruthless consequentialism?]

In these conditions kindness became less common, being replaced by disinterest and ruthless hardness.

Our beliefs form a system, so that none stands or falls on its own.  When reality seems to conflict with a belief we can reject the belief, or adjust other beliefs, or reject the evidence itself.  Beliefs about how to decide between different beliefs are "structural beliefs".  Religious beliefs are structural beliefs, telling us to stick to some authority such as the Bible or the Pope.  Communism can be thought of as a political religion.

This is one reason why relatively few people blamed Stalin for the terror of his regime.  He also deliberately portrayed himself as Uncle Joe, the kind of man who would never do such things.

Many British communists supported communism as the strongest opposition to fascism.  So the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a problem for them.  Stalin claimed that democracy and fascism were equally bad.  He also claimed that Nazi Germany, being weak, was less of a threat than Britain and France, so that British communists should in fact support Germany.

Some gave up on the Soviet Union at this point, but others stuck to their belief in its authority.  So even without the direct threat of terror, Stalin was able to create self-deception and delusion in his supporters.

[Is all rigid Belief dangerous?  Bad?]

Within the Soviet Union, the safest policy was to act and talk at all times (even at home) as if one supported Stalin.  Even theoretically this is hard to distinguish from actually supporting Stalin.

Lying and self-deception could be rationalized by consequentialism.  The very concept of objective truth has been under attack at least since Nietzsche.

Marxists cared more about what worked than what was objectively true.  And "what worked" meant submission to Marxist regimes and their ideologies, not what produced food or saved lives.

E.g. false biological theories were supported because they sounded more like Marxism than their rivals did.  Dissenting biologists were shot.

In the law, a confession by the accused came to be thought of as being as close to the truth as one was ever likely to get.

"Truth and moral identity are linked.  As self-deception feeds on itself, there is less and less to stop beliefs about one's moral identity becoming systematically false.  The growth of such a delusional system is a personal moral disaster.  It can also be a political disaster."

[What is the moral value of truth?  Does Nietzschean philosophy invite terror?  Is it incompatible with humane values?]

*****        

Chairman Mao Zedong improved the status of women and tried to raise levels of literacy and health, BUT he also caused tens of millions of deaths.  Between 20 and 30 million died during the "Great Leap Forward" between 1958 and 1962.

Mao believed you could do anything if you really wanted to [like Chesterton's man who believes in himself] and so that China could become a leading industrial and economic power if its people worked hard enough.

The Chinese were encouraged to make steel in their own furnaces.  The result was a lot of time wasted and a lot of uselessly bad steel.  Fewer people were available to gather the harvest, and agriculture was collectivized which led to apathy and abuse of animals no longer considered the peasants' own.

Mao's personal theories on farming were put into effect, as were Soviet ideas about biology.  These theories had no scientific basis and proved disastrous, but few dared tell Mao he was wrong.

Mao's response to this failure was the "Cultural Revolution."  Traditional Chinese religion, art, and literature were attacked.  Temples were destroyed and books burned.  Authority figures were publicly humiliated, beaten, and killed.

Sympathy and kindness were actively discouraged.  Propaganda encouraged this violent disrespect.  There was fear of being informed on, even by one's own children.

Dissidents were not only humiliated but also tortured and made to 'accept' different beliefs.

Since we cannot check every belief for ourselves, it is natural to believe what others say, especially those in authority.  Organized pressure to think a certain way, combined with propaganda, can lead people to believe the view being pushed by the government.

Some conformity is necessary, BUT so is some skepticism.

[How skeptical is it possible to be?  How skeptical is it good to be?  Could a whole society be brainwashed to the point that democracy would be a sham?]

Mao aimed to recreate people, so everything was politicized.  One's primary loyalty was to be to Mao and the communist party, not one's family or friends. 

The result was misery and constant conflict.

While Stalin and Mao killed large numbers of people that they considered corrupt, Pol Pot went further and tried to kill everyone except the 'pure' minority. 

Civilization itself was considered suspect so towns and cities were emptied and their inhabitants driven into the country.  Anyone who couldn't make it was killed or left to die.  Suspected opponents of the Khmer Rouge were killed, as were people chosen arbitrarily just to set an example.

U.S. attacks on Cambodia, aimed at wiping out North Vietnamese bases there, caused hostility toward the U.S. and increased support for the Khmer Rouge.

[Was the bombing of Cambodia justified?  Are nations responsible for the unforeseen bad effects of their actions?]

Famine relief was refused by the Khmer Rouge, partly because hungry people are easier to control and partly because they wanted people to be poor, seeing poverty as virtuous. 

Religion, the family, and all aspects of traditional culture were attacked.

Children were raised to be cruel so that they could torture and kill happily.  It worked.

[How malleable is human nature?  Are attempts to recreate human nature or human society bound to fail, or are they simply wrong?  Do these examples invalidate utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism?]

    "In one way we cannot escape the Enlightenment.  The authority both of religion and of tradition has been challenged by questions that cannot be answered or easily suppressed.  So the shape of society can only be justified in the spirit of the Enlightenment: in terms of effects on people's lives.  And some social redesigning can make people's lives better.  The replacement of market forces in medicine by [the British] National Health Service is not part of the 'road to serfdom'.  A world ruled by market forces, with no diversion of resources to the poor, is one of lives avoidably stunted and shortened.  The aim of shaping society so that the greatest human needs are put first is not one we should give up."

BUT the social engineering of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot was bad because:

a) it was too large-scale

b) it was too rigid, lacking open-mindedness about how it might turn out

c) it was coercive, forced on people from above

d) it was inhuman, done without sympathy or respect

e) it was too uniform and materialistic in its view of the good life

    "The obvious message from the history of Stalinism is the importance of avoiding grandiose utopian social projects.  But another message is as important.  It comes from the role of ideology in Stalinism.  We have seen how, for instance, tribalism makes atrocities possible by overwhelming the moral resources.  Among such psychological dispositions, Belief is at least as dangerous as tribalism."

*****

The Stalinists killed more people than the Nazis did, but death for them was a means to an end.  For the Nazis, the death of certain people was the end.  Perhaps it is for this reason that Hitler often seems worse than Stalin.

[What do you think?]

The rise of Nazism can be attributed to two things: tribalism and belief.

Tribalism was already a feature of German culture in the 19th century, but was encouraged by the humiliation and suffering in and after the First World War.

Nazi beliefs combined Social Darwinism (belief in a struggle between nations for supremacy) with Nietzsche's rejection of Judeo-Christian values and belief in will, strength, and power.

[Does this seem accurate?  Fair to Nietzsche?]

Jews were a convenient scapegoat to blame for Germany's ills.  They represented foreignness, cosmopolitanism, and sophistication.

Anti-semitism was also encouraged by ideas about eugenics. 

Nazis (and others) hoped that all kinds of hereditary psychological and physical problems could be eradicated if their sufferers were sterilized.  Some were simply killed ("euthanized").

This euthanasia program was extended to cover anyone who did not fit the Nazi ideal for the German race.  Gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews were all murdered.

SS men, on the other hand, were encouraged to have more children.

Nietzsche was selectively quoted to support such programs.  For instance, he said that the extinction of degenerate people was desirable.  He also rejected compassion for the weak, and glorified struggle and war.

Stalin and Mao valued hardness as a means to the end of a more humane world.  For Hitler, hardness was an end in itself.

Hitler was accepted as an authority partly because of his charisma and partly because a kind of religion was deliberately constructed around him.  There was also a general respect for political leaders and other authority figures in Germany.

Typical Nazis were rigid, superstitious, obedient, conformist, aggressive, and obsessed with power.

Stanley Milgram's experiments suggest that many of us will obey authority figures.  When this obedience is particularly encouraged by the culture and the government propaganda machine, the results can be frightening.

There was also peer pressure to conform to what one's group (military unit, say) was doing.  Strong bonds of comradeship were encouraged. 

Jews were dehumanized by propaganda presenting them as rats or maggots.  They were given numbers to replace their names. 

The responsibility for murdering them was often shared out and diminished by bureaucratizing the 'work' to be done.  Alcohol, euphemism, and denial helped the murderers cope with what might have been a heavy blow to their moral identity.

Even so, sympathy or at least embarrassment proved virtually impossible to destroy, even at the highest levels.  Perhaps the moral resources cannot be completely overcome.

*****    

Hitler believed in God and the supernatural but not Christianity.  In particular he was against the restraining power of conscience, which he thought was a Jewish invention.

Nazi ethics combined Nietzschean hardness with Kantian obedience to unfeeling duty.  Stealing was frowned upon and all jobs were to be done to the best of one's ability.

The Nazis offered not comfort and safety but danger and excitement through their banners, torchlit parades, and addiction to war.

Their appeal was to emotion, not reason.  Critical thinking was needed to resist and see through their propaganda.  It is the job of philosophers to think like this and encourage others to do the same.  BUT most of the best German philosophers the the time were Jews or otherwise opposed to the Nazi regime, so they left or else were silenced.

The most prominent Nazi philosopher was Martin Heidegger.  An admirer of Nietzsche, Heidegger opposed the grasping, utilitarian character of modern life.  He preferred a more romantic, peasant-style life, at one with nature.  This tied in with Nazi opposition to modern art, cosmopolitanism, and criticism.

Heidegger believed in acceptance, primarily of nature and whatever culture one was born into, but also, apparently, of whatever fate brought.  Fate had brought Germany Hitler.

Merely going along with one's culture would be 'inauthentic' or phony in Heidegger's view.  BUT consciously embracing it is authentic.  And that seems to be what he tried to do.

[What would Nietzsche do?]

Glover's main complaint against Heidegger's philosophy is that it is so obscure, making it hard to tell whether criticizing and rejecting Nazism wouldn't be more 'authentic' in Heidegger's terms.  Since Heidegger's meaning is obscure, we have to accept his authority with regard to what it means.  Such acceptance is inherently uncritical, unphilosophical, and dictatorial.

[How easy to understand must philosophy be?  What if Heidegger had called himself a poet?]

Another great philosopher of the time was Gottlob Frege.  His work was technical but clear.  BUT he did not transfer this clear, critical thinking to his personal opinions.  Instead he shared the racial prejudices of his time.

[So how useful is philosophy morally and politically?  Is technicality bad in philosophy?]

The few Germans that risked death for themselves and their families in order to help Jews had noticeably different upbringings from the Nazis'.  Their parents were not strict, emphasized reasoning rather than discipline, and set high moral standards, especially with regard to helping others.

[Can such nurture make a big difference to our nature?]

Another great source of resistance to the Nazis was Christianity.  Not all Christians acted admirably, but many people who did were Christians.

[So what is more important after all, critical skepticism or faith in good values?]

Opposition was often communal.  The village of Le Chambon and the countries Denmark and Italy did particularly well.  It is hard to stand alone and most people go with the flow, for good or evil.

Moral identity is not enough.  It needs to be rooted in human responses (sympathy, respect, etc.).  So there is an important subjective foundation to moral goodness.

Subjectivity taken too far in the wrong way leads to tribal brutalism BUT excessive objective rationalism can lead to Stalinism.  We need something in between, combining emotion with reason.

[Can the right mix be specified?]

*****     

Character matters and is not just innate.  A god character is one that is not wholly defined by commitment to some tribe or ideology, but rooted in universal human needs and human values.

We have to discover what values are universal and which needs are deepest.  We must not turn away when others are in need.

[So is it wrong not to keep informed about suffering around the world?]

We need to cultivate our moral imaginations.

This is likely "to destroy the conventional explanations of why what the computer engineer [who helps make planes used for genocidal bombing in Indonesia] does is so different from the stoning [of a woman convicted of adultery]."

[Is there a big difference?  Do conventional explanations get it wrong?]

The past lives on as a precedent and as resentment, but also as a lesson.

[Do we need new values or a new ethics?  What might it be like?  How free are we to change our values?]