Speaking about the Unspeakable: genocide and philosophy

ABSTRACT  Genocide is a political catastrophe. Yet it has not received much academic attention. A few social scientists have studied it. Philosophers have largely ignored it. There is a large literature on the Holocaust, but there is little agreement as to how this should be related to other genocides. Some have argued that the Holocaust represented a crisis of Western culture, but that Western culture has not responded adequately for the lack of the appropriate self-understanding. This crisis has been attributed to the predominance of scientistic models of rationality in our culture. Social-scientific approaches to genocide have been criticised because of their commitment to logical empiricism, which is held to be epistemologically and ethically inadequate. Ethical approaches based on liberal humanism have been criticised by post-Nietzschean philosophers for their attachment to allegedly outworn metaphysical assumptions. However, the deconstruction of social science and liberal ethics leads in the direction of relativism and nihilism, which are either useless or dangerous in the face of evils such as genocide. The arguments against conventional social science and ethics are examined, and a counter-critique made of post-modern philosophy in order to clear the ground for constructive thinking about genocide.