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THE ATROCITY PARADIGM This page intentionally left blank The Atrocity Paradigm A Theory of Evil CLAUDIA CARD 1 2002 3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright © 2002 by Claudia Card Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Card, Claudia. The atrocity paradigm : a theory of evil / Claudia Card. p. cm. ISBN 0-19-514508-9 1. Good and evil. I. Title. BJ1401 .C29 2002 170—dc21 2001036610 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To my teachers, whose example and encouragement have elicited my best efforts: Ruby Healy Marquardt (1891–1976) Marjorie Glass Pinkerton Marcus George Singer John Rawls Lorna Smith Benjamin This page intentionally left blank Preface Four decades of philosophical work in ethics have engaged me with varieties of evil. It began with an undergraduate honors thesis on punishment, which was followed by a Ph.D. dissertation on that topic, essays on mercy and retribu- tion, and a grant to study the U.S. penitentiary system. Besides “Crime and Punishment” courses, I also teach or have taught Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietz- sche, and the philosophy of religion, all with a central focus on evil. The mid-1970s brought an encounter with the radical feminist essays of Marilyn Frye, which worked a revolution in my approaches to everything. I affiliated with Women’s Studies and developed three courses in feminist phi- losophy. My research interests expanded to take in rape, atrocities of domestic violence and child abuse, histories of slavery, lynching, and segregation, and, thanks to pioneering work by Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, histories of witch burnings, foot binding, sati, and the imposed female genital surgeries of clitoridectomy and infibulation. For a decade I taught a multicultural Women’s Studies course on lesbian culture from Sappho to the present. (One could do that in the late ’70s and early ’80s before research in the field mushroomed.) I began work on horizon- tal violence in my Lesbian Choices (1995) and on the impact of social institu- tions and intimate relationships on moral character development and was struck, even more than in my work on mercy, by the pervasiveness of what Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel taught us to call “moral luck.” My book The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (1996) initiated a struggle to come to terms with the idea of moral responsibility under oppression. That struggle continues in this book, especially in chapters 3, 4, 9, and 10. When a colleague who taught environmental ethics left my department in the late 1980s, I affiliated with the university’s Institute for Environmental Studies. For a decade I taught a large cross-listed course that included atten- tion to environmental racism, pesticides, factory farms, global warming, and viii Preface destruction of natural habitats. Evils, I became convinced, are done to many living beings, not just people or even just sentient beings. The theory of evil offered in this book is intended to accommodate that idea, although I do not here develop the wider applications. This coming fall I will teach for the second time my newest course, “Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust,” cross-listed with Jewish Studies. This course returns me to issues of punishment and such related matters as restitution, reparations, apology, forgiveness, and mercy. But now they are contextualized in large-scale international atrocities rather than in the more manageable framework of a single state or institution dealing with simpler deeds and remedies. After years of reflecting on different evils, it seemed finally time to con- front the concept of evil head-on. I wanted to articulate an ethical analysis of what makes deeds, people, relationships, practices, intentions, and motives evil and use that analysis to begin a more general pursuit of ethical questions regarding what to do about evils and how best to live with them. These are the ambitious projects of this book. As the reader can see by now, my background for undertaking them, besides decades of work in ethical theory, is acquain- tance with issues raised by particular sets of evils: crime and punishment, past and present misogyny and anti-Semitism, some forms of racism and of slavery, hatred of homosexuals, violence in the home, cruelty to animals, environmen- tal assault and neglect, war rape (and other torture and terrorism), and geno- cide. Atrocities from that list have become my paradigms of evils. A similar acquaintance with other evils might expand my paradigms and possibly lead to modifications in my theory. Many kinds of support eased the writing of this book and helped greatly with its completion. I thank the University of Wisconsin Graduate School Re- search Committee for summer salary support in 1999 and 2000 and a sabbatical leave during the spring of 2001. The sabbatical is especially appreciated, since I had to reapply after declining it the year before in order to accept a Senior Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a Resident Fel- lowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. These fellowships, for which I am deeply grateful, enabled me to produce a complete draft during 1999–2000, which I was then able to rework during 2001. Parts of many chapters draw on work begun in short articles. All previ- ously published material is thoroughly rewritten, rethought in the context of the theory developed in this book, revised in substance, and greatly expanded with completely new material. The Nietzsche chapter got a jump start from “Genealogies and Perspectives,” presented to the North American Nietzsche Society and published in International Studies in Philosophy (28, 3 [1996]). The last part of chapter 3 grew from “Stoicism, Evil, and the Possibility of Moral- Preface ix ity,” presented to the Illinois Philosophical Association and published in Metaphilosophy (29, 4 [1998]). Parts of chapter 5 draw on parts of “Evils and In- equalities,” presented at a Feminism and Law conference at the University of San Diego and published in the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (9 [1998]). Portions of chapters 6 and 7 draw on portions of essays published in Hypatia, “Against Marriage and Motherhood” (11, 3 [1996]), “Rape as a Weapon of War” (11, 4 [1996]), and “Addendum to ‘Rape as a Weapon of War,’” (12, 2 [1997]). An ancestor of part of chapter 10 appeared in the introduction to my edited collection On Feminist Ethics and Politics (University Press of Kansas, 1999) as “Groping Through Gray Zones” and another in Metaphilosophy (31, 5 [2000]) as “Women, Evil, and Gray Zones.” For permission to draw freely on these materials, I am grateful to the journal publishers and the University Press of Kansas. Many readers and audiences provided stimulating questions, comments, advice, and support. Marcus G. Singer, Van Rensselaer Potter, Paula Gottlieb, David Weberman, Robin Schott, Hilde Lindemann Nelson, and anonymous re- viewers read drafts of many chapters, commenting helpfully and in detail. The Nietzsche chapter benefited from suggestions also by Lynne Tirrell, Paul Eisenberg, Ivan Soll, and Lester Hunt and from discussions with audiences at the University of Copenhagen, Dalhousie University, and Washington Univer- sity-St. Louis. Chapter 4 on Kant was read and discussed helpfully by a faculty seminar at Colgate University. Chapter 5 benefited from comments by Ange- lika Krebs and discussions with audiences at Moorhead State University and the University of Wisconsin. Chapter 6 on war rape was improved by com- ments from Bat-Ami Bar On and Hilde Lindemann Nelson. Chapters 6 and 7 profited from discussions with audiences at the International Association of Women Philosophers Seventh Symposium in Vienna (1995), the Graduate Stu- dent Philosophy Conference at Washington University-St Louis (1996), the University of Chicago, and the University of Cincinnati. Chapter 10 benefited from discussions with audiences at the International Association of Women Philosophers Eighth Symposium in Boston (1998), the Feminist Ethics Revis- ited Conference in Tampa (1999), the Philosophy Institute at the Goethe Uni- versity in Frankfurt, the Economics Institute at the Albert-Ludwigs Univer- sity in Freiburg, Bryn Mawr College, Dalhousie University, Florida Atlantic University, the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin, Colgate University, and the Women in Philosophy Group at the University of Chicago, as well as from comments and suggestions by Lisa Tessman, Bat-Ami Bar On, Marilyn Friedman, Marcia Homiak, Paula Gottlieb, David Weberman, and many contributors to On Feminist Ethics and Politics. For bringing valuable materials to my attention or helping me track them down, I am grateful to Marcus G. Singer, Lorna Smith Benjamin, Carol Quinn, Angelika Krebs, Suzanne Solensky, Steven Nadler, Kenna Del Sol, Elizabeth x The Atrocity Paradigm Heaps, and Maudemarie Clark. Support of many kinds also came from Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Lee Bartky, Michael Stocker, Norman Care, Axel Honneth, Alison Jaggar, Marilyn Frye, Wendy Lee-Lampshire, Virginia Held, Jean Rum- sey, Chris Cuomo, Victoria Davion, Kate Norlock, Tracy Edwards, Steven Whitton, David Concepcion, Ruth Ginzberg, William McBride, Dan Hausman, Steven Nadler, Robert Skloot, Fran Schrag, Terry Penner, Harry Brighouse, Dan Wikler, Bruce Suttle, Elton Tylenda, and Josephine Pradella, as well as graduate students in my seminars on evil and on Kant’s ethics.