Recognition and the Emotions
TLS May 8 2009 from Stephen Mulhall's review of Axel Honneth's "Reification: A new look at an old idea--The Berkeley Tanner Lectures": It is not difficult to share Honneth's sense that the monstrousness of genocide is not adequately acknowledged by condemning it as immoral--a mere violation of ethical principle, as it were. But what the work of his critics should have helped him to see is that his own strategy also risks failing to acknowledge that monstrousness. For what makes genocide abhorrent is precisely that its practitioners did not mistake the ontological status of their victims. To be sure, they described those victims as racially inferior, as subhuman; but just as only human beings can be enslaved, so only human beings can be treated as subhuman. Indeed, recognizing that in this sense the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing is essential to grasping the distinctive evil of their inhumanity. *** from Tamler Sommers' review of Jesse J. Prinz's ...