Genocide and Human Rights - A Philosophical Guide (Electronic book text)

Philosophers have done much to advance human rights and to defend human equality. Unfortunately, philosophy has a darker side. It has largely ignored genocide. Worse, genocide at times has been aided and abetted by philosophies that have advanced racism and antisemitism and by philosophers who have encouraged - inadvertently if not explicitly - political regimes and cultural agendas that turned genocidal. In our post-Holocaust world, nations, businesses, churches, and professions such as medicine and law have been called to account for their complicity for bystanding while Nazi Germany committed genocide against the European Jews. To some extent philosophers have been held accountable too, but when the history of genocide is taken into account, philosophy and philosophers have not been sufficiently self-critical. In this book, an international group of twenty-five important contemporary philosophers work to correct those deficiencies. More than that, they show what philosophers can do to meet the challenges that genocide creates for humankind and for philosophy in particular. Appealing to diverse philosophical traditions, using varied approaches in their confrontations with genocide, the contributors to this book underscore that philosophy must respond directly and boldly to genocide and its threats to human rights in particular.