Innocence, genocide, and suicide bombings

Laurence Thomas

pp. 181-191

in: John K. Roth (ed), Genocide and human rights, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

If there are any objective and self-evident moral truths, the claim that genocide is a moral wrong of the most repugnant kind would surely seem to be among them. Nevertheless, it is important, perhaps surprising, to note that it is only in recent history, namely since the Enlightenment, that genocide has had the status of a manifestly self-evident moral wrong. That result is closely connected to the fact that human equality, as we understand it, is a modern idea. That reality, in turn, is one reason why slavery has a very, very long history of which American slavery was the last significant expression. During the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the idea that all human beings are created equal would have simply made no sense.¹ The same holds for the Roman Empire. It took the arguments of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, among others, to provide the conceptual framework for a shift in the concept of a human being, according to which all human beings are equal at a most fundamental level. Genocide's status as a moral wrong is the outgrowth of this new conceptual framework.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Rousseau Jean-Jacques