• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 961 0

intuition fails us in the face of genocide and other disasters that threaten human lives and the environment on a large scale. We cannot trust it. It depends upon attention and feelings that may be hard to arouse and sustain over time for large numbers of victims, not to mention numbers as small as two. Left to its own devices, moral intuition will likely favor individual victims and sensational stories that are close to home and easy to imagine. Our sizable capacity to care for others may be demotivated by negative feelings resulting from thinking about those we cannot help. Or it may be overridden by pressing personal and local interests. Compassion for others has been characterized by social psychologist Daniel Batson as “a fragile flower, easily crushed by self-concern.”7 Faced with genocide and other mass tragedies, we cannot rely on our intuitions alone to guide us to act properly.

WHAT TO DO?

Behavioral research, supported by common observation and the record of repeated failures to arouse citizens and leaders to halt the scourge of genocide and to prevent thousands from perishing in natural disasters, sends a strong and important message. Our moral intuitions often fail us. They seduce us into calmly turning away from massive losses of human lives, when we should be driven by outrage to act. This is no small weakness in our moral compass.

Fortunately, we have evolved a second mechanism, moral judgment, to address such problems, based on reason and argument. In the case of genocides and other mass crimes against humanity, we must focus now on engaging this mechanism by strengthening international legal and political structures that pre-commit states to respond to these tragedies rather than being silent witnesses. The United Nations is the institution that was created in part to deal with such issues, but structural problems built into its very charter have made it ineffective. Appreciation of the failures of moral intuition makes development of new institutional arrangements even more urgent and critical. For it may only be laws and institutions that can keep us on course, forcing us to doggedly pursue the hard measures needed to combat genocide when our attention strays and our feelings lull us into complacency.

Elsewhere, David Zionts and I have proposed that international and domestic law should require officials to publicly deliberate and proffer reasons to justify action or inaction in response to genocide;8 that is an aspect of the notion of legitimation discussed in this book by Paul Kleindorfer. If enforced, a requirement for public justification would likely heighten pressure to act to save lives rather than allowing people to die.

The stakes are high. Failure to understand how our minds become insensitive to catastrophic losses of human life and failure to act on this knowledge may condemn us to passively witness yet another century of genocide and mass abuses of innocent people. It may also increase the likelihood that we will fail to take appropriate action to reduce the damages from other catastrophic events.

RECOMMENDED READING

Batson, C. D., K. O’Quin, J. Fultz, M. Vanderplas, and A. Isen (1983). “Self-Reported Distress and Empathy and Egoistic Versus Altruistic Motivation for Helping.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 706-718.

Dillard, A. (1999). For the Time Being. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fetherstonhaugh, D., P. Slovic, S. M. Johnson, and J. Friedrich (1997). “Insensitivity to the Value of Human Life: A Study of Psychophysical Numbing.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 14, no. 3: 283-300.

Haidt, J. (2001). “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108: 814-834.

Just, R. (2008). “The Truth Will Not Set You Free: Everything We Know About Darfur, and Everything We’re Not Doing About It.” The New Republic (August 27), pp. 36-47.

Kahneman, D. (2003). “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality.” American Psychologist 58: 697-720.

Kogut, T., and I. Ritov (2005). “The Singularity