The following article is intended to be thought-provoking satire. I was forced to put this disclaimer at the top, because I discovered, unfortunately too late, that it is almost impossible to parody a lot of what goes on and is believed in today's society.
A popular, though inaccurate, interpretation of Godwin's law is that one should
refrain from comparing your opponent to Nazis, because this action is
so insulting that meaningful debate will be killed off. I want to ask
whether this is really true, and whether the Nazis were really as bad
as they are portrayed in our media.
One famous Nazi policy was to kill physically handicapped people.
Before we react against this, we must remember that the killing of
handicapped people can hardly be called barbaric if the Royal Society
of Gynaecology (UK) is suggesting that we be allowed do the same
thing
if they are newly born children. Their arguments for this are pretty
sound -- in the words of John Harris, a member of the government's
Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester
University: "We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to
term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in
the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at
one end of the birth canal but not at the other?". It makes sense in
other ways too — for cases where it is easier to detect the condition
after birth, it is safer for both the mother and child if the
procedure is done after birth, and it's less wasteful as it avoids
misdiagnoses.
Actually, the Nazis were more consistent and logical than we are. Our
aim, quite rightly, is to eliminate suffering, so we compassionately
end the lives of people who are either going to suffer a lot, or cause
lots of suffering in other people's lives. We should not be
half-hearted about this effort, but follow the noble lead set by the
Nazis.
Then there is the issue of how the Nazis segregated the Jews from the
rest of society. Racial separation is well known in many parts of the
world, and in many cases is not seen to be harmful or undesirable —
see the attitude of many of these people regarding their traditional
segregated high school proms for
example. It is quite natural for people to prefer society that they
are comfortable with. In the case of Nazi Germany, the majority of
that society did not feel comfortable around Jews, and one can safely
imagine that the Jews of this period were not that fond of the
Germans. So no-one would have objected to this segregation, which
actually promoted a peaceful society by keeping the warring factions
at a safe distance from each other.
Some people may still object that when it came to the Final Solution,
the Nazis went too far. However, the people of Germany were
exercising their democratic rights — Hitler was, after all,
democratically elected. Since morality is defined by consensus, it is
outrageous for us to condemn this nation for its actions. Also, we
should remember that their action in removing Jews from their society
once and for all is really just a logical parallel to removing other
undesirables such as handicapped people. While we obviously neither
share nor applaud these anti-Semitic views (because we have found
that, far from being a social pestilence, Jewish people can in fact
make a very valuable contribution to society), we must respect the
right of a democratic nation to come to its own conclusions about
ethics — who are we to enforce our own scruples on others?
In the past, we have suffered a great deal from people imposing their
moral opinions on other people, and thankfully many nations are now
outlawing this kind of behaviour. For instance, Britain has recently
passed a bill making it illegal to refuse services on the basis of
sexual orientation. One
ramification of this, that certain Christian groups are complaining
about, is that private individuals who let out rooms in their houses
for Bed and Breakfast (a common practice in the UK) will no longer be
able to refuse a double room to a homosexual couple. Similarly,
religious adoption agencies will no longer be allowed to refuse their
services or discriminate against homosexual couples. In both cases
this is, of course, a great step forward in the right direction — we
ought to be very intolerant of these groups who would seek to force
their moral views on other people, even if until very recently their
views have been considered the norm or even enshrined in law. In the
same way, we need to learn to refrain from passing judgement and
condemning peoples of the past, such as the Nazis, who didn't happen
to have identical ethics to our changing standards.
Finally, I want to say something about debates that invoke Nazis not
as direct insults, but in 'slippery slope' arguments that take the
form "if we do this now, very soon we will be doing X, just like the
Nazis (or other bad people)". While these may seem either very
powerful or insulting, history has shown that such arguments are
actually empty. For example, when abortion law was changed in the UK
in the 1960's, I have no doubt that one of the arguments against
abortion was that it would lead to selectively terminating people with
severe handicaps or disabilities, or even to the killing of infants
after birth — certainly I have heard both such arguments within my
own lifetime, and the idea that anyone would approve of post-natal
terminations sounded ridiculous at the time. But today, we know that
it is perfectly reasonable to cull foetuses for these reasons,
including post-natal infants, according to the sensible arguments of
the Royal Society mentioned above.
Again, when genetic screening for cystic fibrosis and other diseases
was introduced, some people complained that this might lead to
screening against the mere possibility of a disease. In this article
from 1992 about screening and ethics, it states
that the guidelines from 1970's handled the ethical problems by
stating that "screening was appropriate if the genetic disorder was
serious, the test was accurate, and a therapy or intervention was
available". The article lists some of the ethically dubious
possibilities envisioned, such as: "Women carrying foetuses with
genetic abnormalities may be encouraged to abort".
In Britain, aborting because of genetic abnormalities such as cystic
fibrosis is old news. Last week, plans for screening against a gene
that gives a high risk of breast cancer were announced, which is clearly
quite a different matter. The screening is done not against the
mother eggs, against the foetuses, and not for the purpose of therapy,
but early abortion (i.e. in the context of IVF, as I understand it).
Clearly, all but the most heartless of people have applauded this
humane step. The very fact that these 'slippery slope' arguments were
used in the first place, and the way that people responded to them at
the time, shows us that these arguments were thought to be powerful,
and the possibilities they threatened were thought to be genuine
evils. But in both cases, and surely many others, we now know better.
For this reason, we are right to ignore all slippery slope
arguments. Eventually, time and the progress of ethics will show that
the original moral objections were misguided.
So, to conclude, I am actually in favour of the principle that we
shouldn't use the example of Nazis when debating ethics and so, but
for different reasons than those commonly cited. The first reason is
that when we use the Nazis in this way, we are perpetuating a slur on
the reputation of the Nazis that they simply do not deserve — they
were a compassionate people, and even if there are some areas where we
think they did not act very wisely, or where we would have acted very
differently, we are stepping way out of line if we condemn them for
their different ethical standards. A second reason stems from the
first — it can hardly be either an insult or an argument to make
comparisons to such a people, and so the Nazis are somewhat irrelevant
to our ethical debates. We should find some other genuinely evil
group of people as a reference point, and then pronounce a ban on
making comparisons to them instead. And thirdly, all slippery slope
arguments can be seen, ultimately, to be vacuous, as society will
adjust its understanding of morality and we will come to realise that
what we had been afraid of isn't so bad after all.
I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the
readers, the Christian fundamentalists, will rant on about this being
an example of the disastrous effect of moral relativism, and that in
fact Western society is already a long way down the slope to becoming
one of the most horrific societies this world has ever known, and
the only reason I don't realise it is because I am so desensitised.
They will go on to threaten the judgement of God (or George Bush) and
other silly things. The other half, the more reasonable half, will
complain that this is old news.
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