Perpetrators and Social Death: A Cautionary Tale

Metaphilosophy 47 (4-5):585-606 (2016)
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Abstract

Understanding evil requires both addressing the grave wrongs done to the victim and addressing the perpetrator who does these wrongs. Claudia Card's concept of social vitality was developed to explain what génocidaires destroy in their victims. This essay brings that concept into conversation with perpetrator testimony, arguing that the génocidaires’ desire for their own social vitality, achieved through their destruction of the social world of their targets, in fact boomerangs to corrode the vitality of their own lives. This is true whether they succeed or fail in their genocidal project. Card's recent analysis of “being a badass” is brought to bear on the cultivation of evil, and the essay suggests four strategies for meeting Card's “moral challenge of avoiding evil responses to evil.”

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Lynne Tirrell
University of Connecticut

Citations of this work

Discursive Epidemiology: Two Models.Lynne Tirrell - 2021 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95 (1):115-142.

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References found in this work

Genocidal Language Games.Lynne Tirrell - 2012 - In Ishani Maitra & Mary Kate McGowan (eds.), Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 174--221.
Epistemologies of ignorance: Three types.Linda Martín Alcoff - 2007 - In Shannon Sullivan & Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. State Univ of New York Pr.
On mercy.Claudia Card - 1972 - Philosophical Review 81 (2):182-207.
Genocide and Social Death.Claudia Card - 2003 - Hypatia 18 (1):63-79.

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