Phil 492: Problem of Evil Seminar
Spring 2003
Professor David A. Salomon
Paper Two
Choose ONE and only one of the following questions. Answer it in a complete and thoughtful essay. Your essay should be a well-developed, clear, logical and complete idea developed from a definite thesis statement. Use texts where appropriate to support your answer. You need not consult secondary sources for this paper (though they will make your paper much stronger), but if you do, give credit for the information you use. Use the conventions of good essay writing; if you have doubts as to what those are, either see the instructor, check Thinking and Writing About Philosophy, and/or visit the Writing Center. Use MLA format at all times, and double-check your citations and references for accuracy and proper formatting.
Essays should be typed (double-spaced) and approximately 7-9 pages in length. Address the questions with the kind of depth and thoroughness that we have been using in seminar meetings. Papers must 12 point Times New Roman font, be double-spaced, and follow proper format. This paper is due on Monday, April 28 (note changed due date). Papers must be submitted on time. Papers handed in late will receive a one grade deduction for each class late. I will be happy to look at drafts ahead of time; in fact, I encourage it! There will be absolutely no extensions on this paper.
Read the questions carefully. Proofread your work. All papers must have a clear thesis.
As usual, you can alter any definitions you see fit to answer these questions so long as you explain those alterations up-front and give valid reasons why you need to impose those alterations.
1) In his final work, The Drowned and the Saved, published in 1986 (one year before his death), Primo Levi writes "Not by our will, cowardice, or fault, yet nevertheless we had lived for months and years at an animal level. . . . We had not only forgotten our country and our culture, but also our family, our past, the future we had imagined for ourselves, because, like animals, we were confined to the present moment" (75). Later he insists, "we are not yet animals, we will not be animals as long as we try to resist" (111). If in fact the Jews persecuted during the Holocaust can be compared to animals, and philosophers almost universally agree that the ways the Jews were treated were both inhuman and inhumane, would you agree with Peter Singer when he writes, in Animal Liberation, "If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering . . . of any other being" (8-9). Singer offers the term "speciesism" to describe "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species" (6). Might we suggest that anti-Semitism, of the type witnessed during the Holocaust, was actually a type of what Singer calls speciesism? And if we agree that the Jews should not have been treated as they were, and we agree that they were "treated like animals," can we argue that we should not treat animals that way either?
2) For many thinkers, the Holocaust marked the end of theodicy. In other words, extrapolating Theodor Adorno’s idea that there can be no poetry after the Holocaust, some thinkers have come to believe that there is really no possible way to justify God’s ways when discussing the Holocaust; therefore, theodicy is now irrelevant. Some have made similar arguments related to the attacks of September 11th. So, is theodicy still, in the year 2003, a relevant philosophical way to explain the world? Can it be helpful in developing one’s own Weltanschauung? Support your response using both recent (since 1900) world events and contemporary (i.e., since 1940) philosophies and philosophers. Recall, also, that the whole "field" of theodicy really developed after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; what will be the philosophical reactions to the Holocaust and September 11th for the next hundred years?
3) Using Freud and/or Jung, build an argument that, although it occurred some forty years after his liberation from Auschwitz, the Holocaust killed Primo Levi. Is it true, as the pop psychologists like to say, that "some scars never heal"? Use Levi’s own words, in addition to Freud and/or Jung, to defend your response. You also might want to look at the vast array of materials on Levi (there are several good web links on the seminar page); the two most recent biographies (Carole Angier’s The Double Bind: The Life of Primo Levi and Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi) make competing arguments about the cause of Levi’s death, but might be helpful nonetheless.
4) The postmodernist tendency towards moral relativism (and relativism of other types) indicates that good and evil are finally no longer applicable or accurate terms. Because much of our understanding of people and the world is now based somewhat exclusively on our own interpretation of people and the world, any sense of objective good and evil are lost. However, with the attacks of September 11th fresh in their memories, many philosophers have announced the end of postmodern relativism. In an essay published in reaction to the attacks, Stanley Fish writes:
But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary's shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else–in your view, a deluded someone–might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end because it is simply another name for serious thought. Serious thought is what many intellectuals, among them postmodernists, are engaging in these days. Serious thought is what is being avoided by those who beat up on people for suggesting that it would be good to learn something about where our adversaries are coming from. These self-appointed Jeremiahs forsake nuanced analysis for the facile (and implausible) pleasure of blaming a form of academic discourse for events whose causes reach far back in history and into regions of the world where the vocabulary of postmodernism has never been heard. Saying ‘the postmodernists did it’ or ‘the postmodernists created the climate that led to its being done’ or ‘postmodernism has left us without the moral strength to fight back’ might make these pundits, largely ignorant of their quarry, feel good and self-righteous for a moment. But it won't help us understand what our next steps might be or how to take them.
(The entire article available at www.gwu.edu/~ccps/rcq/Fish.pdf; a copy is also in the reserve binder for the seminar.) Is moral relativism (and, by extension, postmodernism) still applicable to our understanding of good and evil in the contemporary world? Why or why not? Use examples to support your argument.