ATS2875 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Robert Jay Lifton, Josef Mengele, Good And Evil
6 Aug 2018
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Document Summary
Paradigm cases of evils are atrocities such as genocide, slavery, torture rape as a weapon of war, and child abuse: groups can do evil things and it"s a common feature of 20th century evil doing. "evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs" (card, Josef mengele and the nazi doctors: unlike eichmann, mengele did not just follow order but showed clear initiative. He had an overweening desire to be recognized as a great scientist. Lifton describes how the nazi doctors in auschwitz distanced themselves from their murderous actions by developing a separate "auschwitz -self" which they saw themselves as acting through when they carried out their killings and their experiments.
