So I raised my hand and said, “Isn’t it good that they were in it for the money, and not because they hated Jews?”

But I have long since learned why that was not a wise thing to say. :)

Or to put this another way: We are sometimes reminded that Mr. X was not just a mass murderer but a genocidal one, as if the “genocidal” part made it worse. I don’t think that part makes it worse. That’s exactly the sense in which I object to the use of “genocidal” as a pejorative.

“The comments are kind of fun to watch. You argue, “genocide is bad, but murder of X people via genocide is less objectionable than murder of X people via non-genocide.”

And the commenters can’t help writing, “but genocide is bad!!””

No Phil, that’s not what happened. Landsburg entitled his post, “In Praise of Genocide.” Then he tried to backpedal in the first sentence.

Then he later in the post said he doesn’t understand why the term “genocidal” is pejorative.

So if Landsburg wanted to have an academic discussion and not mislead people, who would have titled his post, “Why I Can Imagine People Worse Than Genocidal Killers,” and he would have said, “I don’t know why ‘genocidal’ is considered the most pejorative term imaginable, when in my mind is should be maybe the 2nd most pejorative term in the English language.”

This is clearly not true in general, and may be even generally untrue. In the infamous example of the holocaust, the jews were spread all over europe, most of them quite strongly integrated with the larger populations.

This argument would only work on rather small and isolated groups, living in far away places. But no other group would have any interest in attacking such groups.. Even colonisation rarely lead to the planned destruction of complete ethnic groups (though bad things did happen).

….

The same argument is more applicable when discussing the problem of culling elephants in nature reserves like the Kruger park, where good conservation resulted in very large numbers. Let’s assume you can agree that culling is necessary. In that case, the usual policy is to shoot off complete groups (mainly females), to avoid creating groups of traumatized and dangerous elephants. Shooting mostly single males does not help to reduce population growth, as it is anyway only the strongest males that are allowed to mate with the females.

This is intuitive. if 10 families who don’t know each other each experience a tragic death there is a certain amount of suffering. But if a family of 11 people suffers the death of 10 of them there is a certain economy of scale involved.

I would say that as my supply of family is tragically reduced the value i receive from each remaining family member increases.

There were 55 1961 Ferrari 250 GTs made. There’s 12 left. The last time one was sold it went for about 11 million bucks. When there is only one left in the whole world it’s value will be even greater. If I picked 12 random collector carts to detroy I would destroy a smaller value than if I destroyed every last one of the 12 remaing ‘61 Ferrari’s

Instead of murder, let’s think about robbery. So in one case (genocide) a thief goes into a store and steals $10,000 worth of goods. In the other case (random murder) the thief goes into 10,000 stores and steals $1 worth of goods in each store. Which one is worse. By your logic, the $1 worth of goods in 10,000 stores is by far worse. I agree! Imagine the pain and suffering 10,000 people are subjected to when they lose that $1. And how about all of those people’s friends. What if they are all public companies? The number of people affected could be in the millions! Woe is he who bought stock in any of those companies.

Bringing it back to earth, it is clear (maybe not through philosophical logic) that the one store that lost $10,000 worth of goods is in a much worse position. Regardless of if it is a mom n pop store, or a walmart.

So can we bring this back to genocide and random murder. While surely random murder effects a much larger network, and the people who are most close to the murdered will feel be in despair, people have a much larger network to help them get over that death. They can “spread” the death around, softening the impact. This is not the case with a genocide. Assuming that the genocide is not 100% effective (without blowing up the entire earth, I don’t think it would even be possible), there are a small number of people that have to cope with the death of countless others, without that same network.

I crossed a few borders here, but I’m curious if this argument holds any water. What do you think?

“The Han Chinese can be wiped off the face of this earth and the world won’t miss them very much.”–S. Landsburg

I get the part where you pose that such a thing is no worse or even better than “900 million random people across the earth die”. But to me that is like saying that having one of every classic artists painting destroyed is worse then having every Renoir or Picasso destroyed.

I don’t buy it. Your view is that most of the people mourning the Han Chinese would also be Han Chinese so that grief is eliminated. But you neglect the value that the Han Chinese culture would have added to future generations that is now also at a loss.

Note that I did not have any enforced or given connection to Finnish culture. I was born in Israel and have lived most of my life in the Boston area in the US. But I have a large collection of Finnish CDs and love their music, far more than Swedish music; I find the Finnish language fascinating and beautiful; and my life has been enriched both by the direction and indirect contributions of Finnish culture, including Finnish hacker culture (which gave us, among other things, IRC and the core Linux) and literary culture (the Kalevala, and associated myths, which feed into the songs of the band Värttinä which I love, as well as being the inspiration for JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth). I very much hope that Finnish culture continues producing the kinds of effects on the world that it has in the past, and I feel an emotional connection to it due to its past contributions that would make me extremely distressed if it were forcibly eliminated.

Just goes to show you that you never can tell: Just because *you* don’t see know the value of a culture doesn’t mean you actually know how many people outside that culture have benefited from it.