University of Iowa

Iowa Research Online Theses and Dissertations

Fall 2010

Evil perpetrators or cultural victims? An examination of the relation between cultural membership and moral responsibility Heather Elizabeth Libby University of Iowa

Copyright 2010 Heather Elizabeth Libby This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/846 Recommended Citation Libby, Heather Elizabeth. "Evil perpetrators or cultural victims? An examination of the relation between cultural membership and moral responsibility." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2010. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/846.

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EVIL PERPETRATORS OR CULTURAL VICTIMS? AN EXAMINATION OF THE RELATION BETWEEN CULTURAL MEMBERSHIP AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

by Heather Elizabeth Libby

An Abstract Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa December 2010 Thesis Supervisor: Professor Diane Jeske

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ABSTRACT In my dissertation, I explore the connection between cultural membership and moral responsibility. In particular, I consider what sorts of mitigating excuses, if any, are available to perpetrators of what we take to be serious wrong action due to their unique cultural circumstances. I utilize real-life case studies, and apply various philosophical theories of moral responsibility to these examples. One such theory!offered by Susan Wolf!suggests that "#$%$&'()*")+,*& -$.$/-,/"%0 may not be responsible for their participation in morally wrong practices due to the possibility that they may have been rendered by their cultures unable to recognize and/or appreciate that these practices were in fact wrong. This would supposedly allow us to claim that they were not culpable for their resulting ignorance or for their morally wrong actions which resulted from acting in accordance with their (actually false) beliefs. I argue that this approach to understanding the relation between moral responsibility and cultural membership is seriously flawed, and provides us with counter-intuitive results about the case studies in question. Consequently, I next examine theories of responsibility which suggest that responsibility may be mitigated not because of an alleged inability to recognize the truth, but rather due to the alleged reasonability of the beliefs of the perpetrators. Lawrence Vogel and Neil Levy offer versions of this strategy. They argue that, because certain morally wrong practices (such as slavery) were endorsed by the societies of certain individuals, their resulting beliefs in the propriety of their actions were epistemically reasonable. It is argued that these persons should not be considered culpable for holding their actually false beliefs or for acting in accordance with them. I argue that the strategy 1%&1/&2,/3&4,3%&5+$.$+,6*$&"7&87*.9%&1/,61*1"3&"#$%1%:&3$"&1"&/7/$"#$*$%% suffers from ambiguity.

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The final portion of my project explores the connection between the epistemic status of a belief and a person9%&27+,*&()*5,61*1"3&.7+*-1/;&,/-&,("1/;&)57/&1"-M)-/(7-6)-P'1&-5/)%)-/)-5("&)7-6)^-C-/(7-"$-07)(where my family was. M(7-]03/)*-bT&("4*21-3$**)(4')-("7-friend at Sobibor] got them out? Or had they perhaps stopped them? Were they holding them as hostages? And even if they were out, the alternative was still the same: Prohaska was still in Linz. Can you imagine what would have happened to me if I had returned under those circumstances? No, he had me flat: I was a .%01$")%LJC-@")5-0&-could /(..)"-&/(&-&/)+-5$'*7"2&-1/$$&someone. But I also knew that more often they did shoot them, or send them to concentration camps. How could I know which would apply to me? (134) Convinced that he had sufficient justification for his decision, Stangl arrived at Treblinka in September of 1942. He claimed to have once again put in for a transfer, which was again ignored by Globocnik (160). Despite his reported reluctance to accept the position, once having assumed the role of a death-camp director, Stangl performed the corresponding responsibilities with remarkable efficiency. Indeed, it was in response to his work ethic and the clock-work-like precision with which his camp was run that he )(%")7-&/)-3$66)"7(&0$"-#$%-9A)1&-3(6.-3$66("7)%-0"-W$*("7-C#-&/)-("15)%-01-k:$,2-&/)"-?$*#-A)*0)B)1-&/(&-5)-$'4/&-&$-3$"3*'7)-&/(&the person does not have a sane deep self and should not be considered morally responsible for her wrong action. Likewise, it may be the case that an individual does in fact have the correct moral A)*0)#1,-A'&-A)3('1)-$#-#(*1)-)6.0%03(*-A)*0)#1,-&/(&-.)%1$"21-6$%(*-7)*0A)%(&0$"1-%)1'*&-0"90"3$%%)3&