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6 - Social Science and the Study of Perpetrators

from Part I - Causes and Dynamics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

Thomas Brudholm
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen
Johannes Lang
Affiliation:
Danish Institute for International Studies
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Summary

Philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen considers the moral and intellectual dangers in emotionalizing mass atrocity. The turn to emotion, which was also a self-conscious turn away from excessive intellectualism and cognitivism, must take care not to go too far in the other direction. Giving too much weight to the subjective and emotional dimensions of atrocity, Vetlesen cautions, might lead scholars to embrace a self-proclaimed “value-free” form of analysis, which simply adopts the perspectives of the historical actors, including those of the perpetrators. The danger here is that a scientific “objectivism” warps into a form of relativism and radical moral constructivism. When this happens, there is no longer any critical distance between the voices of the perpetrators and the interpretative framework of the scholar. The scholar has lost the ability to formulate a critique of the violence.
Type
Chapter
Information
Emotions and Mass Atrocity
Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations
, pp. 104 - 120
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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