Are Moral Judgments About the Past a Necessity or Unethical? Reflections on the Meaning of Universalistic and Relativistic Ethical Positions

ABSTRACT

Ethical relations to the past demand a conscious confrontation of the past. In this sense we will examine the close connection between past events and moral concepts and their influence on current moral discourses. We presume a weak moral objectivism, since strong moral objectivism fails to take account of relevant particulars of a given context, now or in the past, and since it might carry a tendency to dogmatism and rigidity. A stringent moral relativism, on the other hand, can lead to the trivialisation and denial of the violation of universal ethical values. From a philosophical standpoint, it will be argued that moral judgments about past actions are appropriate and necessary, followed by reflections on the significance of universalist and relativist positions in social science discourses and from psychoanalytic social psychology.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgenerational transmissions
• human rights
• moral universalism
• moral relativism
• moral learning
• psychohistory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Universalism and objectivism are used synonymously.

2 Here the question arises whether one such community can even be specified or whether it isn’t rather the case that each of us is part of plural and ever-changing communities.

3 Lemkin (2013, Chap. 7). Resolution Nr 260 of the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 9th, 1948: ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’, see Documentary Appendix in Lemkin 2013; Segesser and Gessler (2005).

4 For example, the German social psychologist Harald Welzer (2008), citing Daniel Goldhagen's (1996) thesis of the different basic moral beliefs of Germans under National Socialism.

5 An abbreviation for Tiergartenstraße 4, that place in Berlin-Mitte where the decisions were made to carry out the murder of the mentally and physically handicapped, euphemistically called ‘euthanasia’ by those initiated into this project.

6 This was true, as a result of the Geneva Convention for the Protection of the Wounded in 1864 and the two Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1899 and 1907, already during World War I, which is why various countries tried to prove that they were only at war because they had been attacked (Segesser 2013, 164pp).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidrun Wulfekühler

Dr. Heidrun Wulfekühler is Professor for Ethics in Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts at the Faculty of Diaconic Studies, Health Care and Social Work. She is a social worker and philosopher and her teaching and research interests include ethics in social work, ethics of migration, international social work and the didactics of ethics.

Angela Moré

Dr. Angela Moré is Professor for Social Psychology at University Hannover, Guest Professorships in Graz and Klagenfurt (Austria), Group Analytic Training and Graduation as Training Group Psychoanalyst (D3G) and external Supervisor at the Seminary for Group Analysis Zurich (SGAZ). Her main research topics include Developmental psychology and gender; psychoanalytic and culture theories, group dynamics and the unconscious; transgenerational transmissions; genocide research.