Abstract

In 1988, my book Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic first appeared. The book generated a variety of responses, some positive and enthusiastic and some quite negative. The reason for these responses, of course, was that in the book I staked out a discomforting, and so controversial, position. The overarching conviction which led to the writing of the book was that, like in so many other areas, the process of thinking about ethics and doing moral philosophy in the post-Shoah world simply could not continue in the same way as it had up to that point. That is, for me, the events of the Holocaust represent, if I can borrow a concept from Emil Fackenheim, a kind of revelation, a radical challenge to the way we in the West must face and try to understand the human condition.Beginning from this perspective, I came to the conclusion, in brief, that one of the most disturbing implications of the Holocaust for moral theory is that we can no longer assume that there is a universal moral truth to which all normal people have access and to which all normal people will naturally respond. In other words, the optimistic assumption of Western modernity that human beings can know and act on the true and the right, can no longer be taken for granted. This, of course, seriously undermines the very basis for the modern enterprise of moral philosophy.As one engaged in the teaching of Western moral philosophy, I of course did not come to this position easily, nor am I fully comfortable with it. But that uncomfortableness is in the end also part of the point. I am the child of survivors and I live and work in a post-Shoah world, and that world is simply not a comfortable one to inhabit. It is not the optimistic world of Enlightenment thinking. For me, the implications of the Holocaust for what I am doing as a professor of religion and as a scholar of ethics must be taken seriously enough to radically affect the way I, and others, go about our business.Before moving forward, I should give a little bit of the intellectual background that led me to write the book in the way I did. I came to the study of the Holocaust rather late. In fact I only really entered into a systematic study of the Holocaust when I began teaching in 1980, that is after my university education and even after my graduate work. I came to the Holocaust then as a young scholar with little formal background in the field, but with the need to develop and teach a course to American undergraduates.Looking back, I think that coming to the study of the Holocaust relatively late in my professional development was actually a positive situation: I was not, after all, invested in the field, I did not have prior commitments to one view or the other, I did not feel I had a particular set of scholars to defend or uphold. When I began to teach the Holocaust, the only items on my agenda were to understand the events as best as I could and then devise a way of presenting them to the students in the clearest possible way