Mikes LITMUS TEST (below) is an Imaginary historical fact pattern.
Hypothetically, if the government were to announce that it intends to round up all _________ (insert some group of people) and then exterminate these people as quickly and completely as practically possible, not for anything specific that they have individually done but for who they are in general,
MY QUESTION FOR PHILOSOPHERS IS THIS:
Can you think of any moral reason why our government should refrain from doing this?
The Nazis filled in the blank with Jews, Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. However, the dividing line is flexible, it could be filled with the literate and Westernized as the Khmer Rouge did, or the kulaks and Trotskyites as in Russian communism. We could single out other groups to suit: nearsighted libertarians, left handed boxers, vegan astrologers, people who text only in emojis, the possibilities for eliminationist cruelty are infinite.
The misanthropy of Schopenhauer who thought everyone would be better off dead and that the nonexistence of Buddhist Nirvana was the best human fate, so we’d all be better off dead, differs from Nietzsche’s heroism, because by contrast he affirmed that in any century, there are a handful of geniuses who are valuable individuals, they have value, but the rest of our species is without value. Killing a million of ordinary people has the moral valence of stepping on a million ants.
Mike’s Litmus Test would tag Schopenhauer as an antisemite, but his hatred of Jews was a subset of a more general misanthropy, regardless of who we put in the blank, there is no moral reason that anyone should be burdened with life in his view. Sade would be another good example of an antisemite whose hatred of Jews was a subset of his hedonic misanthropy. He objectifies all other subjects in his contempt for any value beyond his libido. When the Litmus Test is applied to Nietzsche, he would also shrug off any moral reason to oppose government genocide of nearly everyone that was not of the stature of Goethe or Homer or himself; nearly everybody else can be exterminated without moral qualms: Jews or Slavs or Trotskyites or kulaks or homosexuals or vegan astrologers and the rest of our species are of no moral valence. I regard any thinker who cannot suggest a moral reason why the state should not immediately exterminate all the Jews as anti semites. Thus my tag. Generally, if you cannot think of any moral reason why our government should not exterminate some group of people, X, I take that to be a token of hatred for those people.
As with mad, sad Arthur of the Muttonchops, the very small numbers of people who have moral significance is a subset of Nietzsche’s more general view that the lives of most members of our species are a matter of moral indifference, so he also anti-Slav or Anti-Christian, anti homosexual and anti almost everyone else, the difference being that Nietzsche finds some cultural heroes aesthetically worthy. Sorel found violence purifying and creative, like a Futurist with words rather than images and he affirmed the virtues of destruction which treated current death as future life, unconstrained by good and evil. Schmitt’s distinction between friends and enemies is a conflict to the death, with everyone not regarded as a friend marked for annihilation. Foucault would also insist that who kills and who gets killed is a matter of power, not morality, so there is no moral reason why the government should refrain from genocide of any collection of people that that did include not him. Heidegger failed this fact pattern when it was not hypothetical, but actually historical. He was an unrepentant Nazi before and after the war. The epigones and advocates of this rogue’s gallery often fail Mikes Litmus Test as well.
I have a hard time not verbally flogging these and others like them like because, especially in the twentieth century historical context, I regard them as not just mistaken, but dangerously so. I believe in our twenty-first century deeply polarized political climate, it is irresponsible to excuse thinkers who paved the road to the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Failing Mike’s Litmus Test for any group of people is evidence of hatred for those and perhaps other people. This is why I think all of the above are anti semites.