Kristen Monroe's serious moral concern in writing this book is striking. From the story of how she first learned about the Holocaust from her father at the beginning of the Acknowledgments (p. xi) to the recounting of her own intellectual development and turn away from rationalistic political economy (e.g., pp. 302–303), this book is an account not only of a scientific discovery but of a personal journey. Despite the title, there is little here about living in an age of terror; the book argues that if one knows about the evils of the Holocaust then the lessons learned from that case can be applied in others. Monroe's argument relies upon the enthymeme that invoking the Holocaust also provokes the response: Never Again. The moral requirements to try to prevent such events from recurring are probably the highest stakes that human beings face. But as a political scientist, even one interested in “empirical political theory” (p. 4), Monroe avoids taking this last step throughout most of the text. The last sentences of the book are thus quite revealing about where Monroe hopes that this journey has taken her:
Deciphering the ethical importance of identity thus leads us to consider our needs for human connection and human flourishing. This work forces us to think about what it means to be a human being and what we want as we live in a world of others. It shows us that our need for others is more than a longing for their cooperation in our own individualistic enterprises or even for their help in ensuring individual survival in a harsh world. It reminds us that it is a fundamental part of our human nature to crave acceptance, validation, and affirmation from others. We can find self-esteem and self-respect only when others help us to claim it. And we can fully attain the humanity in ourselves only by honoring it in others
(pp. 318–19).These sentences reveal an aspect of this book that I would like to explore in this essay. On the one hand, Monroe believes that “the ethical importance of identity” leads to the need to take connections with others seriously. Indeed, the key to understanding this book is that one's identity provides an ethical framework which serves as the “scaffolding” from which one's moral choices take shape. But what is an identity, anyway? Why has it become such a fundamentally important framing concept in contemporary political science? If we use Ockham's razor, we might rewrite the above sentences to say that humans fundamentally depend upon others for everything, including their capacities to make decent moral judgments. What that dependence means, and how it is expressed, thus become fundamental questions for moral life. Monroe, however, does not take this path. In this way, she has not yet escaped the gravitational pull of the self-interested individual at the heart of American political science. “Self-esteem” and “self-respect,” which have played no role in the argument in the text, suddenly appear at the end as valuable in and of themselves. In posing this question to Monroe's work, I might similarly ask the same of many other works in contemporary political science. Why is “identity,” which is often a placeholder for something else, such an important analytical category? In the end, it often seems vacuous, as I shall argue it does here. Yet if we are not to rely upon “identity,” on what other basis shall we build our understanding of humans so that we might prevent great harm? While a full account of such an alternative is beyond the scope of this review essay, my goal here is to show that from the standpoint of an alternative paradigm, one that is political and relational, Monroe's analysis would look quite different, and perhaps such an alternative would yield more promising results in response to the imperative of “Never Again.”
I.
Monroe attempts to explain how, in a society like Holland, some stood by and went along with the occupation, some resisted, and others collaborated. What distinguishes these three groups? Monroe's answer is that each person's “identity” leads him or her to a set of available moral choices.
She writes:
Ethical acts emanate not so much from conscious choice but rather from deep-seated instincts, predispositions, and habitual patterns of behavior that are related to our central identity. These spring from diverse forces, such as genetic predispositions, social roles, or culturally inculcated norms. Culture provides a range of self-images, but actors gravitate toward the image that strikes a chord with their genetic propensities, with a powerful filter coming from situational or contextual factors
(p. 256).She uses an insightful illustration: “Assume you are in a new town and are mugged while sightseeing.” Few people would mug someone else to get the resources they needed to return to their hotel. Why? Monroe answers: “Because mugging is not something people like us do. It is not on our cognitive menu” (p. 258). But who are we “people like us?” The “process” begins “with an ethical framework. This underlying framework is innate to all individuals” (p. 256). But the framework “gets filled in through some still undetermined process in which innate predispositions are acted on by critical others and the general environment to create each person's individual … identity or, more particularly, our sense of who we are in relation to others” (pp. 256–7). If this is the process by which moral choices emerge, then why privilege “identity” rather than the ethical framework as the key element? Besides moral choice, the other important element in an ethical framework is “moral salience,” that is, whether a particular situation strikes the person as raising a moral question. Once again, it is difficult to see why “identity” is the most useful category to arrive at this useful idea.
Indeed, there are serious problems with hanging the claims in this book on “identity” discovered through narrative. Monroe's own examples and narratives in this book are perhaps not so helpful. When she asks Tony, her example of a rescuer, to describe himself, he describes his body (he is older than he can believe and a bit overweight), his personality (“gregarious”), and adds that his children are “a major disaster” (p. 56). Tony's actions as a rescuer, not his divorce and child-rearing skills, and not the story he tells here (many years after the fact), are what matter in Monroe's categorization of him. When and how did Tony's rescue-identity form? The interview reported here presumes that the rescues occurred; did Tony decide to save people on the spur of the moment or because he believed the account he gives of the connection among people, as if they are all cells in a single organism (an argument that could also be used to deny the importance of any individual)? What is Tony's identity within which an ethical framework has grown?
Another problem with identity is that it can shift. Monroe writes that Oskar Schindler had an awakening to other moral possibilities and suddenly “his sense of moral salience clicks in and he becomes someone who will help Jews … ” (p. 257). But what causes his sense of moral salience click and not another person's? The stories of such moments of conversion are sometimes heard even about Nazis, who Monroe portrays as having a world-view quite different from “people like us.” Indeed, once Monroe has described an identity, she sees it as somewhat impenetrable by other forms of moral judgment. She characterizes the bystanders with whom she spoke as possessing “an incredible moral insensitivity” (p. 305), and Nazis as people “who saw themselves as superior Aryan people who were under attack and therefore needed to strike preemptively to protect themselves and their community” (p. 305). Identity becomes a fairly blunt instrument here; there is little room for changing accounts of moral choice or salience. Is this the best that we can hope for?
Part of the reason, I would argue, that Monroe becomes focused on identity is because her analysis is based on understandings of moral psychology that over-emphasize types of scientific findings that rely upon brain biology and other experimental results. Like the bias of rational choice, much of political psychology also emphasizes the individual to the exclusion of more collective ways of thinking. To escape from this bias, though, Monroe turns to philosophy and draws upon what she takes to be the more philosophically complex and other-oriented moral philosophies of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Shaftesbury and David Hume. She does so, presumably, to make good her criticism that utilitarianism and Kantianism are not helpful in discussing moral motivation. As she writes, “Utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, religious admonitions, indeed, most existing theories designed to guide our moral behavior and help us understand the ethical acts of others fail to adequately capture what appeared in my analysis to be the critical importance of psychological factors” (p. 8). While Monroe has been admirably interdisciplinary in her approach one wishes that she had included other disciplines in the ones that she relies upon in rethinking ethical theory. Different arenas of scholarly endeavor in the past generation might have refocused some of her conclusions.
II.
If the question at hand is: what causes some people to act in morally admirable and others in morally despicable ways, then my reading of Monroe's account suggests so far that identity is something of a place-holder, a bundler of other moral qualities, rather than a “cause” of ethical action. Ethical framework and moral salience either form or are a part of identity and influence how we treat others. My claim, then, is that too many pieces of the analysis are hiding behind the screen of “identity,” and identity itself can change. But Monroe's attachment to “identity” as the appropriate level of analysis is not only perhaps misleading, it is also symptomatic of the problem of over-privileging the level of the individual in political life.
Consider a different powerful account of moral judgment during the Holocaust. Relying upon a revision of Kantian moral theory, Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J. David Velleman argue that the Nazis' moral defect came not from their identities but from their living under a totalizing and morally heinous world-view.Footnote 1 Pauer-Studer and Velleman begin by reviewing some of the important work being done in Kantian ethics by Barbara Herman.Footnote 2 Herman argues that Kantian moral agents are not “morally naive,” and that in any community of moral agents, community norms will help individuals make judgments about what is “morally salient,” which is the same term used by Monroe. In other words, Kantians have spent much of the last generation looking at the practical implications of applying Kant's moral philosophy to how people live and apply moral standards. The problem for people living under National Socialism, according to Pauer-Studer and Velleman, is not that there were no moral standards, but that the standards were so distorted by the Nazi normative framework. Like Monroe, then, they are partly disagreeing with the Arendtian pronouncement that the great moral danger is that Eichmann did not think at all. But they identify the problem as political, rather than at the level of individuals whose personal writings reveal moral struggles but an inability to transform their intuitions into clear moral judgments. Pauer-Studer and Velleman quote letters and other memoirs of normal perpetrators to show that the world-view within which they were living, and not their identities, made it impossible for them to break free. “The reason why the [low-level] perpetrators were not deterred by morality, in our view, is that moral principles were filtered through socially conditioned interpretations and perceptions that gave events a distorted normative significance.”Footnote 3 Because there was “no space for the community to carry out this practical task” of exploring the meaning of norms vis-à-vis moral imperatives, they argue, ordinary citizens were unable to break free of the Nazi mindset.
Norman Geras makes a related political argument in his book, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust. Geras argues that if individuals accept the premise of “mutual indifference,” then they will be forced to accept the consequences of genocidal thinking when it is directed against them. In a way, Geras is making an argument similar to Monroe's. But he does so by using a political and social, rather than a psychological and cultural, approach.
There is one additional literature that Monroe has ignored but which would be extremely applicable to her analysis—the feminist work on approaches to care and relational thinking. Relational thinking, as opposed to positing identity as a fixed category, requires that moral psychologists and political theorists turn their attention to relationships. Starting with a framework of “relational autonomy,”Footnote 4 feminist writers have begun to demonstrate how framing ideas such as law, responsibility, and even international relations change when we presume human dependency, vulnerability, and relationship as starting points.Footnote 5 These are not complete theories, and still need the kind of political contextualization described above. Nevertheless, feminist writings now show a path away from using identity as a fundamental category.
Surely Monroe is correct to see moral salience and the connection with others as keys to creating more ethical societies. But must these ideas still be run through the ideological totem of “identity” in order to be taken seriously? There are not simply limits but also dangers in doing so: Above all postmodern, post-structuralist thinkers have taught us to be mindful of the ways in which our categories and processes of “normalization” may distort human ethical life by making us unable to see or experience our own actions and their consequences. As a result, we may end up filled with self-righteousness and incapable of self-reflection. Morality pertains not only to individuals acting in ethical ways, but also to the existence of politics, laws, and social institutions that support and bolster these ethics within communities. The mystery of why humans find it so difficult to “live and let live” is not solved by focusing on identity as the basis for moral choice. But Monroe is surely to be praised for continuing to raise this critical question as an issue in political science.
