Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules

Evidence

What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed ‘legal’ crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgement, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all these around them. And this question is all the more serious as we know that the few who were ‘arrogant’ enough to trust only their own judgement were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief. Since the whole of respectable society had in one way or another succumbed to Hitler, the moral maxims which determine social behaviour and the religious commandments – ‘Thou shalt not kill! – which guide conscience had virtually vanished. These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgements, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 496

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s radical individual-judgement claim is a key counterpoint the reader will need when later readings theorize how Islamophobia gets socially produced yet individually resisted. — connects to: Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 583; No scientific method can adjudicate moral responsibility for the Holocaust. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 587; Individual moral judgment can remain intact without any supporting social rules — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 603 (+2 more)

Related

• Individual moral judgment can remain intact without any supporting social rules (similarity 0.93)
• Nazi rule inverted reason so that rationality demanded moral consent to crime (similarity 0.84)
• No scientific method can adjudicate moral responsibility for the Holocaust. (similarity 0.82)
• Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles (similarity 0.82)
• Nazi law reversed the presumption of rights to presume universal rightlessness at birth. (similarity 0.80)
• Totalitarian legal theory replaces juridical accountability with fate and life-laws (similarity 0.79)
• Older Nazi officials retained moral qualms the genocidal machine overrode (similarity 0.79)
• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520
• Moral rules cannot be created or altered by deliberate human enactment #corroborates (0.75) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 443