No scientific method can adjudicate moral responsibility for the Holocaust.

Evidence

Even the most sophisticated quantitative methods of researching ‘the facts of the matter’ would not advance us very far toward an objective (i.e. universally binding) solution to the issue of moral responsibility. There is no scientific method to decide whether their gentile neighbours failed to prevent the transportation of Jews to the camps because the Jews were so passive and docile, or whether the Jews so seldom escaped their guards because they had nowhere to escape to – sensing the hostility, or indifference, of the environment. Equally, there are no scientific methods to decide whether the well-off residents of the Warsaw ghetto could have done more to alleviate the lot of the poor dying in the streets of hunger and hypothermia, or whether the German Jews could have rebelled against the deportaton of the Ostjuden, or the Jews with French citizenship could have done something to prevent incarceration of the ‘non-French Jews’. Worse still, however, the calculation of objective possibilities and computation of costs only blurs the moral essence of the problem. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 587

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on modernity’s rationalized bureaucratic logic: here Bauman marks the limit of rational-calculation as moral arbiter, echoing Weberian instrumental rationality critiques that reappear in Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 496
• DEEPTHINKING: Core Bauman move: reframing the Holocaust question from ‘what happened’ to ‘what can be judged,’ grounding the whole scaffold’s turn from facticity to responsibility.

Related

• Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust’s methods emerged from expert judgments on feasibility, not from Hitler’s orders. (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror (similarity 0.81)
• Individual moral judgment can remain intact without any supporting social rules (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust’s moral categories grew more contested after consensus about the facts settled (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.79)
• Instrumental reason’s slaughter continued after the Holocaust on the same scale. (similarity 0.78)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.78)
• Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles (similarity 0.78)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Moral judgment survived the Holocaust only outside all existing rules #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 496