Carl Sagan once said, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back” (241). This quote can be applied to many situations through history, but specifically to the Holocaust. Many times in history, society was made to believe that their practices or situations were morally right, but it was eventually realized that these practices were, in fact, wrong. Some could say that this realization occurs when nonconformists “criticize
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The adjustment of society shows that values are objective in that they are always there, but they simply have to be discovered. Until the Nazis discovered that their actions were morally wrong, they were acting according to their relative moral beliefs. Someone can believe that killing is right or good, but that doesn’t mean that it actually is morally right. During the Holocaust, the Nazis believed that they were doing society a favor by eliminating those seen as a threat. If it was morally right or good to execute six million Jews and millions of others, then why is there guilt associated with the Holocaust? This inevitable guilt shows that there is some unspoken moral truth that was realized in order to feel the said guilt. If the Nazis had believed in an overarching set of moral truths, they wouldn’t have thought that their actions were morally right. For more than 40 years after World War II ended, Germany was devastated, occupied, and torn apart. Their society crumbled because the Nazis didn’t recognize or follow the absolute moral truths. Moral relativists wouldn’t be able to tell the Nazis that what they were doing was wrong because they would be entitled to their own opinions or beliefs about morality even though their actions led to the crumbling of an entire country and
The adjustment of society shows that values are objective in that they are always there, but they simply have to be discovered. Until the Nazis discovered that their actions were morally wrong, they were acting according to their relative moral beliefs. Someone can believe that killing is right or good, but that doesn’t mean that it actually is morally right. During the Holocaust, the Nazis believed that they were doing society a favor by eliminating those seen as a threat. If it was morally right or good to execute six million Jews and millions of others, then why is there guilt associated with the Holocaust? This inevitable guilt shows that there is some unspoken moral truth that was realized in order to feel the said guilt. If the Nazis had believed in an overarching set of moral truths, they wouldn’t have thought that their actions were morally right. For more than 40 years after World War II ended, Germany was devastated, occupied, and torn apart. Their society crumbled because the Nazis didn’t recognize or follow the absolute moral truths. Moral relativists wouldn’t be able to tell the Nazis that what they were doing was wrong because they would be entitled to their own opinions or beliefs about morality even though their actions led to the crumbling of an entire country and