Ethics

What's so bad about Holocaust denial?

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Well, the first thing that's bad about it is that it flies in the face of the obvious evidence. But that's not what you meant, presumably. Merely believing something false isn't usually held to be morally objectionable, the way Holocaust denial is.

So why is that morally objectionable? Well, I think we have to look at the moral surroundings. People who deny the fact of the Holocaust are not normally historians with a detached interest in the matter. Holocaust deniers do not have good, independent reason to think things are other than the rest of us believe. Rather, they want there not to have been a Holocaust, or for it not to have been as bad as is usually thought, and so they flatly disregard the obvious evidence or invent reasons to discount it. So one thing one might say is that those who deny the Holocaust (almost?) always have an ulterior motive, and it's not so much the denial itself that is problematic as the motives behind it.

Indeed, I don't myself see that there would be anything morally objectionable about one's having doubts about the occurence, or scope, of the Holocaust, if one's doubts were firmly based in the usual kind of evidence. That, of course, is fairly hard to imagine, again, because of the strength of that evidence, but we can certainly imagine someone's discovering other evidence that, perhaps misleadingly, cast serious doubt on the evidence there presently is and, for that reason, starting to have doubts for perfectly ordinary reasons. I don't see why that would be morally wrong.

This is connected with another reason one might suggest Holocaust denial is morally objectionable: that it offends the sensibilties of, and thereby injures, people for whom the Holocaust is not at all abstract. This, however, is more problematic, I think. It's not that I don't think it's bad to offend people. It is. But suppose (counterfactually, obviously) that the Holcaust wasn't nearly as bad as we know it to have been. Suppose that "only" a few thousand people were murdered. Then, well, if we were to discover such a thing, or have very good reason to think we'd discovered such a thing, then the mere fact that telling the truth, or what we had very good reason to believe was the truth, would offend people who had an emotional investment in its not being the truth does not seem to me a sufficiently good reason to keep one's mouth shut. To be sure, one ought to take account of the fact that this new truth will upset people, but that is a different matter.

I should say, by the way, that I speak here as a citizen of the United States, and I speak entirely and only to the moral issues. The political, or legal, question whether denying the Holocaust ought to be illegal, as it is in Germany, is one on which I have very mixed views.

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