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Article: Must Expousing Morality Always Lead to Mass Slaughter?
- Article from:
- The Philadelphia Tribune
- Article date:
- August 30, 1994
- Author:
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Franz Schurmann
Philadelphia Tribune, The
08-30-1994
Must Expousing Morality Always Lead to Mass Slaughter.
How are middle-class Americans to understand the enthusiastic hacking off of limbs that look the lives of millions in Rwanda? Is this some throwback to our savage past or, more frighteningly, is it the outcome of moral visions of the kind that have inspired the world for centuries?
In the 19th century, Western philosophers detected in history a moral evolution of humans from savagery to civilization. By civilization they meant a higher material way of life in which people's nobler nature - decency, tolerance, respect for life - would guide them. Yet within decades, the West produced ...