Paul Morrow, "Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocity" (MIT Press, 2020)
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What is Paul Morrow’s main argument about the role of norms in mass atrocities?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talise, I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figder, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Paul Morrow. Paul is John Mahr Human Rights Fellow at the Human Rights Center of the University of Dayton. His research focuses on moral, political, and legal philosophy with an emphasis on norms, mass atrocity, and war. His new book has just been published with MIT Press. It's titled Unconscionable Crimes: How Norms Explain and Constrain Mass Atrocities. The moral horrors of genocide and mass atrocity lead us to wonder how such things are even possible.
A common and I should say understandable reaction is to see events of this kind as arising from the collapse and eventual disappearance of norms as such. That is, because we find genocide and mass atrocity so difficult to comprehend. We grasp for an explanation that ascribes to these episodes the absence of comprehensibility. Against this tendency, Paul Morrow argues that moral, legal, and social norms help to explain mass atrocity. and accordingly can help avoid its occurrence. In unconscionable crimes, Morrow lays out a subtle theory of norms as explanatory and action guiding tools. Now as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But also as usual, we should begin with our guest. Hi, Paul. Hi Bob. How are you doing today?
I'm doing well. How are you? Oh, hanging in, you know, it's strange days, but uh, you know, making the best. Um, so, you know, we usually just begin with uh the author saying a few things about himself. So uh can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm a moral and political philosopher. Um not true of everyone on this program, I understand, but a former student of Bob. So it's great to hear from you again, Bob.
It's good to be talking to you both.
And uh yeah, as you mentioned, I I've worked in a couple of different positions, uh, but I've always been a philosopher at core. I'm currently working in a human rights center where the focus is, you know, really on advocacy and also on institutions and sort of explicit legal norms around human rights. So it's this past year has been a really Impressive introduction to the sort of practical sphere of issues that I really understood from a philosophical perspective before that.
Great. Um So and b am I right to s to think also that you've done a lot of Travelling. As an academic.
That's right. So uh even when I was doing my PhD, I did a visiting fellowship at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, uh where I was, I think I don't know if I was the first philosopher, but I was certainly the only one there amongst a bunch of historians and social scientists. And the core of this project, you know, goes back that far to thinking about, you know, what are what are some of these colleagues who work in social scientific or humanistic fields? They're already invoking, you know, ideas about the normative landscape during mass atrocities. you know, what can philosophy add to the conversation? And so I've been thinking about that, I guess, for almost ten years now. And I'm still I'm still thinking about it and I
I should say that people who work in this area, you know, often have some sort of biographical background to how they started thinking about it, that very closely matches what you laid out about people's first assumptions about the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide or other atrocities, which is, you know, a failure of comprehension and then You know, there's there's a couple of different directions you can go from there. One is towards, you know, trying to comprehend and doing research and, you know, reading literature, reading testimony. The other one I suppose is to sort of put it out of mind and think, well, that's just that's just not possible to to comprehend, or maybe it doesn't touch my own life.
I don't have any direct sort of negative epiphany sort of story about when I first discovered the truth about the Holocaust or one of these other crimes, as as some people who work in this field do.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Paul Morrow’s main argument about the role of norms in mass atrocities?
0:00–7:10
2
How does the book’s methodological approach differ from traditional legal‑historical studies?
7:10–15:08
3
What are the three kinds of norms (moral, legal, social) that structure the theory?
15:08–23:51
4
How do moral norms explain why ordinary people can participate in genocide?
23:51–33:01
5
In what ways do legal norms facilitate or constrain mass atrocities?
33:01–41:48
6
Why are social norms considered the most promising yet under‑explored category?
41:48–51:52
7
What historical case studies (Holocaust, Rwanda, etc.) illustrate norm transformation?
51:52–1:00:25
8
How can visual testimony and museum practice help prevent future atrocities?
1:00:25–1:09:18
Speakers
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