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Killing all the members of a group is worse than killing a lot of people.
Genocide, in its literal sense of cide ie completely killing a genos ie an ethnicity or race, is viewed as uniquely bad because of reification of race and ethnicity as concepts. Stalin killed many millions of Slavs, but there was no possibility that he would kill all of them, that left to his own devices there would be no more Slavs remaining. Hitler killed many millions of Jews, and his intention was very much that there would be zero Jews remaining in the areas under his control at the conclusion of his process. Hitler's intention was to exterminate the Jews, Stalin's was never to exterminate the Ukrainians.
So I think the core of privileging killing millions of Jews over killing an equivalent number of Slavs is simply that there are more Slavs, while Jews were reasonably close to being, as it were, an endangered species. The number of Jews has been permanently reduced, the number of Slavs remains large. The rule would be: It's worse to kill all of some group than it is to kill 10% of a 10x larger group.
With regards to animal species, where we can say definitively that two species aren't equivalent and one can't produce the other, I agree with this concept. I'd find it much more abhorrent to kill a California Condor than to kill a Turkey Buzzard, and I'd find it almost infinitely more abhorrent to kill 500 California Condors than to kill 500 or 5,000 or even 50,000 Turkey Buzzards; regardless of the method or motive or degree of cruelty involved. Because the death of a Turkey Buzzard (1/5,600,000 in the USA) is just the death of a bird; the death of a California Condor removes a piece of genetic diversity from the world, some fraction of some utils from everyone.
With regards to humans, I'm a little more skeptical but still see the logic. This attitude reflects a reification of the idea of nationality and race as ideas more important than mere lives. If one recognizes a superhuman value attached to the idea of a nationality as a cultural project, ending that cultural project is much worse than mere murder. If one deeply believes in HBD and one values diversity, either genetic or cultural or whatever, then wiping out a branch of the tree of life is much worse than merely killing a lot of folks.
If one identifies instead by class, than one ends up at Mao's infamous remarks on the subject of nuclear war: Mao expounded at an international conference that China had (at the time) 700 million people, and that even if half of them were wiped out in Nuclear War the remaining 350 million would be able to build world socialism. An Italian communist asked how many Italians would survive. Mao replied "None, but what makes you think Italians are so important to World History?" For a Communist, whose identification is with the international proletariat rather than with race or class, killing every Italian is a small price to pay for permanent liberation from Capital.
Of course this adds obstacles to the cultural diversity arguments. Ok, you still have Ukrainians, but you killed all the Kulaks, so you lost their culture, you lost their unique class of genetics, you might still have Ukrainians but they're not the same Ukrainians. But this lapses quickly into absurdity: any cultural change reduces diversity by killing off what came before, and any lack of cultural change kills off what might have been. Humans are malleable.
So if some tiny isolated but culturally/ethnically distinct village catches smallpox before being wiped out in a raid by another tribe is that worse than the Holocaust? By this logic America is guilty of countless Holocausts and isn't in a position to lecture Hitler, a man who ultimately didn't even succeed in wiping out his targets.
Would I be right in saying Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were not personally responsible for the genocide of any ethnically distinct Native American tribes?
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Hey, how was the guest speaker from BLM last night at Oberlin?
Presumably there's some way to weight the degree of cultural importance and the size of the group against another group's size and cultural value? Idk. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it with regards to human nations as opposed to animal species so I might be losing my steelman abilities. On balance I would guess it would be more tragic to lose a big group with a large cultural footprint than a small group with a small cultural footprint; it's how you weight a small group with a large cultural footprint against a large group with a small cultural footprint. Would losing Mormons or Jews be more tragic, per TracingWoodgrains twitter?
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If you want to take the argument towards this direction, killing one person is worse than killing multiple people because one person was the only representative of their specific genotype.
It falls apart because no one cares about one person's specific genotype except possibly that person. A few more people care about a tiny no-name village's distinction. A lot more people care about the Jews as an ethnicity and culture.
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