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Interesting site:
https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/health/Default.aspx
It asks you 30 agree/disagree questions on a variety of "philosophical" topics, and then outputs a score calculating the inherent "tension" or cognitive dissonance in your answers.
The average score is 27% out of 100%, I score a pleasant 7%, but only because:
I'm using a common-sense or consensus definition of evil, and I don't think this is an actual contradiction. So I'm pleased to say I have zero philosophical dissonance? Who knows.
What's that? Whence consensus?
I know it when I see it. I think it's not particularly controversial that genocide is generally considered to be, at the very least, in bad taste.
Not controversial among whom? Europeans had been fine with genocide as "kill them all" until about 19th century when the "white man's burden" took over, but if you extend the definition of genocide to forced population control and cultural suppression, then well into 20th century. Many non-European cultures are still fine with the former one (of course, when applies to really bad people over there). They may not be stressing this point when talking to Europeans, but their actions and even their words when not talking to Europeans show that clearly. I don't think it's as non-controversial as you think it is.
No, Europeans weren't fine with genocide before that. If nothing else, the concept of "genocide" (as "kill them all" as opposed to "please stop being like that, here is a school") didn't exist before industrial states. The closest thing in the European world would be the sack of cities or the expulsion of defeated enemies like various Indian tribes, but that was always justified as some kind of defensive fair play. The idea of systematically exterminating a helpless population, who had committed no crime to warrant a temporary state of exception, was anathema to European Christian culture. In the colonial cases where pre-modern Europeans took tiny baby steps towards "genocide", it was condemned by clerics (and, usually, by bean-counters pointing out that it was a waste of perfectly good human resources). Even when Caesar commits genocide the Roman sources treat it as "damn you didn't have to do 'em like that, but I guess that's how larger-than-life you are".
How about this one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_genocide
And yes, I agree that at least "kill them all" does not sit very well with Christian doctrines, but I don't think religious doctrines had ever been a major impediment to doing what people wanted to be doing.
Ah, Las Casas, the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, abuses of the encomienda system, and it turns out it actually wasn't smallpox. The greatest hits. I don't consider the Wikipedia page probative at all (the ESL involved is amusing but also suspicious: "However, descendants of the Taíno continue to live and their disappearance from records was part of a fictional story created by the Spanish Empire with the intention of erasing them from history.") The Black Legend runs deep, even if it's passed from Anglo-Dutch propagandists to anti-colonial academics.
I think it's entirely possible that, between diseases, resource exploitation, and the Malthusian conditions of the New World, the Spanish wiped out entire populations of natives, including many cultures smaller than the Taino. But "genocide" is the intentional destruction of a people based on their identity. If aliens landed their starship and crushed Switzerland, that would not be the Swiss Genocide.
I'll make two further points: first, I would hold up Las Casas as evidence that this sort of thing was not sanctioned by European culture of the time. The Church and Crown consistently attempted to reign in the frontier warlords and planters. Secondly, I have no basis to claim this and have looked up zero evidence, but I would bet that if we were to look at genetic evidence from Taino graves and at modern Dominicans, we would find a nontrivial fraction of Taino genes in the Dominican Republic (Haiti, obviously, is a monoethnic state founded on actual genocide, but the DR is a more representative sample).
Yeah, I am pretty sure if those were Spaniards it would go differently. But, OTOH, see England/Ireland, I think the Irish are still pretty salty about those times...
I think it's not a useful distinction. If somebody murders a lot of people and wipes whole cultures, it doesn't matter much, morally speaking, whether you thought "fuck you in particular, this culture, I hate you specifically because your language irritates me and your dances are ugly!" or you just thought "it'd probably more useful for me if this two-legged cattle just died, and I don't even care how they call themselves". This argument sounds like a pointless rule-lawyering, where you substitute naming question for substance question, and try to argue that because exact labelling and classification may be questioned, the substance - massive dying of people caused by somebody's actions - is not not as reprehensible, because some definition of some word does not cover this particular case with enough precision. I find such kinds of argument utterly useless.
No True European Culture, amirite?
Yes, it's not "true Christianity". But somehow things still happened... Just as slavery - according to many, many Christian authorities - weren't part of true Christianity, and yet, it happened too. As I said, people are very flexible in their religious beliefs when they want to be.
This is why I find the term "genocide" pointless outside of very central cases (basically the Holocaust and anything that looks a lot like it), because any discussion is literal rules-lawyering. Genocide needs to be intentional to be genocide, there's a whole Genocide Convention which says that. We can say that the Spanish were highly murderous without using the G-word (though I would assume there were cases where the Spanish intentionally slaughtered entire tribes, which one could reasonably call small genocides).
Let me bring back your initial statement: "Not controversial among whom? Europeans had been fine with genocide as "kill them all" until about 19th century when the "white man's burden" took over". I think it's fair to say that the Spanish actions being controversial at the time, chastised by the Church, the subject of heated debates in the metropole, and motivating policy actions from the Crown meant to put a leash on them means that they were at least "controversial" at the time and not a case of everybody being "fine with genocide".
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