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Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide is the culmination of Kristen Monroe's twenty years of work on altruism and moral choice. The book is magisterial in scope. Its goals are ambitious, its methods innovative, and its results provocative.
As in her previous work, Monroe relies on narrative data--the stories people tell about themselves and others--to probe individual psychological processes. Her goal is to develop "an empirically grounded theory of moral choice" (p. 4), one that accounts for not only rescuers, but also bystanders and genocide supporters.
The presentation of unedited interview transcripts forms the heart of the book. Reading the transcripts without commentary imparts an immediacy and intimacy rarely encountered in social science monographs. It is as if one is listening in on very, very private conversations. Reading the raw data also allows the reader to form her own mental picture of each interviewee, which is exactly Monroe's intention.
Monroe presents interviews--or what she calls "targeted case studies"--with five different people (p. 27). The five she presents are similar in background, but differ in their responses to the Nazi conquest of Europe and the Holocaust. They are drawn from a pool of over 100 interviews that Monroe conducted over fifteen years, starting in 1988.
Tony is the rescuer from an affluent background who views his activities as nothing extraordinary. Beatrix is the bystander. She is Tony's cousin and grew up in the same affluence, but when faced with the same circumstances did nothing to help, believing that one person could not make any difference. Kurt is the "good" German soldier whose profile is similar to that of Tony, as both served in their respective armies. Kurt believes in the ineluctable forces of history and thus supports Germany's invasion of the West, but not the East, which he views as the historic homeland of the Slavs. Fritz is a disillusioned Nazi supporter who admits that he, like many others, dealt with the conflagration of Nazi persecution of Jews by putting his head in the sand--despite traveling all over Europe during the war as a journalist. Florentine is what Monroe calls an "unrepentant" Nazi supporter; she is the widow of one of the most prominent Dutch Nazis of World...