Affirming by Isaiah Berlin

Author:Isaiah Berlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

TO JONATHAN DANCYfn1743

28 March 1995 [carbon]

[Headington House]

Dear Dancy,

Thank you for your letter about the conflict of values. I am afraid that your account of my views is somewhat at variance with what I believe myself to hold. Let me begin.

You speak of an ‘anecdote’ as being a ‘refreshing change’. The story I tell is so horrible that there is something totally inappropriate in calling it an ‘anecdote’. You say that I tell it as a true story, which implies that though I tell it so it may not be – but I can assure you that the trials in Tel Aviv have revealed the full horrible story in all its gruesome details. So the story is true and not merely, as you take it to be, an example of an extreme case of the conflict of what you call disvalues.fn1744 Before we get on to the substance of this letter, let me continue a little with the ‘anecdote’. You say that the Gestapo chief tells the Jewish leader that the Jews are to be transported ‘somewhere where their chances of survival are not good’. By this time the Jews of Hungary, where this episode occurred (as well as many similar ones in other countries), knew perfectly well where people were being transported to: the news about the gas ovensfn1745 was by this time widely known even in the West. So it is very likely that this phrase describes what was known. […]

I ought to add that this story is not, for me, a case of a conflict of ‘disvalues’, but [of] quite a different paradigm. My point when telling this story is that there are situations so extreme, and indeed appalling, that ordinary moral categories are not fitted to cope with such cases; and that therefore the attempt to judge the conduct of the Hungarian Jewish leader as being right or wrong does not arise. We are in no position to pass judgement on behaviour in a situation so unspeakable; ordinary moral criteria do not apply to situations so far outside the range of normal experience. I said all this because I was against Hannah Arendt, and others like her, who criticised German, Hungarian etc. Jews for not standing up more to the Nazis, and letting themselves be taken like sheep to the slaughter. This seemed to me not only wildly unrealistic, but a piece of inexcusable arrogance on the part of people living in safety, daring to dictate what people in that situation should or should not have done. No doubt there are religious doctrines or ideologies which do dictate a clear answer to this kind of dilemma: but if they exist, I do not share them. I am concerned [with] the normal ethical views of the great majority of mankind, in many times and places.

[…] You speak of adopting certain values or disvalues. But this is not a realistic piece of moral psychology. We simply find that these values are such that we can, being what we are and [believing] what we believe, live our lives by them.

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