CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Pesek, Sanja |
|---|---|
| Title | SELF-REFLECTION IN POST-CRIMINAL SOCIETIES: FROM DENIAL TO MORAL RESPONSIBILITY |
| Summary | Victims of collective crime are targeted on the basis of their group membership; they are expelled from the moral universe of perpetrator-defined collectives with the help of large segments of the population. The absence of public disqualification of the criminal project and its ideology in the transitional period immediately following the fall of the criminal regime, I argue, should be understood as a collective problem. I hold that the transition from collective crime to the rule of law ought to be conceptualized as a context in which the ‘perverted group ethics’, which attempts to justify avoidance to deal with the criminal past, ought to be morally evaluated and disqualified. This is the time when the re-establishment of the moral community becomes the necessary condition of the very possibility of the establishment of democracy. A normative change from denial to acceptance of responsibility is required because victims ask us to acknowledge and to remember. Although I borrow from both, the individualist and the collectivist accounts of moral responsibility, I ultimately reject both in favor of a shared moral responsibility account, which requires that besides the membership criteria, the participation criteria be fulfilled as well. Thus, I hypothesize, that agents who share their collective identity with the perpetrators and who fail to uphold already accepted universal moral norms can be conceptualized as bystanders, a morally faulty group that produces harm against the community of victims, both, during the life of the criminal project (T1), and in the transitional period (T2). |
| Supervisor | Dimitrijevic, Nenad |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/pesek_sanja.pdf |
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