Westermarck's ethics Book

Don't be fooled by the title: this book is neither about humanity, nor is it a history of the 20th century -- though we can perhaps say it is moral, if morality means feeling good about not being a war criminal. Glover's grandiose title masks a project of a substantially more limited scope: a catalogue of atrocities committed in the last century, followed by a discussion after each particular episode of what went wrong and a concluding section with suggestions as to how we can fix it.

Glover's purpose, he announces at the onset, is "to bring ethics and history together" -- a promising approach. And it should have been to the book's advantage that Glover, as director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College, London, is enmeshed in the discipline of bioethics. Alas, Glover enshrines the misperceptions and inadequacies typical of his profession in his approach to the topic at hand. Namely, he believes ethics "could be more empirical than it is"-- as if the discipline needed more empiricism, not less.

Glover's "more empirical" approach to ethics takes on a veneer very much like the pseudo-psychological approach he professes at the same time to disfavor. Worse still, Glover uses his own peculiar brand of pop psychology for the majority of his analyses. In their application, none of the clumsy pop-psychology terms or concepts proves particularly rewarding or especially original. Further, the ideas that are original are not useful, and what is useful is unoriginal. Given the vision of "humanity" he assumes at the outset -- that is, a qualified materialist one -- it is not hard to understand why. Glover claims to replace the "thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex . . . a darker account" of human nature, which at first glance seems suspiciously like an understanding of Original Sin. However, he basically sticks to the Enlightenment model of man and to its "hope of a world that is more peaceful and more humane." In Glover's world, humans are little more than stimulus-response machines: input the correct "moral resources" and the correct behavioral output will emerge soon after. What is more, this view of man places Glover squarely in the same trap experienced by humanity time and again in the last grim century.

For example, in the concluding chapter, which lays down a plan of action for improving the human condition, he writes the following lines without a hint of irony: "The causes of these [20th century ] catastrophes are partly political and social. Solutions to them cannot be purely in the realm of psychology or ethics: the political dimension has to be central. There is a need for proper policing of the world, with a legitimate and properly backed international authority to keep the peace and to protect human rights. There is a need for independent sources of information as alternatives to propaganda. There is a need to avoid large-scale utopian political projects. [emphasis added]"

Thus, in one concise paragraph, Glover's "solution" identifies itself with the primary cause of the largest-scale and most horrid atrocities of the last century. For what are "proper policing of the world" and the establishment of an "international authority to keep the peace" if not examples of the very kind of "large-scale utopian political projects" he condemns?