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Law and Philosophy

Columbia Law School

Faculty Scholarship

Collective guilt

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Collective Guilt And Collective Punishment, George P. Fletcher Jan 2004

Collective Guilt And Collective Punishment, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Attitudes toward collective guilt in the Middle East require us to take a closer look at guilt in the Bible. It turns out the text of Genesis is conflicted. Some passages support a theory of guilt linked with the inevitability of cleansing and punishment; other passages appear to treat guilt as a psychological state that might be cured by a confession of sins. The tension is important today in trying to understand whether the collective guilt of nations should also entail collective punishment.


The Storrs Lectures: Liberals And Romantics At War: The Problem Of Collective Guilt, George P. Fletcher Jan 2002

The Storrs Lectures: Liberals And Romantics At War: The Problem Of Collective Guilt, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Somehow we in the West thought the age of war was behind us. After nuking Hiroshima, after napalming Vietnam, we had only distaste for the idea and the practice of war. The thought of dying for a noble cause, the pursuit of honor in the name of patria, brotherhood in arms – none of this appealed to us anymore. "I hate war and so does Eleanor," opined FDR in the oft-repeated lyrics of Pete Seeger. War became a subject for ironic disdain. As Tom Lehrer caught the mood of the 1960s: "We only want the world to know that …