in defense of baby hitler.
not clickbait.
Silas Abrahamsen made the case that Judas Did Nothing Wrong. This followed the preview of Kanye’s new hit song, “Nigga, Heil Hitler.”1 It seems that this is the best time for me to come out of the closet:
I do not think Hitler was the worst person to ever exist.
Before you rush to judge, let me clarify some points immediately:
I also don’t believe that Genghis Khan, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot were “the worst person to ever exist.”
I don’t think that Naziism was good.
The Holocaust happened, and it was plausibly the worst event to ever happen.
I am not employing moral relativism or nihilism to claim that “no one is better or worse than anyone else.”
I don’t agree that “Hitler did nothing wrong.” Hitler definitely did something wrong, but he is still not the worst person ever.
To explain why I don’t think Hitler is the worst person to ever exist, I’m going to restate, modify and build off the arguments of Silas for my own purposes.
Was Judas the Worst Person Ever?
If you believed that Jesus was God, you wouldn’t betray him.2 God knows everything and has infinite power to mete out justice, so no one in their right mind would ever betray God.
Therefore, Judas either wasn’t in his right mind, or he simply didn’t believe that Jesus was God.
If Jesus wasn’t God, that would make him a liar. If I pretended to be God and got people to follow me by doing magical tricks, that would be fraud.
When Judas told the Pharisees where to find Jesus, he was turning Jesus over to a court of law to assess whether or not his claims were true. If Jesus was lying, he should be punished for fraud.
Judas did not intentionally sin against God, but thought that he was turning in a fraudster. After all, Jesus said, “they know not what they do.”
Finally, (this is the consequentialist argument of Silas), because the betrayal of Judas led to the salvation of mankind, Judas did the best thing a human could possibly ever do.
Points 1-5 are correct — Judas did nothing wrong. However, I reject point 6, that he did “the greatest thing.” This is because I am a moral intentionalist, not a consequentialist. I believe that the moral goodness of a subject is determined by their intent, not the consequences of their actions.
The worst events don’t require the worst people.
Let’s not play genocide Olympics. I am not going to compare the Holocaust to Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Caliphate Jihad, the Crusades, the Conquistadors, or any other genocide. Let’s assume that the Holocaust, as an event, was the worst thing to ever happen.
Even so, Hitler was not the worst person to ever live.
He wasn’t more evil than a garden-variety pedophile. You could go on the Sex Offender Registry and find dozens of people in a 20 mile radius who molested and abused their relatives without any pretense of moral justification.3 Their purpose was to inflict pain for their own personal sadistic pleasure.
If we accept that the Holocaust is the worst event to ever happen, then Naziism and Nazi Germany were the worst systems and ideologies to ever exist. Consequentially, Hitler is bad for contributing to them (although he wasn’t the single point of origin or failure for them).
On a personal level, people who molest and abuse their kids are worse people than Hitler, even if Naziism as a system is worse than the average political ideology of a random pedophile.
Hitler’s system abused many more people on a more systematic level than any individual could ever achieve. The most prolific pedophile might abuse hundreds of children, but Hitler’s ideology led to the deaths of millions. Still, that doesn’t tell us about Hitler’s moral worth as an individual. All it proves is that he was a moderately bad person at the head of an extremely bad system.
Let’s go back to Genghis Khan. Imagine if the Great Khan was resurrected today, and he successfully invaded Asia with some high-tech equivalent of mounted archers.4 The death toll of a modern-day Mongol invasion would be in the hundreds of millions — clearly worse than the Holocaust.
But Genghis Khan wasn’t uniquely evil. He had plenty of generals who had the same exact sadistic attitudes that he did. Tolui, Ogedei, Hulagu, Jochi, and Chagatai probably would have done the exact same thing. In fact, if you took any random Mongol soldier, cryogenically froze him, and gave him enough drones to invade Asia today, most of them would probably kill 100 million people.
If we define “literally the worst person ever” as “willing to kill 100 million people,” then it’s likely that 1% of people alive today are “literally the worst person ever.” And that percentage was probably a little bit higher the further back into the past that we go.
Hitlerian evil is garden variety, and nothing special. What was special about Hitler is that unlike the Khans, he and his fellow Nazis managed to take over Germany, which was a modern industrial state surrounded by modern industrial states.
If Hitler had launched a war against Africa, rather than other European states, the final death toll would have been smaller, because African populations were smaller and had a limited capacity for resistance. The reason why the Holocaust was so quantitatively bad is because technology caused a massive inflation of populations that would have otherwise not been possible.
Consequentialism is dumb.
In consequentialist terms, the people responsible for the Holocaust are those who made technological and bureaucratic advancements in farming. Without those increases in productivity, increasing the supply of food, the Holocaust would have never reached the scale of millions of people.
But that would be a poor prescription of moral responsibility, because no one who worked on making agriculture more productive ever intended for millions of people to suffer and die. Clearly, intention matters.
Consequentialism is appropriate to apply to systems and ideas. The ideas of Naziism — discrimination, extermination, systematization — didn’t begin with Hitler. It doesn’t make sense to blame Hitler for Naziism on a personal level, because he was influenced by all those who came before him.
If we’re being consistent consequentialists, we should say that Erich von Ludendorff is significantly worse than Hitler, since he influenced Hitler and he was part of the German leadership during WWI. But no consequentialists are consistent on this point. They are intentionalists when it suits them, and consequentialists when it suits them.
It doesn’t mean that “Naziism is better than pedophilia,” that’s not what I’m arguing (although I think it’s fair to say that the systematic rape of 40 million children would be competitive with the Holocaust).
What I am arguing is that when judging the moral worth of individuals, we should judge them according to the principles that they believe to be true, whether or not those principles are wrong.
For example, let’s say Trump accidentally nukes China, leading to a nuclear holocaust. Is Trump the worst person to ever live? No, he just made a mistake. His action may lead to the worst event to ever occur, but that tells us nothing about Trump’s moral worth as a human.
Consider a more extreme example: while Trump and Elon are hanging out in the oval office, Elon’s son pushes the big red button, starting a nuclear war. Is Elon’s son the worst human to ever live? Obviously not. Intentions matter more than consequences when we are assessing the moral worth of humans.
Conclusion.
My intention here wasn’t to rehabilitate Naziism, communism, the Mongol Empire, or any other destructive system or ideology. Rather, my intention was to make the following point:
Moral systems matter more than personalities.
I would rather live in a liberal society with some marginal percentage of pedophiles than live in an authoritarian hellscape where pedophiles have been eliminated — along with millions of others. Even though the authoritarian hellscape would have less “truly evil” people (on a personal level), the moral worth of the resulting system would be much lower.
When we say things like “Hitler was the worst person ever,” it may sound like we are attacking Naziism. For the average person, this is true, because the average person only understands the world in terms of personalities, not in terms of ideas or systems.
Hitler didn’t torture animals or molest children. He wasn’t a uniquely evil person. He was a garden-variety bad person with an extremely destructive ideology. It wasn’t his demonic spirit alone which hypnotized Germany and led to the Holocaust — it was the nexus and ecology of ideological systems which brought him to power and supported him for 12 years. Hitler wasn’t solely responsible for the Holocaust, but shared that responsibility with thousands of Nazi Party members.
Hitler had opportunities throughout the war to cause more destruction and suffering, which he hesitated to take. He could have conducted more civilian bombing against London and Paris early in the war, but felt a moral obligation to reduce civilian casualties when fighting “civilized Aryans.” Nazi Germany had huge stockpiles of poison gas, to use in case the allies ever used those weapons on Germany — but he never deployed them, even after Stalingrad, because he believed it was an immoral act which would result in massive casualties for both sides.
This isn’t to say that Hitler was a kind, gentle, or humane person. But it is to say that there were probably thousands of fanatical Nazis who, given the opportunity, would have broken the Geneva Conventions, bombed London and Paris from day one of the war, and released poison gas over civilian targets. These sorts of tactics could have increased the final death count of the war by several million.5
It has always struck me as wrong and evil to hypothesize about “killing baby Hitler.” It might be the case that there are some people who are hardwired for sadism genetically, no matter what political ideology they adopt. There are self-professed liberals who have tortured others, I’m sure. But Hitler wasn’t one of those people. When he ordered the deaths of millions, he did so because of a utilitarian, moralistic, political theory, not for his own personal sadistic pleasure.
When people talk about “killing baby Hitler,” they are presuming that Nazi ideology was somehow genetically ingrained into Hitler. Furthermore, they’re presuming that ideologues like Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Strasser, or Bormann wouldn’t have existed or had any chance of succeeding without Hitler. In fact, it’s possible that any one of those Nazi leaders may have been more successful than Hitler, leading to a higher death count in the event of a Nazi victory.
Nationalism is an exceptionally destructive idea. Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism were at the heart of WWI. The inability of Poland and Germany to come to an agreement over Danzig was due to fanatical, antisemitic nationalism in both countries. Nationalism can only be contained effectively when there is supreme imperial force, like the Romans or the Americans, who can force regional powers to work together.
Mass genocide is worse, as an event, than a singular event of child abuse. But in terms of whether or not an individual is personally evil or not, intentionalism means that the singular event of abuse makes an individual worse than one who orders a mass genocide for political or ideological reasons. Abuse which is justified by personal sadism has worse intentions than mass genocide justified by utilitarianism.
The petty sadism of pedophiles and primitive tribespeople is only limited by the fact that those individuals are generally cut off from real power. If you put a child-molesting animal-abuser in charge of Nazi Germany, things could have been worse. But there’s a sort of paradox here.
Let’s say that Hitler one day went crazy, and started demanding from his subordinates Caligula-style events, where he would publicly and personally torture children and animals in front of large crowds. How would the people react? Inevitably, people would turn against Hitler. Naziism was a bad system, but it was not an amoral system.
In order for Hitler to maintain power over the state, he had to abide by certain rules of moral conduct. This creates a paradox of evil, where truly evil people can never maintain power (they alienate their supporters), and neither can truly good people (the path to power is too corrupt and requires too many compromises). As the amount of power someone has increases, the absolute value of their deviation from moral neutrality decreases. This is because power is not immoral, but amoral, and takes advantage of moral systems when it is helpful to do so.
Naziism took hold not because it promised sadism and cruelty, but because it promised to protect people from sadism and cruelty. The Russian Civil War was brutal, and the victory of the Bolsheviks in that civil war was even more brutal. The best propagandists aren’t liars; they are people who believe their own narrative. That was the appeal of Hitler: in a sea of politicians who never kept their promises, he stood out as someone who meant what he said, and believed it with all his heart.
It is said that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and this can either be true or false depending on what we mean by hell. If we mean “a bad state of affairs, causing pain or suffering to others,” then yes, wars and genocides begin with some sort of good intention, like the intention to protect one’s self and one’s family, or to punish criminals for their wrongdoings. But if by hell, we mean “the result of ultimate evil,” then good intentions can never achieve the same level of evil as bad intentions.
If a pedophile believes a child to be innocent, and rapes them, this is an evil intention. If an animal abuser believes a cat to be innocent, and tortures them, this is an evil intention. If Judas thought Jesus was God, it would be an evil intention for Judas to betray Jesus. If Hitler believed that Jews were normal humans with no inherent predilection for evil, it would be an evil intention for him to kill Jews.
Barring some sort of extreme hallucinations or delusions, pedophiles and animal abusers are not fooled by faulty ideologies into committing evil acts. But Judas may have had a faulty understanding of Jesus, and Hitler certainly had a faulty understanding of Jews. Just as Judas would have been correct to turn in a fraudster, if Hitler’s characterization of the Jews was empirically correct, then he wouldn’t have been doing anything wrong.
Understanding Hitler’s intentions is important, because it helps us understand how good or moderately bad people can participate in the worst events. The problem here isn’t personalities or genetics, but ideologies and politics. The people cheering on mass deportations aren’t evil. But they have come to believe that illegal immigrants are “mostly gang members,” rapists, and criminals, who deserve to be locked up.
It’s plausible that some of the people cheering for mass deportations are also evil people in their personal lives, for unrelated reasons. But I don’t think that the people who are the most motivated to deport illegals are doing so because they want to hurt innocent people. But some people do! Those who intend to hurt innocents are sadists. Confusing sadists with ideologues is common, especially since the two are not mutually exclusive, and sadism is not a static trait.
Ideologies can make people sadistic. Think of the phrase “drinking liberal tears.” Conservatives feel Schadenfreude when they see a trans person cry. The more extreme on the dissident right get a dopamine hit when they hear that a trans person has committed suicide. And there are those on the left who fantasize about ruining the lives of conservatives for being racist. How evil are these people?
Imagine if some of these people on the internet were given Hitler or Stalin levels of power. How would their behavior compare? As bad as Hitler and Stalin were, there are millions of powerless losers on the internet who would have been much worse.
It is a mistake to conflate the evils of a system with personal evil. This is because when we conflate the two, then a person without systematic power becomes automatically good.
Attacking powerful people for making mistakes without putting those mistakes in the context of intentionalism leads to the moral bias of declaring that the powerless masses are inherently good, and the elites are inherently evil.
This is the moral fallacy at the root of populism, where someone like George Bush is declared “pure evil” for the Iraq War, while a powerless loser who fantasizes about hurting and killing others is given a pass. In reality, most people who attain power are (on average) more morally good than most people without power. There are hard limits to how evil powerful people can be (lest they be overthrown by their subordinates), while there is really no limit to how evil normal people can be.
Had democracy in Weimar been stronger, Hitler would have died and been remembered as a Father Coughlin or a Charles Lindbergh, a populist orator who inspired street fights. But, on the other hand, had Hitler been kept in prison to serve the length of his sentence for attempting to overthrow the government, it’s still possible that Strasserites or communists would have taken over Germany and started WWII in an alliance with Russia, prolonging the war and leading to more casualties. Blaming WWII on Hitler’s “uniquely sadistic personality” doesn’t give us the tools to learn from history — it’s a superstitious and flawed picture.
If we want to stop tragedies like WWII and the Holocaust from happening again, the best way wouldn’t be to start killing the most Hitler-looking babies. The best way would be to focus on systems and ideas.
For all the people complaining that culture is “stuck,” could you imagine, 10 years ago, that one of the most famous rappers of all time would be releasing the chorus, “nigga, heil Hitla,” and we would all just collectively roll our eyes and move on?
Some Christians argue that even those who believe that Jesus is God betray him all the time by sinning. But I don’t think being tempted to sin is the same thing as leading a group of men to arrest Jesus. Additionally, Judas is usually thought to be in hell. Perhaps the reason for this is that he never repented, despite committing suicide. I’m just going to assume that if a reasonable/rational person was confronted with the person of Jesus in the flesh, and they believed he was God, they wouldn’t turn him in. Jesus had many followers and all of them behaved with a degree of loyalty toward Jesus (although some denied that they knew him).
Some claim that Hitler had a relationship with his cousin Geli Raubel, who was 17 at the time. If Hitler abused his cousin, maybe he was amorally and selfishly evil on a personal level, but this isn’t usually the primary argument made.
Maybe some sort of land-drone, like an AI-powered autonomous tank.
There is an argument that if poison gas were used during WWII, people would have died much more quickly, but that the war would have ended much more quickly as well, and there would have been less destruction of infrastructure, leading to a quicker economic recovery after the war was over. I am skeptical of this argument in the early phases of the war, when Germany had air superiority during the Blitz, because Germany could have killed millions of British civilians and forced an end to the war in a matter of months. The key question is how effective gas masks and air raid shelters would be against mortality, as opposed to the eastern front, where the Soviets did not have enough gas masks to protect the population. It’s a difficult question. At the very least, my point was that Hitler’s intention in not using gas was to reduce civilian casualties, at least for the Germans, which other Nazis may have been less hesitant to care about.
C. S. Lewis in his adult fiction went on in depth how pure evil is not all that dangerous. Evil mixed with a good cause can be incredibly dangerous. Bent is more dangerous than Broken.
Genghis Khan had a good cause: ending inter tribal warfare across the steppes. His rampage across the the steppes was a War to End All Wars. And yes, things got mighty peaceful and law abiding after the pyramids of skulls building was done.
Hitler had an excellent cause: protecting the West from Bolshevism.
Cortez had an excellent cause: ending the mass torture and human sacrifice of the Aztec Empire. (In Cortez' case, he comes off as a net liberator. Most of his army were oppressed natives.)
I love these kinds of provocative posts that challenge common beliefs, in this case, that Hitler was the worst person to ever exist. I was intrigued by the possibility that he was not the worst person in the history of humankind. However, I was more intrigued by the paragraph with the heading "Consequentialism is dumb" because I have a theory about morality that supposes that all human beings are moral consequentialists, whether they realize it or not. If my theory is correct about this, even intentionalists care about the actual consequences and well as the intended consequences of someone's actions. If my theory is wrong about this, then it is back to the drawing board.
Trying to explain why my theory assumes that we are all consequentialists would probably make this comment longer than the original post, so I am not going to attempt that. The brief summary of the theory is that, as the human brain evolved, it began to model the world in terms of cause and effect because this was extremely useful to survival. Along with understanding cause-effect relations in both the inanimate and animate world, the brain came to evaluate the goodness or badness of things, events, one's own behaviors, and other people in terms of how effectively they cause a desired consequence. A rock with a sharp edge was "good" because it effectively cut animal skins. "Good" people help me attain my goals and "bad" people interfere with attaining my goals.
I'm not saying that people consciously evaluate the potential consequences of events in the world, although that can happen. Probably most of these calculations are part of what Kahneman called "fast thinking." Some of the products of fast thinking are positive and negative affects, which signal whether things are on track for accomplishing goals or not. In the moral realm, the moral sentiments are evolved emotional reactions to particular kinds of events that are helpful or not helpful for achieving life goals (ultimately impacting the universal goals of survival and reproduction). Because the evocation of moral sentiments is part of fast thinking, we are often morally dumbfounded when asked to explain what is objectively wrong (what the bad consequences are) of things like consensual incest. These things just feel wrong.
Mushy feelings also direct our efforts to tell each other what is right and what is wrong. We encourage other people to do what feels right to us and discourage them from doing what feels wrong. Ironically, because strong feelings of certainty often accompany perceptions of truth, we declare that some moral edicts represent moral truths, even though the "truth" is just a strong feeling, not an analytical discernment of what is actually the case. What is the truth about moral pronouncements? My theory says that moral pronouncements are designed (unconsciously) to shape the behavior of other people in ways that help us to accomplish our goals. It is helpful to be self-deceived about the real purpose of our moralizing because we have a better chance of convincing people that certain ideas are moral truths (especially if the truths are given by gods!) than if we tell someone, "I want you to do something because it will improve my reproductive fitness."
Intentions do matter, too. It can be useful to know if someone is consciously, intentionally trying to interfere with my agenda, because they might be a continuous threat to me. The person who is intentionally trying to harm me is worse than someone who accidentally interferes with my goals but is unlikely to do it again. (But if they continue to unintentionally give me trouble, then intentions do not matter as much as consequences.)
Wow, that took way too long. I do want to say something about whether the intentions of Judas or Hitler matter when judging who is the worst person in the history of humankind. Christians' attitudes about Judas always puzzled me because he was apparently part of God's will to sacrifice Jesus to save the world. Why should Christians revile Judas when he did exactly what God wanted to happen? In fact, did Judas really have a choice in the matter? Can anyone go against God's will? I once asked a priest about that, and the priest said that Judas had free will and could have chosen not to betray Jesus. If he had, God would have chosen somebody else who would have freely chosen to betray Jesus. None of that makes sense to me. Betrayal is simply one of those human behaviors that we instinctively get angry about. Poor Judas never had a chance.
[I sometimes also talk about the inanity of modern Christians getting together to weep and wail about Christ's suffering during the crucifixion. For Heaven's sake, people! That is exactly what God the Father wanted for his Son! And you know how the story turns out! Resurrection and salvation of the world! So why the sad faces on Good Friday? Yeah, I know, it is human nature to sympathize with anybody who is suffering.]
Back to Judas. The Deep Left Analysis of this story is that intention is the deciding factor in judging whether Judas did "the greatest thing." His answer is no, because Judas was not intending to save the world. He was only intending to turn a possible imposter into the authorities, in exchange for his bag of silver. I get that. Why would we want to give credit to someone who was only trying to make a little money and who didn't even realize that he was part of a plan to save the world?
[Another aside: Judas didn't even get to spend his silver because he so regretted his betrayal that he hanged himself. Another great example of Biblical justice: Judas played the role that God intended for him, and God knew that we would kill himself for playing his part. What a great reward for Judas in God's greatest plan!]
But what if Judas had been aware of God's plan? What if he realized that it was God's intention to sacrifice his Son to save humankind, and his role was to betray Jesus to the authorities to help make this happen? Even though he would feel so much regret about this that he would kill himself? Should we then praise him for helping God to carry out His greatest plan?
I would say we should neither condemn Judas for being the unwitting dupe or praise him if he had been aware of and willing to accept his role in God's plan. His intentions do not matter. Why? Because intentions do not arise ex nihilo. Nor are intentions authored by an autonomous "self" separate from all the causes that make our brains function the way they do. None of us can help but intend to do "God's will" [which, to me, is a metaphor for in inexorable causes that direct our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors]. It is all about consequences, about cause and effect. "Good" and "bad" are simply evaluations about what is helping or hindering desired consequences. ["Evil" is an inflammatory word, rife with metaphysical demonic mythology. A topic for another piece.]