As for the criteria on which we could make a judgment, I’m fond of a principle that Chomsky elaborates: we bear moral responsibility for our own political decisions and the decisions from which we benefit, i.e. those of our allies. Thus, we are ‘responsible’ for East Timor but not for Cambodia. It’s unclear that the Armenian genocide qualifies under these criteria.

I don’t think this is at all right: “There’s little satisfaction in the recognition of strangers.” As many of my colleagues would attest, there’s actually a great deal of solace in having people you have never met or heard of extend their thoughts to you in a time of atrocity or crisis. Perhaps it is more important for one’s own community to acknowledge suffering (I don’t dispute that), but it is also very valuable for other people to acknowledge suffering precisely because they are outside your community and interacting with you simply as a human.

But in any case, my intuitions don’t rest on any claim about what provides comfort or satisfaction to victims. Most of those people who experienced the Armenian genocide have long since passed away and, as such, can no longer be comforted. Instead, the deontological intuitions I have concern respect, and it is surely always possible for the dead to be respected (and disrespected). That truth commissions have an important function with regard to comforting victims does not mean they do not also have an important function in respecting them. Genocide acknowledgment, in my view, is more akin to truth commissions in their latter function than the former.

I don’t see why I’m conflating personal, political, and interstate duties. Naturally there are many things the United States Congress does not owe people of other societies, that their own governments and communities do owe them. But we’re not talking about building a monument to the cultural achievements of Ali Farka Toure or Faiz Ahmed Faiz on the Washington Mall, we’re talking about acknowledging genocide. The US government already owes many (frequently flouted) duties of respect to people in other countries with regard to their human rights in general and vulnerability to genocide in particular. My sense is that this is just another duty in that same category, albeit of a curious retrospective form. Again, if it were just about making victims feel better then I would not think this were an important resolution at all, no matter how deserving those victims may be of comfort.

With regard to the Kurds, my sense is that the dangers to life in the region have far more to do with the situation in Iraq than the genocide resolution in Congress. Of course, the United States owes the Kurds (and the Iraqis, and the Turks, and the Assyrians, etc.) a sensible foreign policy. But it also owes to the civilians of the world a duty to take genocide seriously, and be seen and understood to do so categorically. On purely consequentialist grounds, the suggestion of international indifference to or flippancy about genocide can be devastating (although, obviously, such indifference is not the primary cause of genocide). So I think there is significant consequentialist value in signaling that the genocides of the future are intolerable by insisting that the genocides of the past are undeniable.

What I need are appropriate criteria for this acknowledgment, such that it does not become incumbent upon legislatures throughout the world to trawl through history to find bad things to be serious about. So there’s a slippery slope I need to avoid, and that appears difficult to me. But the difficulty here is not grounds for denying that we need some such moral theory of acknowledgment at all.

The rest of your comment fails on these grounds. You conflate the duties we owe each other as individuals with those that our own state owes us. Then you conflate those obligations with the interstate duties, and finally you fail to acknowledge that our current actions are actually endangering another ethnic group, the Kurds. I’m going to go out on a limb and say we owe them a sensible foreign policy, too.

To remain silent when a matter of historical fact is being debated seems like a decision with a number of possible motivations: one such motivation might be foreign policy motivations, but it is also might be the case that the legislators in question feel that they lack the expertise to reliably evaluate the claim in question, not being historians.

Sure, but I doubt whether many of the people in Congress opposed to this measure are opposed to it because of some principled commitment to historical agnosticism. I would imagine that if Turkey were not opposed to genocide acknowledgment, this measure would sail through, had it come up at all.

In any case, I don’t think we should have a principled commitment to historical agnosticism at all. It’s one thing to say that politicians should set themselves up as referees in historical matters, as if the American Historical Association should call them up during a wild crisis of disagreement in one of their conference sessions. But it’s quite another to say that once certain historical events have been sufficiently substantiated by historians, and when those events are of [Insert Appropriate Theory] importance, then political bodies should acknowledge them. So there should be no resolution of historical facts by politicians that takes precedence over historical expertise. But that leaves open the question I have, which assumes that the fact of the Armenian genocide has been sufficiently substantiated by eyewitnesses and historians.

Now you think that states should acknowledge facts only insofar as they intend to act upon those facts; e.g. the state should acknowledge the human contribution to global warming, because it should be doing something about global warming. This is a plausible view, one that I could imagine a number of sensible people holding. But I’m not sure why we should have such a limited scope to what states should acknowledge. Certainly, if we were to be consequentialist in our approach, acknowledgment per se could have good consequences independently of any further policy for which the relevant fact acted as a premise. Acknowledgment is itself an act, whether or not it serves to underpin some further policy, such as compensation or reparations. There could be some rule consequentialist reason for the qualified form of historical agnosticism (as I’ll loosely call it) you set out, but I’m not sure how that would be defended.

Moreover, on deontological grounds, there seems to me to be a way to say that acknowledgment of genocide per se is owed as a way to properly respect those who have been massacred, whether or not it also serves to promote other valuable ends. This, I take it, is behind the expressivist position that Andy alluded to above: sometimes part of what we owe to each other is simply to express certain things. In the case of punishment, we are supposed to express condemnation of the guilty (although, like Matt L, I’m sceptical of this being an independent justification for punishment).

That expression can have some kind of moral value in itself, seems to me to be something that’s indicated by the idea of chastisement you mention. We oughtn’t chastise people for doing things they did not do, or which are at most trivially bad. Such chastisement can be disrespectful, intuitively, independently of its consequences, so it has a negative non-instrumental value. My sense is that genocide acknowledgment need not be a form of undeserved chastisement at all (certainly not of today’s Turks for committing yesterday’s atrocities). If it would be a chastisement of the Turks, then it would be for their continued denial, and that does not seem inappropriate to me. But the broader point is that if expression can have negative non-instrumental moral value, it could also have positive non-instrumental moral value.

The problem that troubles me is how to account for just why a genocide acknowledgment resolution in one country is an important response to a genocide in another, and the conditions under which it is important. Surely it’s not true that a concern for human rights abuses stops at one’s own borders in general, so I don’t see why it should stop at one’s own borders in this case (especially since we are talking about a crime under international law that all signatories to the Genocide Convention are expected to prevent and punish). I’m tempted by the idea that since denial and obfuscation facilitate atrocity, it’s important to repudiate them. I’m also tempted by the idea that in the context of some salient denialist position, agnosticism about genocide becomes even more untenable. But what I’m not sure about is whether these intuitions can be stitched together into a manageable political theory.

There’s a developing literature on truth commissions and the place of acknowledgment of atrocity in transitional societies. Much of that literature focuses on the need that victims of atrocity have for some official recognition of their experiences before they can, in general, act in society as fully respected individuals. I don’t think the Armenian genocide is exactly like this at all — too much time has gone past — but it may be sufficiently like this to help justify my intuitions.

As for whether the Turks should condemn the genocide of Native Americans, Jim, I would think that everything I saw about the Armenian genocide would apply mutatis mutandis to them. So yes, the more the merrier. It would also be nice if something could be done about that in the US itself. Abolishing Columbus Day would be a start, given that Columbus himself was not a particularly pleasant fellow.

I think this is, indeed, the most fruitful place to begin a discussion of the House Resolution, and not with the thorny issues related to our relationship to Turkey or the precise nature of genocide. To remain silent when a matter of historical fact is being debated seems like a decision with a number of possible motivations: one such motivation might be foreign policy motivations, but it is also might be the case that the legislators in question feel that they lack the expertise to reliably evaluate the claim in question, not being historians. Were I advising my own Representative, I’d caution him that facts are not democratic, and ought not to be resolved by the many and their representatives.

The state doesn’t have any pure epistemological duties; regimes only need to get the facts right insofar as they will act upon them, and no one in the US government is actually acting as if the Armenian genocide didn’t occur. We acknowledge our own regime’s crimes because we owe our fellow citizens this recognition and must build the injuries we have done to them into our considerations of future policies. ‘Acknowledgment’ of another regime’s crimes is always and only an accusation: it serves as a chastisement and is thus a strategic decision.

So there are strategic and the fallible reasons to remain silent, and there are reasons rooted in at least one conception of the relationship between facts and politics. But the Ottoman Empire committed genocide. That’s horrible, and we need to do more to remember it, and to think about the impact it’s had on the region and the Armenian diaspora. Do we need a Congressional resolution to do that? I don’t see how we do: this resolution just muddies the waters by politicizing a fact.

What I am very sympathetic to, is the idea that we can incur a special *responsibility* by virtue of membership in a group. And I’m also very sympathetic to the idea that denial of genocide can be morally problematic because of how denial and obfuscation can be used as a tool of both genocide itself and outside non-intervention (remember the “how many acts of genocide does it take to make a genocide?” question in 1994). When we bring these points together, there may be special group-based responsibilities to acknowledge genocide as a way to repudiate or avoid complicity in the continued existence of that tool. (Maybe grounding it in group identity is superfluous though, I’m not sure).

I’m beginning to wonder whether a duty to acknowledge genocide might be part of a broader set of duties that liberal states have in response to social epistemic difficulties, given that information does not always flow very effectively or in a way that effects appropriate public action. This might be behind the intuitive sense of how “sending a message” can be important … but I’m thinking out loud.

Whenever members of a group, qua members of that group, are targeted for annihilation, the group as a whole – distinct from its particular members — has been wronged: being part of that collective, after all, was singled out immorally for injustice. See, for example, Paul Taylor, ‘Reverse Discrimination and Compensatory Justice,’ 33:16 Analysis 177 (1973). And groups survive the death of their individual members.

A related assumption is that just as a victim group maintains its own sustaining of injustices, even into the next generation, so too does an offending group retain its guilt for inflicting injustice, insofar as we hold the group – and not just its members – responsible in the first place. With genocidal massacres like that of the Armenians, there were many such group-on-group injustices. Aside from the main crime, there is the one perpetrated by the international community, the “innocent” rest of us: we tolerated it. We didn’t face it directly. We brushed it aside. It wasn’t just our parents; it was the group of which we remain members.

The victim group, it could be argued, maintains a claim against us for not fully facing their horror. If so, it doesn’t seem we’ve even begun to make amends, to redress their continued claim against us, until we take steps in the opposite direction of ignoring genocide: to look directly at it, to memorialize it, or at least to cease the continued violation of ignoring it. Which seems to require something like the Congressional resolution at issue. That’s at least one source of my intuitive support for it.

Historical questions are difficult questions, particularly when dealing with large scale political events during times of great instability. Nevertheless, I’m reluctant to accept that we should shrug our shoulders and conclude that reasonable people will disagree. This seems to me to be a question which it is morally important to get right; my intuition is that when genocide happens, there’s something morally problematic about not recognising it to have happened. My philosophical question is not about whether or not 1915 was a genocide — that’s largely historical — but rather about whether this intuitive sense of moral importance is philosophically defensible or just a lazy spill-over from either the horribleness of genocide itself or an aversion to common racist reasons for genocide denial. We don’t usually moralise historical beliefs. I don’t really care if people believe in a Shaka-centric Mfecane theory or a train timetable account of WWI. But I’m not prepared to let go of my intuition about this kind of case just yet.

It could be that consequentialist considerations are the operative considerations here. So Matt suggests that the wrongness of genocide denial has to do with the likelihood of genocide happening again in the future. Andy wants a clear public repudiation of the attitudes that underpin genocide and the urgency of this can easily be understood in consequentialist terms. But on the other hand, expressive arguments are not usually consequentialist, so there may be some non-instrumental moral value to just getting it right about genocide and acknowledging this publicly.

If we did accept Hampton’s account of retributivism it might help explain what was wrong with denialism. But, I think it’s both a pretty implausible account as far as our actual practice goes and also a pretty unpleasant one if taken as a strictly normative one.