Examining how crucial parts of the distorted normative order of the Third Reich evolved and were justified by regime-loyal legal theorists, this book explains how law can bend to a political ideology and fail to keep state power from transgressing elementary standards of humanity and the rule of law.
"Georg Konrad Morgen was a judge in the SS courts, placed in charge of prosecuting crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. Although delegated by Heinrich Himmler to root out corruption, Morgen remarkably went on to prosecute camp officers for the murder of prisoners. He secured the convictions of several concentration camp commandants, two of whom were executed for their crimes. Yet, despite being face-to-face with the horrors of the Nazi killing machine, he was unable to prosecute anyone for the systematic extermination of the Jews. Instead he tried unsettle the system by seeking an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann, albeit for minor offences, and the chief of the Auschwitz gestapo. This is a moral biography of Morgen, focusing on how he felt, thought, and deliberated about the challenges of his unique position. In wartime memos and correspondence, both official and private, as well as his post-war interrogations and his gripping testimonies at war-crimes trials, Morgen's moral and legal reasoning is placed at the fore. What emerges is a deeply equivocal figure whose strong but flawed sense of justice was unequal to the extraordinary circumstances of the Third Reich."-
Norms, Values, and Society is the second Yearbook of the Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in October 1991. The main part of the book contains original contributions to an international symposium the Institute held in October 1993 on ethics and social philosophy. The papers deal among others with questions of justice, equality, just social institutions, human rights, the connections between rationality and morality and the methodological problems of applied ethics. The Documentation section contains previously unpublished papers by Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Charles W. Morris and Edgar Zilsel, and the review section presents new publications on the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle Institute is devoted to the critical advancement of science and philosophy in the broad tradition of the Vienna Circle, as well as to the focusing of cross-disciplinary interest on the history and philosophy of science in a social context. The Institute's Yearbooks will, for the most part, document its activities and provide a forum for the discussion of exact philosophy, logical and empirical investigations, and analysis of language.