ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how listening to what the dead have to 'say' might improve the odds that moral motives will bite in the ways people need for them to do. The Responsibility to Protect, the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), refers to 'conscience-shocking situations crying out for action. The ICISS report observes that getting moral motives to bite is harder to do "at the crucial stage of prevention than it is after some actual horror has occurred". The point of departure for Robert Pogue Harrison's eloquent and interdisciplinary study involves deep reflection on a fundamental and distinctive fact about human life: namely, that in one way or another human beings bury the dead. The chapter focuses on the Holocaust evokes reflection on all mass atrocity crimes, before and after the Nazi genocide, each one in its particularity. The thoughts and voices of the once-living-but-now-dead live on, often with great authority.
