ABSTRACT
Genocide is one the most disputed concepts in international law. Raphael Lemkin believed that genocide had occurred many times in history. Many who look upon the Holocaust as our paradigm of genocide believe that although genocide is a crime and a moral offence against its victims, its distinctive and defining terribleness is moral terribleness of a kind for which the Holocaust is a paradigm. This chapter explores the reasons for taking the Holocaust as a paradigm of genocide. It delineates the ethical complexity of the concept of genocide and of the Holocaust. The chapter examines what place the concept of evil has in this discussion. The distinction between morality and ethics is an old one, but there is no agreement about how to draw it. When politicians use the word "evil" rather than one of the many expressions we use to record our sense that something morally terrible has been done, people often become uneasy and sometimes hostile.
