ABSTRACT
The moral sensibility towards genocide, mass murder, rape and torture has increased considerably in recent decades. The attention to mass infringements of human rights even when they affect foreigners living on the other side of the globe is certainly a consequence of the easy access to information that new means of communication have made possible. Another reason is the growing number of people whose political liberties and comfortable living conditions allow them to pay attention and commiserate with the sufferings of others. In the third place, one can argue that higher sensibility to human pain is a historically informed moral reaction, generated under the impact of the unique atrocities of the twentieth century, now condensed under the generic term ‘Holocaust’. In what follows, I would like to elaborate on the third point.
