"If the ideals of the Nazis and the liberals had been such that they could be pursued without interfering with each other, argument might have been impossible and war unnecessary...
Let us, as briefly as possible, consider what might be said in such an argument between a liberal and a Nazi. The liberal might try, first, drawing the Nazi's attention to the consequences of his actions for large numbers of people (Jews for example) who did not share his ideals, and asking him whether he was prepared to assent to a universal principle that people (or even people having the characteristics of Jews) should be caused to suffer thus. Now if only interests were being considered, the liberal would have a strong argument; for, if so, the Nazi would not assent to the judgement that, were he himself to be a Jew, or have the characteristics of Jews, he should be treated in this way. If ideals are left out of consideration, there is absolutely no reason why he should assent to such a judgement, and every reason why he should dissent from it; he will certainly agree that it is against the interests of Jews and of everybody else to be so treated. And thus, by applying the arguments of Chapter 6, the liberal might lead the Nazi to reject the moral judgement that it is right to treat Jews (or anybody else) in this manner. But the Nazi has a universal principle of his own which gets in the way of the liberal's argument. He accepts the principle that the characteristics which Jews have are incompatible with being an ideal or pre-eminently good (or even a tolerably good) man ; and that the ideal, or even a tolerably good, society cannot be realized unless people having these characteristics are eliminated. It might therefore seem prima facie that it is no use asking him to imagine himself having the characteristics of Jews and to consider what his interests would then be; for he thinks that, even if the other interests of people (including his own) are sacrificed, the ideal state of society ought to be pursued by producing ideal men and eliminating those that fall short of the ideal.
A person who was moved by considerations of self-interest, and was prepared to universalize the judgements based on it, but had no ideals of this fanatical kind, could not think this ; and it might plausibly be said that a man who professes to think this is usually either insincere or lacking in imagination -for on the whole such fanaticism is rare. But it exists. The person who has ideals of the sort described is not necessarily defective in either of these ways. His ideals have, on the face of it, nothing to do with self-interest or with a morality which can be generated by universalizing self-interest; they seem much more akin to the aesthetic evaluations discussed in the last chapter. The enormity of Nazism is that it extends an aesthetic style of evaluation into a field where the bulk of mankind think that such evaluations should be subordinated to the interests of other people. The Nazis were like the emperor Heliogabalus, who, I have been told, had people slaughtered because he thought that red blood on green grass looked beautiful.
There is another way of indicating the superior strength of the idealist's position. We saw in 6.6 that there was a way of escaping from the golden-rule argument that was open to anybody, viz. by abstaining from making any moral judgements at all. This way of escape, however, involves a resignation from the argument, considered as a moral one; and it does not seem in any way a defeat for the moralist that he cannot get the better in argument of someone who is not competing in that game, any more than a mathematician need feel worsted if he cannot prove that six eggs and five more make eleven to a man who will not make any mathematical judgements at all. But our Nazi is able to perform what is essentially a very similar manoeuvre, while still claiming to play the moral game; for he is still making prescriptive universal judgements, and the only difference between him self and his opponent is that the Nazi sticks to his judgements even when they conflict with his own interest in hypothetical cases (for example the case where he himself is imagined as having the characteristics of Jews). In this respect he might even claim to be morally superior to his opponent, in that the latter abandons his principles when they conflict with his own hypothetical interests ; the Nazi might say that one should stick to one's principles regardless of questions of interest...
The Nazi is desiring that the Jews should be exterminated; and, because the desire is a universal one corresponding to an ideal, he desires that anyone having the characteristics which make him want to exterminate Jews should likewise be exterminated. And from this it follows that, if he is sincere and clear-headed, he desires that he him self should be exterminated if he were to come to have the characteristics of Jews...
In order to bring out the extraordinary nature of the really fanatical Nazi's desires, let us imagine that we are able to perform on him the following trick, comparable to another which we shall devise later for a different sort of racialist ( 1 1.7). We say to him 'You may not know it, but we have discovered that you are not the son of your supposed parents, but of two pure Jews; and the same is true of your wife'; and we produce apparently cast-iron evidence to support this allegation. Is he at all likely to say-as he logically can say 'All right then, send me and all my family to Buchenwald !' ? And then let us imagine saying to him 'That was only a deception ; the evidence we produced was forged. But now, having really faced this possibility, do you still think as you used to about the extermination of Jews ?...
He would not be contradicting himself if he said 'Jews are such an abomination that I and my whole family, if we were Jews, should be sent to the gas-chamber'."
--- Toleration and Fanaticism in Freedom and Reason / R. M. Hare
