What are the sources of the concepts, theories, and traditions that give ethics authority and character? Some responses to that question point toward religion. They invoke a divine source or the inspired teachers—for example, Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed— who stand at the foundations of religious traditions. But other sources are diverse thinkers—women and men from a variety of historical and cultural circumstances—whose insights have significantly influenced attitudes and evaluations regarding right and wrong, justice and injustice. In Western philosophy, Aristotle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Immanuel Kant are examples of that kind. Different sources of ethical insight are provided by people who put thought into action and decisively influenced political and social life. Mohandas Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr., are examples of that kind of person.
In the articles found in this section of Ethics, you will encounter in more detail a wide variety of ethical theorists and practitioners. As you do so, it is important to consider that such theorists and practitioners are not always well-known or the subjects of articles in encyclopedias. Especially with respect to practitioners, they are mostly quite ordinary but still highly significant women, men, and children who, in their daily lives and sometimes in life-and-death situations do what is right, just, and good. As often is said, an example is worth a thousand words, and by their actions, the practitioners of ethics not only act well but also show what ethical theories at their best encourage and mean. To illustrate that point, consider two persons who do not appear elsewhere in Ethics but who help to show why its volumes deserve attention.
Born in Turin on July 31, 1919, Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, joined a partisan resistance group during World War II after Nazi Germany occupied northern Italy in the autumn of 1943. He was arrested as a suspect person by Fascists on December 13 of that year. Fearing that confirmation of his partisan identity would lead to torture and death, he admitted his status as an “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” unaware of what that identification held in store for him. Levi was sent to a concentration camp at Fossoli, near the city of Modena, which had been intended for British and American prisoners of war. By mid-February 1944, more than six hundred Jews were imprisoned there. The arrival of German SS men meant that Levi and the other Jews at Fossoli would be deported.
On the evening of February 22, 1944, Levi’s transport left the train station at Carpi. By then, Levi knew that its destination was Auschwitz. That name, he said, was “without significance for us at that time,” but soon enough he realized that going there was, as he put it, “a journey towards nothingness.” After reaching Auschwitz on the night of Saturday, February 26, Levi was spared for labor, received the tattooed number 174517 on his left arm, and endured Auschwitz for eleven months. For most of that time, he worked at Monowitz, a sub-camp in the vast Auschwitz complex. Monowitz—it was also called Auschwitz III or Buna—provided slave labor for the construction of an I.G. Farben plant, the Buna factory, whose name was taken from the synthetic rubber that the Germans wanted to produce there. Liberated by Russian troops on January 27, 1945, Levi eventually got back to Italy, where he resumed his life as a chemist and eventually became a chemical plant manager. He also became one of the most perceptive and respected writers about the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s attempt to destroy the Jewish people.
In his book Moments of Reprieve, Levi recalled his friend Lorenzo Perrone, the person Levi credited with saving his life in Auschwitz. Not a Jew but an Italian civilian, Lorenzo, a skilled mason, was “officially” a “voluntary” worker helping to build the industrial plant that the Germans were constructing at Auschwitz III. In fact, however, Lorenzo was a labor conscript. He despised the German cruelty that he witnessed.
After meeting Levi in late June 1944, Lorenzo decided to help his fellow Italian, although it was a crime with grave consequences for him even to speak to an Auschwitz prisoner. For months, Lorenzo got Levi extra food, which was the physical difference between life and death. “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today,” Levi would write, underscoring that Lorenzo’s help meant much more than food alone. What also sustained him was that Lorenzo “constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.”
When liberation came, Levi lost track of Lorenzo, but later he became determined to find out what had happened to his life-saving friend. They reconnected for a short time in Italy after the war, but despite the medical assistance that Levi arranged for him, Lorenzo, wracked by tuberculosis, died in 1952. Significantly, Levi’s daughter, Lisa Lorenza, and his son called Renzo were named after Lorenzo Perrone. On June 7, 1998, he was recognized by Yad Vashem, the State of Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a special honor for non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.
At one of their postwar meetings, Levi learned that he was not the only Auschwitz prisoner whom Lorenzo had helped, but Levi’s friend had rarely told that story. In Lorenzo’s view, wrote Levi, “We are in this world to do good, not to boast about it.” Levi may have been right in thinking, as he did, that no universal human conscience exists, that there is no innate and shared moral compass to guide us all, if only we would pay attention and follow it. But that sensibility does not negate, at least not completely, the reminding presence of Lorenzo, which testifies that “we are in this world to do good.” Remote though it often seems, difficult to define though it may be, that possibility remains. More than that, the possibility becomes an imperative if the world is to be less corrupt and savage and more opposed to hatred and terror.
Levi was right to suggest that it is difficult to define precisely how it is that we are in this world to do good, but it was not difficult for Levi to feel Lorenzo’s “presence” and to discern his “natural and plain manner of being good.” Those characteristics were oppression-resisting, hope-sustaining, death-defying, and life-giving.
More often than not, ethics at its best involves reminders of the kind embedded in Lorenzo’s actions. Reminders are not always welcome or followed. But good reminders of the kind that Lorenzo gave Levi are testimonies about sometimes difficult-to-define realities—justice, compassion, respect, love—that have been experienced, at least at times, in word and deed. At their best, the theorists and practitioners of ethics remind us about those realities. That work is especially crucial when human flourishing is threatened, and hope is in short supply. Knowing that, Levi testified with insistence that Lorenzo’s reminder—we are in this world to do good—should always be vivid and never abandoned.