What I'm saying is that, had their audiences taken the time to consider what they were being told rationally rather than being swayed by their own prejudices and emotions, then the rise of National Socialism would have been a non-issue. In the absence of an audience that is willing to deceive itself about the goals, aims, and methods of the Nazis, then there is no fascist rise to power in Germany. Without the people as willing participants in their own deception, Hitler is just some housepainter with one testicle, not the world's greatest madman.
I don't understand how in the evolutionary sense, blame or praise can be assigned to anything they did, since you say that a reasoned case cannot necessarily be made for either survial or extinction preferences.
We have to take some things as a matter of definition - it's a different sort of faith, if you like. If we think of people's preferences as being compelling, then we can construct a rational case for life being better than death. IOW, I ask you which you prefer, you say "life", and that's the end of it. It will, however, break down if you and I try exploring why you prefer life over death - there, the rational case becomes much more difficult to put together. But we don't really have to do that - we just have to take preferences like that as given.
So, if we accept your preference for being alive as a priori valid, we have no real problems - we can define what the Nazis did as wrong quite easily.
Without God there is no absolute right or wrong to impose on our conscience.
I don't think Eichmann was particularly troubled by his conscience in any case - here was a man who wished to justify the means by pointing to the ends, after all, which I already suggested should be out-of-bounds.
So in the atheistic view, what if Eichmann could have entirely escaped the social consequences of his actions? Would there then have been anything really wrong with, say, his devious and clever luring of more victims by forcing his prisoners to write postcards to their relatives telling them how wonderful the camps were, and to be sure to wear good shoes when they came because they would be staying a long time?
Once we've accepted this preference for life over death as valid, then this is wrong by those lights. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, we can still call it "wrong" as a dysfunctional practice - this is both murder and deception, which I suggested are both dysfunctional.
If Eichmann had escaped justice, how could his actions be seen as a failure of rationality?
Not as a failure of rationality, but as a failure of us - our failure for not applying it to him. If he escapes justice because we let him go, then the failure is ours, not logic's. If he escapes because he's really clever and slipped past us, then...these things happen. We tried to get him, but success is never guaranteed, of course.
I grabbed the following as a brief description of animal use of deception from an Discover article by MARC HAUSER:
"All of us (humans) understand what it is like to distort the truth. We have the mental tools not only to think about our own beliefs but also to recognize what others are likely to believe, and maneuver in such a way that we can, if we are devious enough, alter the beliefs of our friends and enemies. This capacity derives from our social brain and its exquisite mental circuitry. When that circuitry is damaged, the effects can be devastating psychological problems. Patients with autism, for example, often experience a form of "mindblindness," an inability to read from behavior what others feel, want, and believe".
"Are normal human adults unique in their capacity to read others' minds? Are we the only animals that can lie? To be honest, we don't yet know--but given the battle to survive and reproduce, we should not be surprised to discover that through natural selection other animals have evolved strategies to dupe opponents and reap the rewards of competitive struggle. [emphasis mine] The challenge faced by researchers interested in the question of non-human deception is to distinguish between the con artists and the true masters, between those who look as if they are aware of how the process works and those who really do know."
"...Nature leaves us with a wonderful puzzle. Animals of all kinds deceive. Predatory fireflies lure prey by mimicking their mating signals; molting (and thus defenseless) mantis shrimp bluff intruders with aggressive displays; female plovers feign injury to draw predators away from their young. But during the course of evolution, some organisms acquired an understanding that they are deceiving. This event represented a renaissance in thinking, an awakening of mind. It allowed not only for true Machiavellian deception but also for self-reflection, an understanding of mortality, and an appreciation for how and why belief systems diverge and converge. We humans are unquestionably part of this renaissance. But we have yet to determine when or how it started--or why" (Hauser 2000)."
I'm probably sounding like a skipping CD at this point, but we certainly don't think that animals, who at least act as if they have a desire to live, are morally responsible for deceiving and killing one another. The article describes the understanding and manipulation of deception, not as dysfuntion, but as a "renaissance in thinking", an "awakening of the mind" that occured through natural selection as animals evolved strategies to dupe opponents and reap the rewards of competitive struggle. What rationale can be given as to why should we not also regard Eichmann's cunning use of deception as also just a product of that evolutionary struggle? (What else could Eichmann be, other than a product of the evolutionary struggle?) In other words, I don't see how, even given a preference for life as compelling, which even animals seem to possess, an evolutionary base principle leads to the conclusion that Eichmann's use of deception is dysfunctional and 'wrong' by definition, a definition I happen to agree with, btw.
Cordially,