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INTENT TO DO RIGHT? consistent with the fact that people who use the rules setting out these criteria may make mistakes about which criteria are set by the rules”,*' as the “correct criteria are those that people who think they understand the concept or term generally share”.” A reservation is due. I do not suggest that law or morality could be reduced to an emanation of a totalitarian ideology, but the argument here does not require it. This issue could become relevant if one were to argue whether what a Taliban executioner or Nazi official consider as the ground for their acts is an acceptable conception of law, or whether they consider such grounds as law using a generally acceptable criteria for law. Suffice it to propose, in words of Arendt, that “ideological thinking [that] becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and [that] insists on a “truer” reality concealed behind all perceptible things"? can provide what is required for a parochial concept of law and right. Following Raz**, I will refer to a perpetrator’s reinterpretation of grounds for his or her actions as to a parochial understanding of law and argue that such an interpretation is typically among primary reasons for perpetration of crimes against humanity. Such interpretation is a rationalization in the sense of what Davidson calls a reason for action: “Whenever someone does something for a reason, therefore, he can be characterized as (a) having some sort of pro attitude toward actions of a certain kind, and (b) believing (or knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering) that his action is of that kind.” Such pro-attitude is directed towards “some feature, consequence, or aspect of the action the agent wanted, desired, prized, held dear, thought dutiful, beneficial, obligatory, or agreeable”.* If one were to use such rationalization as the meaning for the word intention, then it can be said that enforcing or following a parochial understanding of law is a part of shared ‘prior’ intention that is characteristic of crimes against humanity. 3 Raz, Two Views of the Nature of the Theory of Law, 265. 3 Raz, Two Views of the Nature of the Theory of Law, 263. % Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, NY, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1973, 470-471. 34 Joseph Raz, Can There Bea Theory of Law?, in Martin Golding — William Edmundson (eds.) Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004 (2007), https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1498. 35 Donald Davidson, Actions, Reasons and Causes The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963), 685. + 71°
