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Hello, for inhumanity, there's never been a sanctuary like it. 58 million people died in the slaughter of two world wars.

Stalinist Russia killed 20 million of its own people. It's estimated that Mao killed about 40 million in China. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews.

2 million people were killed in Vietnam, 3 million in Korea. And in 1994 in Randa, 1 million ordinary people were suddenly turned on and killed by their neighbors.

And all the while in this bloody century, the private and individual murder of one human being by another has risen inexorably.

What are the conditions that allow a man to be inhuman to man on such a scale, and can a scientific study of the mind ever uncover the roots of inhumanity or evil?

I'm joined by Jonathan Glover, philosopher and director of the center of medical law and ethics at King's College London. His new book Humanity and moral history of the 20th century has prompted this discussion.

And Dr. Gwen Antshead, whose main job is as a consultant psychiatrist at Broadmoor Special Hospital, and she's written several books on ethics.

Jonathan Glover, people were very optimistic about humanity at the start of this century. What was the basis for their optimism?

Well, I think the, in Europe at least, there had been a hundred years of largely unbroken peace since the Napoleonic Wars.

People believed that human beings were progressing, were making moral progress. People believed there was a moral law that we all knew how we should behave.

And it was thought that barbarism was a thing of the past we were gradually growing out of.

Do you think there's conditions now appear before we get into the trenches? Do you think there's conditions now appear almost freakish?

Yes, I think they do. I think that it isn't true that the 20th century is unique in barbarism. Barbarism has disfigured all of human history with a few isolated calm bits.

We do seem to have stepped up the place though. Well, that quite a lot is technology, I believe.

A few people can decide something which results in vast numbers of people being killed off and far away.

But can we just come back to the beginning of this century to set the scene those two more?

Was it the sort of the rule, imperial rule of the British and the navy ruling the waves, the American constant America being allowed to develop peacefully in all sorts of ways and so on?

Were there any key factors in that 100 years which just sort of gave people a feeling at the end of the 19th century as you said that barbarism had been confined to the museum and so on?

Well, I think it was really just that the settlement at the end of the Napoleonic Wars had lasted really pretty well.

I mean, there had been the Franco-Prussian War and there was a lot of bloodshed in colonial conquests and colonial wars.

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