Evil by Luke Russell

Author:Luke Russell [Russell, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192551368
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The banality of evil

One of the most memorable phrases of 20th-century intellectual life, coined by Hannah Arendt in her 1961 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, is ‘the banality of evil’. It has the pleasing ring of familiarity, and it is clearly supposed to be profound. When we hear it said, many of us sagely nod along. But what does it mean? In this chapter we will see how Arendt’s famous phrase should be interpreted, and trace the influence of Arendt’s analysis of the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s claims about Eichmann have led some contemporary philosophers to reject the idea that the difference between evil and wrong must be qualitative rather than quantitative. They reject the view that every evildoer shares the same kind of distinctive, distorted motivational structure, and claim instead that evil actions can come from a broad range of familiar motives, and sometimes are performed by ordinary people like you and me.

Before we engage with Arendt’s thoughts about banality, there is one final location in which we ought to search for a qualitative difference between evil actions and ordinary wrongs. This is the effects that actions have on their victims: in other words, with the kinds of harms that they inflict. Harms fall into distinct sub-categories: infliction of physical pain, maiming, enslavement, rape, public shaming, theft, removal of valued options, and so on. Could it be that evil actions harm their victims in a special way, a way in which victims are never harmed by ordinary wrongs? If this were true, evil action could be defined as wrong action that inflicts this special kind of harm. This is an attractively simple suggestion. In order to complete the theory all we need to do is identify the unique kind of harm that marks out evils from ordinary wrongs.

As soon as we start assessing candidates, though, the whole project falls apart. Is the distinctive harm caused by evil actions the death of an innocent human being? If so, then every wrong action that causes an innocent human death would count as evil, and every wrong action that does not cause an innocent human death would fail to count as evil. Both of these claims seem utterly implausible. Some wrong actions that cause human deaths are cases of culpable negligence or recklessness. No doubt these actions are tragic, grave, and serious, but how do they compare to a case in which a sadistic torturer deliberately inflicts terrible pain on a terrified group of captives for years and years without killing any of them? Does it really seem that the act of reckless manslaughter is evil but the repeated sadistic acts of torture are not? Perhaps the distinctive harm is something else: the destruction of the victim’s will to live, or the failure to respect what the victims hold sacred. A torturer may well destroy his victims’ will to live, and arguably what the torturer does is evil. Yet a suicide bomber does not destroy his victims’ will to live.

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