Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of evil—especially in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem—introduced the concept of the "banality of evil." She argued that great evil is often not committed by fanatics or inherently monstrous people, but by ordinary individuals who fail to think critically about their actions and the moral consequences. This "thoughtlessness" or lack of reflective thinking allows people to participate in horrific acts without fully grasping their evil nature. Rather than being driven by deep hatred or malevolence, evil can arise from a kind of mental complacency and unquestioning obedience, where individuals simply follow orders or conform to systems without considering right and wrong.
In short, Arendt’s view is that evil can be terrifyingly mundane because it is perpetrated by people who do not think deeply about what they are doing.
ARENDT AND AUGUSTINE SIMILARITIES
St Augustine - evil is not a substance. It is nothing in its own right. It is an absence of a good that should be there and is not. To sum up - it is a lack.
Arendt - evil is caused by a lack of thinking.
Both would agree that a lack of right thinking is involved.
Augustine's view could be pictured thus. "Evil is like blindness. Blindness is a lack of sight. Blindness is not a positive condition. Sight is. Every evildoer needs spiritual or moral blindness to proceed."
Arendt: "To be evil, a person need to not think correctly."
Both hold that evil does not necessarily arise from intent. They avoid the lazy idea that all that matters is good intention. In fact they would acquiesce that the worst evils are done with good intentions. For them evil is not necessarily arising from intention but deficiency.
The differences follow.
Augustine - evil is an ontological lack - goodness missing in being.
Arendt - does not deny this but puts all the attention on evil as in goodness missing from judgement. She is only concerned with evil as in a moral-intellectual lack.
Augustine would say her theory is itself evil for it is too lacking in depth. She does not care enough about what evil actually is or is not.
Also Augustine is dealing with evil in the context of how all is supposedly made by a loving creator. Her focus is on deliberate harming in the context of the state and politics.
Interestingly, her view leads many - unwittingly - to minimise responsibility for evil. That is how people respond but what about the principle? It is suspected of actually diluting moral responsibility in itself. No proof is offered that it upholds moral responsibility. A denial that it does it, is insufficient. Indeed denials in the face of something that needs clear reasons to refute it are part of the evil.
Against Arendt, many atrocities have been committed with a lot of intellectual and ethical input. Humankind tends towards utilitarian thinking - kill the one for the betterment of the many. Even those who argue for absolute ethics slip into utilitarianism easily. For example, "Do not push an innocent person in the path of a train to derail it to spare five people on the track in its path." Yet the same will argue, "Administer the vaccine though it will kill many for it will save more." This plays on the human tendency to feel less responsible for killing people when the killing doesn't seem direct. It plays on human dishonesty - the damage done matters not how distant it feels from your action.
Whether you push or not, whether you choose the one or the many, once you do an evil saying it was unavoidable and necessary, you are letting evil in. Evil is seen as something that infects and sows seeds. And no wonder for there is already some kind of evil inside - chinks in the armour. It is still an evil, your intention cannot change that. You transform into a harmer.
And there is an inner psychological transformation too.
When you cause a necessary evil, you have to feel it was the right thing and you were brave - it may not feel like a low level of celebration but it is. A necessary evil by definition should not be celebrated at all.
Once you justify harm in one context, it becomes easier to justify in others.
The line between “necessary evil” and convenient evil can be very thin.
You know evil whether it seems unavoidable or not, no matter how you define it, has an uncanny power - like a smart virus. You do not know what you unleash.
The act of rationalizing evil will - at least to an extent - desensitize you to its true nature.
Augustine is supposedly centred on the human will while Arendt is on the failure to judge. It is possible to agree with both. There is no need to be more about one than the other. If not thinking leads humans to evil, by not thinking, on some level they are intending evil to come in.
Augustine would definitely agree with this,
"Arendt is wrong to say that a lack of intelligence or thinking leads to evil. But suppose God was supplying the information and knew what to tell you to get you to act in the most positive and helpful way. Say he helped you to think. Then the argument would be that a lack of reference to divine intelligence is behind all evil. Seen that way, Arendt and Augustine's agreement would be a lot closer."
If Arendt's view is harmful, Augustine's view when unpacked correctly is no better. It only looks better for he didn't complete it. He left God out too much despite intending to keep God at the heart of it.
ARENDT AND KANT
Kant said there were three levels of evil.
1 - frailty when the individual knows the moral thing to do and will not out of having a weak will
2 - impurity when the individual acts in a morally good way but with impure motives - eg wanting to help the other for their sake but also having another motive, to get divine approval or a heavenly reward
3 - wickedness - the worst form - the person throws away a moral good out of self-interest
Arendt said evil is down to not thinking. Would that reduce all evil to frailty? Errors and weaknesses creep in where one will not think and grow. It is a weakness not to think in the first place.
The answer is yes.
HOW DO THE DEFINITIONS OF EVIL RELATE TO ARENDT'S CLAIM?
There are two understandings of evil. One is that it is a lack of a good that should be there.
The other is that it is a real substance - perhaps an intelligent one or like an invisible disease - or both.
[Some hold that both types happen. Believers in God deny he made evil, so they opt for the lack theory to the exclusion of the other.]
A lack of thought being behind human evil would fit either view. But we are left wondering if this lack is making people get possessed by substantial evil. They would not be necessarily responsible for the harm they do. Giving the benefit of the doubt would mean assuming they are not. But as they are "infected" it may be foolish to reason with them so they must be vanquished or quarantined.
Also, the infection is present in a person doing relatively minor evils - just as it is in an Eichmann. It is like a crack, a Pandora's box. As a dam only needs a small crack to let the waters destroy a city, the former person needs the same treatment as Eichmann.
Arendt has no refutation for the substance view of evil, no safeguard against it. Thus it would be considered evil itself.
HOW DOES HER CLAIM IMPACT THE THEORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM?
The theory claims we always and unavoidably include some self-interest in all we do, nothing is completely for the other person .
The strong version says we are self-interested even when we act for others and/or God.
Both say we may have subconsciously self-interested motives.
A religious thinker may look at egoism in a very moral or theological, as opposed to psychological, way. Asserting the self over God and others - and over the truth - is egoism. That is your reward or psychological benefit even if there is no other or even if it costs you dearly. It not grounded in psychology but in the attempt to be some kind of God - to be at the centre. In this thinking, having no obvious self-interest can still be egoism.
If we can show the self-interest is not of a particular type, that does not mean the theory of psychological egoism is false. It may mean we have the wrong idea of self-interest in mind. If we eliminate the sense that we are great for we helped, a reward, that does not mean it is not something else. We know truth is not about us or what we want to think.
We know that if we live in error, the truth can rush in and upset us - and that people who know the truth will help it along. Acting irrationally offers a potential reward - and may have an inbuilt reward. Defiance can feel good and exciting. We really start to think and feel we have got the better of the truth. If all of us carry such a streak - even subconsciously - then we are descriptively egoists. Many say we all deliberately hold on to lies and mistakes - we trick ourselves into thinking they keep us safe. It is too difficult, we think, to let them go.
Suppose we are descriptively egoists in some form. Arendt says evil is not thinking. If we mass-murder, that would surely imply we have not found a way to think about how we would be happier and our self-interest stronger or healthier! We are neglecting to think of the harm to others. If we cannot help being egoists, then we cannot help that. It is hard to see how Arendt could call that evil if it is just the way we are. Her theory is evil, if we are not.
HOW DOES HER CLAIM IMPACT ON ETHICAL EGOISM?
What of prescriptive egoism? Ethical egoism teaches that rather than trying to help others without self-interest, we should help others because it helps us feel good and reap psychological rewards. It argues that proper self-interest means going out there to help people.
Critics say that it is evil to hint that what matters is that Hitler did not have the right kind of self-interest, not how he was genocidal.
They say that "Something having a bad aftermath does not mean it was bad itself. Ethical egoism sees the destruction and reasons that Hitler's version of self-interest was bad. That is not logical. Why don't they say it was good but just happened to cause a lot of harm?"
IMPACT ON ALTRUISM
Arendt would say: Don’t ask just whether you're being altruistic. Ask whether your altruism is serving justice, truth, and humanity — or just conforming to what others expect. For Arendt, altruism must be paired with critical thinking and moral judgment, or it can be co-opted into evil. This assumes that morality is clear enough. Not all agree with that. All the teaching about altruism in the world is futile, if genuine altruism is very rare or never really happens. You need altruism to be relevant and to be occurring enough to be count. You need to put that beyond all reasonable doubt. Her stance was defective for she failed to support the viability of altruism as an account of human behaviour. It is not known if it is important.
GOD, EVIL AND THE CLAIM THAT EVIL ARISES WHEN THINKING IS NOT DONE
You learned that when you carry out a necessary evil, you have to believe it was the right thing to do and that it took courage — even if it doesn’t feel like a victory. By nature, a necessary evil isn’t something to be celebrated. But there is a degree of that there. There is probably more of it subconsciously.
For the likes of you then to say God should be worshipped while the world suffers then is an abomination. Whether God is right or not is beside the point. The point is the kind of person it is coming from.
Also, if Arendt is right that not thinking contributes to evil deeds, you are resting on faith that God is right - not thinking. You are unable to show why the baby next door died of bone cancer.