punkin said:
I have to rely on my rusty memory of Arendt's book, but I believe her point was precicely that Eichman was evil. The fact that he concentrated on the logistics of train schedules and other "banalities" does not excuse him from being labled evil becasue he knew very well that those numbers on paper represented real people being systimatically exterminated.
I do not believe your point is substantiated by the content of her book.
As for the other work you quoted, I have not read it and can have no independent opinion.
However, overall I agree with you. I just don't think Arendt ever addressed the issues in the way you are presenting them.
The way I meant it, and my exegesis may be faulty, is that evil does not always take the monstrous form so clear in cinema, where there is a large dark Darth Vader figure who kicks his cat as he enters the house and slaps his wife. At its most basic, Arendt was referring to the fact that while Eichman was malevolent, he cut a fairly unremarkable figure in person, and that many of the overt acts he engaged in were logistical, not dramatic.
One of my common lines, and I have no idea if it is true, is that Hitler may have been nice to animals. There is no clean Manichean dualism that lets you identify a particular person as "evil" and another as "good". Moral judgment requires that we recognize that evil can be charming and seductive, and, most importantly, that is can be rationalized by common people without great animus. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen undertook the famous "Hitler's Willing Executioners", a book about how ordinary German citizens undertook most of the acts that created eh Holocaust, most without any significant moral reasoning, with rationalization. The same author did a strong piece on my church titled "A Moral Reckoning" in which he addressed via contrast how many Jewish lives could have been saved by internal moral outcry at what all recognized was occurring but imagined themselves powerless to prevent and at peril if they protested.
To apply all this to the points, there is definitely evil in the world, but it doesn't always take the form of a mass movement that is easily branded such that military action is the simple solution. It is not always the Rebel Alliance against the Evil Empire. Much of the battle against evil is internal based on moral reasoning addressing complex factual patterns. Of particular application to the Iraq question is Just War Doctrine,
jus ad bellum. Before the war, Bush apologists like Michael bnovak tried to take an overly reductive view of the doctrine, focusing solely on intent, i.e. war could not be wrong if our intent were pure.
That's not the doctrine, and there are six conditions to a just war, and I will concede that for my purposes the doctrine is overly restrictive. For moral analysis of the use of force by a state in war, I tend towards Reinhold Neibuhr, who referred to Moral Man and Immoral Society and the state's obligation to resort to patent immorality to oppose evil. But that doesn't mean that none of the planks of JWD are applicable, and we have seen here that by avoiding the principle of due discrimination, of proportionality and studied attempt toward probability of success and last resort and comparable harms, we may have made matters worse, not better, for a region. It's also a corollary of the law of double effect.
Having an outlook like Joe's, which hubristically claims to advance good without serious reflection of the nature of the acts or concern about the actual effect of those acts, has historically been a recipe for evil. The belief that one always make moral decisions without reflection and defend it by reference to broad themes is morally flawed. And it's what our President does. I understand that a public persona requires a bit more certitude in oratory than in private thoughts. But I don't believe that he has internal reflection, that there is a well formed conscience, as we say in Catholic moral thought
There's a million subpoints here, all of which leave this cursory address into serious questions subject to caricature or misinterpretation. But I think a large cause of evil in today's world results from the fact that we cannot honestly engage in moral reasoning. I interpret his statement as an attempt to short-circuit serious discussion, which almost always leads to evil.
