Hannah Arendt on the Banality of Evil (Part Two)

Continuing on Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), on how ordinary people can do—or acquiesce to—horrific things. How do people rationalize this? What's required to cut through the environmental haze and have an authentic moral reaction? What can we apply from this story to our present political circumstances? Also, how was genocide a new type of crime, and what's the best rationale for punishing it? We talk justice, revenge, and ways that we too might be morally mass-confused.

Listen to part one first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: "Hiding from the Face of God" from Judybats 2000; listen to me interview singer/songwriter Jeff Heiskell on Nakedly Examined Music eps. 5 and 63.

#philosophy #evil #morality #ethics #fascism #totalitarianism #nazism #genocide #holocaust #shoah #duty #law

Go to the blog: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2018/01/22/ep181-2-arendt/