{"id":718,"date":"2012-05-01T15:47:24","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www-rohan.sdsu.edu\/~arendt\/wp\/?p=718"},"modified":"2012-05-01T15:47:24","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:47:24","slug":"moral-perplexities-unthinking-evildoers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arendt.sdsu.edu\/index.php\/2012\/05\/01\/moral-perplexities-unthinking-evildoers\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral Perplexities: Unthinking Evildoers"},"content":{"rendered":"

(I recently posted the following as my commentary on a quote I chose to explore on Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities web site<\/a>, where I regularly contribute to the Quote of the Week<\/em> column hosted there.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever the source of moral knowledge might be\u2014divine commandments or moral reason\u2014every sane man, it was assumed, carried within himself a voice that tells him what is right and what is wrong, and this regardless of the law of the land and regardless of the voices of his fellowmen.\u201d Hannah Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy<\/em>, in Responsibility and Judgment<\/em>, ed. Jerome Kohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) p. 61.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In a series of lectures she wrote for two courses she taught, one in 1965 at the New School and the second in 1966 at the University of Chicago, Arendt mapped out some of her complicated thinking about moral philosophy and the \u201cperplexities inherent in the human faculty of willing.\u201d In these lectures, she drew heavily on Kant and Nietzsche, but began her reflections by calling attention to the historical motivation for her concerns: \u201cWe\u2014at least the older ones among us\u2014have witnessed the total collapse of all established moral standards in public and private life during the nineteen-thirties and \u2013forties, not only…in Hitler\u2019s Germany but also in Stalin\u2019s Russia.\u201d (54). The distinction between right and wrong that it was assumed \u201cevery sane man\u201d heard like a voice within him had not stood the test of time. How easily, Arendt observed, ordinary people had changed their habits of mind, exchanging one set of values for another \u201cwith hardly more trouble than it [took] to change the table manners of an individual or a people.\u201d (50). How had this happened? If acting morally, and not just legally, depended on the \u201cthinking\u201d conversation one had with oneself about what one should or shouldn\u2019t do, then it was as if large sections of the population in every strata had simply stopped thinking, did what they were told to do, and then proceeded to forget.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago today, Anders Behring Breivik, the 33-year-old Norwegian man who \"\"<\/a>admitted to killing 77 people last July in two separate attacks, entered a specially outfitted courtroom in Oslo to stand trial for criminal acts of terrorism and mass murder. After the charges against him were read, Mr. Breivik pleaded not guilty. “I acknowledge the acts, but not criminal guilt – I claim I was doing it in self-defense.”<\/p>\n

He would have preferred, he added, to appear before a military tribunal; he was, he contended, a political activist involved in a war in Europe.<\/p>\n

Since he admitted his acts, the trial now turns on the question of Breivik\u2019s sanity.\u00a0 Two psychiatric reports have produced contradictory conclusions; the first found him insane at the time of the killings, suffering from paranoid schizophrenic delusions, while the second declared him sane.<\/p>\n