The apparent banality of evil: The relationship between evil acts and evil character

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 364-376

  Calder, Todd ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645500731     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9833.00187     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1964);
2. Fred E. Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 1-21.
3. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1930), 155-56, 163.
4. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Buffalo, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1902), 208-9.
5. John Kekes, "The Reflexivity of Evil", Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 1(1998):216-32, at 217.
6. Laurence Thomas, Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 75-76.
7. I get the term "effective desire" from Harry G. Frankfurt in his "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Reason", Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1(1971):5-21.
8. For a more detailed criticism of Thomas's theory of evil, see my "Toward a Theory of Evil Acts: A Critique of Laurence Thomas's Theory of Evil Acts", in Earth's Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil, ed. Daniel M. Haybron, Value Inquiry Book Series (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 51-61.
9. It should be noted that this feature of e-desire sets is controversial. See, for example, Eve Garrard's "The Nature of Evil", Philosophical Explorations 1, no. 1(1998):43-60.
10. See also Daniel M. Haybron's "Consistency of Character and the Character of Evil", in Earth's Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil, ed. Daniel M. Haybron, Value Inquiry Book Series (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002).
11. By intentional actions I mean actions combined with certain beliefs. More specifically, an action A is intended to cause a state of affairs x iff the agent does A and believes A will cause x. See Michael E. Bratman, "Intention", in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 380-81.
12. Daniel M. Haybron, "Evil Characters", American Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 2(1999):132-38.
13. Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 61-63.
14. I am like Leontius, of whom Plato writes. Plato's Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974), Book IV, 439e-440a, 103-104.
15. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem;
16. Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil;
17. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
18. Kekes, "The Reflexivity of Evil", 217-19.
19. John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3-10.
20. I have also borrowed the terms "cognitive powers" and "deliberating capacities" from David Jones in his Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 28-29.
21. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust, 130.