Banality of evil
# Banality of evil

The banality of evil, which has been called one of the "one of the most memorable phrases of 20th-century intellectual life," attempts to describe why and how otherwise boring, mediocre people actively enable grossly immoral systems. Coined by Hannah Arendt in her journalistic coverage of the Adolf Eichmann Nazi war-crimes trial in 1961, the phrase is controversial and in some ways central to contemporary Western public debates about morality and justice. On one side is concern that the banality of evil concept is exculpatory—seemingly forgiving or diminishing heinous acts as habits or routine matters that got out of hand—while others see the popularization of the concept as a valuable warrant against walking negligently into horror, which was a constant theme of moral leader Martin Luther King Jr., such as in his statements, "A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan," or "The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But...the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'" This interpretation may be viewed as the evil of banality, in which failure to interrogate received wisdom results in individual and systemic weakness and decline.

In contemporary philosophical examinations of big-g Good and big-e Evil, the banality of evil concept posits that harm-causing action can be judged separately from intent, rejecting "the view that every evildoer shares the same kind of distinctive, distorted motivational structure, and claim instead that evil actions can come from a broad range of familiar motives." Arendt herself underweighted Eichman's malignant antisemitic motivations such that "Eichmann himself was not an Eichmann, little or big, in the way that Arendt had imagined" and yet the cost paid in human suffering for his actions, whether careless or careful, remains the same.

Similarly, the concept is present in the fields of criminal justice, or in the workings of truth and reconciliation commissions: How does society assign blame and rectify wrongs when whole communities enable or enabled evil, for example as in the antebellum slave trade in the United States? Per one writer's consideration of how diffusion of responsibility results in a sort of banality of crimes against humanity: "This intellectual discourse is mirrored in ordinary people who adduce long-winded explanations for how moral responsibility for events like the Gujarat pogrom cannot really be attributed to anybody, especially the chief minister, who is distant from the crime scene. No moral universe exists beyond the one of 'legally admissible evidence.' To be innocent means only to be innocent in the eyes of law. But what does evidence mean when the most powerful political, bureaucratic, and legal machineries are deployed to manipulate, manufacture and kill evidence as seen in both the 2002 and 1984 cases?"

