THE BANALITY OF EVIL AND THE CRIMINALITY OF STATES

In the discussion of mass atrocity, no phrase is more familiar than Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil” – one of the few coinages by political theorists that has entered the moral vocabulary of the wider world. The phrase has often been misunderstood, but Arendt assigned it a well-defined meaning: “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer.” Arendt formulated the banality of evil idea to describe the personality of Adolf Eichmann, and we can most readily understand it as a concept within moral psychology, describing a certain type of wrongdoer. As Arendt diagnoses Eichmann, he is a kind of chameleon who takes on the moral coloration of those surrounding him and adapts his conscience to the situation he is in. Arendt's observations and speculations mesh well with the powerful line of experimental social psychology associated with cognitive dissonance theory and the “situationist” school – a line represented most vividly by the famous Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.

But describing a specific pattern of moral psychology is only half the story Arendt tells. To understand why a chameleon is a specific color at a given time, you must know the color of its surroundings.