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Responsible Leadership Psychology
Edited by Cecile Rozuel & Tarja Ketola
The banality of evil and moral responsibility
In The Lucifer Effect , social psychologist Philip [18] Zimbardo (2007) details how ordinarily ethical people, in the course of their work, commit manifestly evil acts or fail to oppose them. Most do not actively set out to harm. Rather, naively susceptible to social psychological forces, they succumb to situational pressure; privately conscientious, they violate deeply held personal ethics in their professional capacity. Zimbardo warns that the banality of evil is an ever-present possibility for leaders and followers ([18] Zimbardo, 2007, pp. 435-7). The phrase "the banality of evil" derives from an influential study by philosopher Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Study in the Banality of Evil ([9] Arendt, 1963/2005). On one level, it is an examination of the moral psychology of one man, a notorious manager, by a contemporary, informed by her experience and concerns. Its scope widens to an ethical critique of the social psychology of the Third Reich and, more generally, of totalitarian and bureaucratic institutions. In the decade following its publication, Arendt elaborated a moral epistemology (theory of knowledge), moral psychology and theory of mind premised on shared human mental capacities for responsible thinking, judging and acting. She proposed that innate capacities which transcend time and culture enable individuals to maintain moral autonomy, even in ethically challenging circumstances. With her death, the project remained unfinished. Read together, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Arendt's final writings illumine connections between the banality of evil, the life of the mind and humane responsibility apposite today - especially for leaders and followers, managers and citizens who, neither monstrous nor demented, knowingly harm because it is expected of them. This paper presents Hannah Arendt's classic account of the banality of evil in light of lesser known, posthumously published works on moral psychology and philosophy. Honoring Arendt's phenomenological method, discussion begins by setting Eichmann in Jerusalem in context.
Two Germans meet in Jerusalem
In 1961, over the course of an extended capital trial, a man and a woman exchanged glances. Although the two had never met, they shared things in common. Both had been born in 1906 in Germany. For both, the rise of Nazism and upheaval of Second World...