Sep 19, 2012
Tracy Barlow and the Banality of Radical Evil: Towards a Kantian Analysis of Meanness
Kant defines radical evil as non-pathological evil, that is, evil which is not done simply for selfish individual gain ("from which, indeed, not a soul reaps the smallest benefit"), but instead is the result of adopting an evil maxim. In much contemporary philosophy, this radical evil is equated with evil of the greatest enormity; the paradigm is the holocaust. But looking around us, much of the radical evil we can see is much more petty. How should we rethink ethics if we take as the paradigm of radical evil, not enormity, but meanness?