FELSEFE YAZARI

Despite this, there is a certain ‘banality of evil‘ that has come to be associated with such extensive animal suffering. This phrase was first used by Hannah Arendt in relation to the Holocaust and, in particular, the crimes of Adolf Eichmann who felt no responsibility for his actions, claiming to simply be ‘doing his job’. InEichmann and the Holocaust, Arendt argued that, despite his horrifying crimes, Eichmann was not inherently evil: ‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him … they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal’. When Arendt used the phrase ‘banality of evil’, she was emphasising that evil is not committed by monsters, but by people who blindly follow routine, who fail to reflect on what their actions mean in a moral sense and who fail to link their routine jobs or procedures to the suffering they cause. What their actions mean for others has, in this way, been willingly or unwittingly ignored. As she claims of Eichmann, ‘It was shear thoughtless that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the period’.