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Zusatztext An excellent read both for specialists and the curious, Deirdre Lauren Mahony’s book does a much-needed work of synthesis across a broad range of Arendt’s writing, drawing out from beneath the abundance of political-theoretic interpretations of Arendt a cogent and persuasive interpretation a strong individual ethics in the background of Arendt’s engagements. Centering the problem of evil as Arendt’s ethical lodestone, Mahony succeeds in drafting a map of Arendt’s normative terrain that stands out in its novelty and interpretative incisiveness in an otherwise increasingly crowded field. Informationen zum Autor Deirdre Lauren Mahony is a Lecturer in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Vorwort This book provides an examination of Hannah Arendt’s ethics, considering not only her claims about the banality of evil but also previously unexamined aspects of her ethical thought, and how they relate to issues in moral philosophy. Zusammenfassung The vast majority of studies of Hannah Arendt’s thought are concerned with her as a political theorist. This book offers a contribution to rectifying this imbalance by providing a critical engagement with Arendtian ethics. Arendt asserts that the crimes of the Holocaust revealed a shift in ethics and the need for new responses to a new kind of evil. In this new treatment of her work, Arendt’s best-known ethical concepts – the notion of the banality of evil and the link she posits between thoughtlessness and evil, both inspired by her study of Adolf Eichmann – are disassembled and appraised. The concept of the banality of evil captures something tangible about modern evil, yet requires further evaluation in order to assess its implications for understanding contemporary evil, and what it means for traditional, moral philosophical issues such as responsibility, blame and punishment. In addition, this account of Arendt’s ethics reveals two strands of her thought not previously considered: her idea that the condition of ‘living with oneself’ can represent a barrier to evil and her account of the ‘nonparticipants’ who refused to be complicit in the crimes of the Nazi period and their defining moral features. This exploration draws out the most salient aspects of Hannah Arendt’s ethics, provides a critical review of the more philosophically problematic elements, and places Arendt’s work in this area in a broader moral philosophy context, examining the issues in moral philosophy which are raised in her work such as the relevance of intention for moral responsibility and of thinking for good moral conduct, and questions of character, integrity and moral incapacity. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: Hannah Arendt and Ethics after Auschwitz Chapter One: Arendt, Eichmann and the Banality of EvilChapter Two: Thinking and EvilChapter Three: Evil and Living with OneselfChapter Four: NonparticipationConclusionBibliographyIndex...
