180115 VO-L Evil (2018W)

Objectives: Elaboration of a differentiated, critical-reflected, thus: philosophical approach to subjects as morals and/or ethics, philosophical concepts of moral or ethics and justice versus religious morals, moral categories like good and evil. We’ll look at those subjects from a philosophical perspective and always try to bear in mind a historical dimension. The course will also provide an introduction in some crucial topics of political philosophy and ideology critique as well as an exploitation of relevant subjects by means of selected texts. The methodical approach to these texts will, beyond others, also include methods of conceptual history.

Contents: As a result of religious, especially Christian transformation of moral and/or ethical ideas many people are used, to think of categories of good and evil in this connection. These categories have to do a lot with ideas of divine rules, sin and punishment, at least in a next world.
So it seems to be indispensable to distinguish between philosophical concepts of morals or ethics on one hand and religious moral teachings on the other hand. It is also of high importance to distinguish the terms ethics and morals beyond philosophical or religious approaches, which are often equated. Strictly speaking they describe quite different ideas: In respect to consideration of ancient Greek thinkers, ethics can be seen as a collective name for theories or doctrines of successful life (in a very wide sense), while morals have always to do with rules or norms. Nevertheless, there are also normative ethics, such as utilitarianism. Nowadays ethics is – against its original meaning – often used to describe a branch of practical philosophy, designated to find criteria to describe human behavior as good or bad. The term evil is mostly avoided in this perspective.
Religious, especially Christian, but also Islamic concepts of morals or ethics are usually tied to norms, seen as founded in transcendental spheres and absolutely valid because enacted by an absolute powerful, good force. Even more problematical than the idea of an absolute Good is that of an absolute Evil. Based on a concept like that it is quite easy to class other human beings, creatures, but also social and cultural phenomena as in principle bad, depraved, maybe even demonic – and as a consequence also treated in accordance to that point of view.
Notwithstanding the distinction between good and evil was also applied to the sphere of philosophical morals, in particular when Immanuel Kant invented the term radical evil. As part of her considerations of Adolf Eichmann Hannah Arendt referred to this terminology and connected it with the term banality. Arendt’s view Eichmann was no demonic figure, but was profoundly banal (or trivial) in terms of ordinary or mean. Arendt insists on the category evil, maybe also because it is indeed difficult to find proper terms for the things, Eichmann did. For Arendt he was a normal representative of a dehumanized, anonymous bureaucracy, applicable for any purpose or program. Even though this interpretation cannot be kept up without serious modifications on the basis of meanwhile found as well as new interpreted older sources, the question remains, how the deeds of Eichmann or people like him can be assessed in moral or ethical terms. Can it be helpful to classify those people or what they did as evil – or would it, from a philosophical perspective, preferable to go without a term like evil at all?

Method: Lecture, (critical) analysis of texts and film sequences, discussion