What Is Evil, and From Where Does It Derive?

Political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt gave us the words here.

In the context of the Holocaust, this makes perfect sense.  We can say that the people who committed those atrocities failed to think of the consequences, and didn’t consider that sending millions of innocent people to agonizing deaths was wrong.  In fact, one of the key architects of the genocide, Adolf Eichmann, used this (unsuccessfully) in his defense: essentially, “I wasn’t thinking.”

Having said that, there are many examples of evil that are perpetrated by people who clearly were thinking.  When we say,  for instance, “Exxon Knew,” we mean that a large team of senior executives in what is now the largest oil company on Earth was informed by the company’s own scientists that continued combustion of fossil fuels would soon warm the planet’s climate to the point that it would lose its capacity to support life as we have known it.  They took that knowledge and conspired to keep it from us, bringing us now to the point that successful climate change mitigation may be impossible.

That may be a failure to think like a decent human being, but it’s certainly not a failure to think per se.