A Lesson Still Unlearned: Arendt and Radical Evil

Hannah Arendt’s notion of radical evil constitutes an important advance on Kantian ideas about the sources and extent of moral impropriety. For Kant as for many other moral thinkers, the selfish privileging of one’s own interests over those of others threatens to lead to the reduction of others to the status of mere means to one’s own ends. Arendt recognized that even worse than treating others as resources or objects is representing them as superfluous; in the latter case, others are represented not just as possessing value relative to one’s own projects, but as possessing no value at all. This paper lays out Arendt’s analysis of the conditions for the representation of others as superfluous, and argues that this notion of radical evil can illuminate troubling features of contemporary life, especially the anthroposupremacist refusal to acknowledge that sentient non-human animals matter morally.