What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the Banality of Evil?

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was neither perverted nor sadistic , but terrifyingly normal . He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his thoughtlessness , a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann never realised what he was doing due to an inability& to think from the standpoint of somebody else . Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong .

Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann the banality of evil : he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a joiner , in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just happened .

via getpocket.com

In terms of Catholic philosophy at least, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the idea that evil can be banal.