Arne Johan Vetlesen

Evil and Human Agency

Understanding Collective Evildoing

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In this provocative and original approach to understanding evil, Professor Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into what he calls collective evildoing. A philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman is brought to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact. An important book with wide appeal.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Seitenzahl: 328
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Dezember 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 534g
• ISBN-13: 9780521673570
• ISBN-10: 0521673577
• Artikelnr.: 22293040

Autorenporträt

Arne Johan Vetlesen is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of over thirteen books including Perception, Empathy, and Judgement: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance (1994) and Closeness: An Ethics (with De Maleissye-Melun, 1997).

Inhaltsangabe

1. The ordinariness of modern evildoers: a critique of Zygmunt Bauman's The Modernity and the Holocaust
2. Hannah Arendt on conscience and the banality of evil
3. The psycho-logic of wanting to hurt others
4. The logic and practice of collective evil: ethnic cleansing in Bosnia
5. Responses to collective evil
6. A political postscript: globalization and the discontents of the self.