Evil and Human Agency is a 2005 book written by Arne Johan Vetlesen. Vetlesen combines philosophical, sociological, and psychological approaches in order to contend that evil is defined by its intentionality and harmfulness and to investigate why people commit acts of organized evil. He uses
Hannah Arendt and
Zygmunt Bauman as his main sources.
Summary Vetlesen focuses on large-scale acts of evil such as the
Holocaust and former Yugoslavia's “ethnic cleansing” in order to investigate how human agency allows an individual to cause harm to another intentionally and how personal intention turns into a collective evil. He argues that collective evil stems from a combination of “character, situation, and structure.” Vetlesen poses an important distinction between immorality and evil. While many acts may be considered immoral, only acts that harm another with intentionality are considered acts of evil. He aims to push away what he considers to be the current “shallow” understanding of evil that observes an immoral action's bad effects or consequences by instead focusing on what causes someone to deliberately inflict harm or pain. In the first three chapters, Vetlesen analyzes Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt's ideas on “the banality of evil” and
Adolf Eichmann, and C. Fred Alford's theories on the individual desire to commit evil. He focuses on theories of collective evil by detailing former Yugoslavia's “ethnic cleansing.” ==References==