The Problem of Evil Laws and the (Banal or Evil) Officials Who Make Them: Reflections from Arendt, Levi, Nino, and Others

Abstract

The problem of how to respond to the evil laws and evil governments raise numerous theoretical and practical problems, and they are obviously problems of great urgency. The present work considers ideas from some of the most thoughtful commentators on these problems from the 20th century, Primo Levi, Carlos Nino, and Hannah Arendt, and supplements that discussion with other figures of importance, including Socrates, Niccolò Machiavelli and Gustav Radbruch. Levi, Nino, Radbruch, and Arendt carry the authority of those who have witnessed and suffered from radical evil. None offer simple solutions, and many speak of the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of trying to understand radical evil from the perspective of our conventional moral, political, and legal categories.