Risk Management, Banality of Evil and Moral Blindness in Organizations and Corporations
This paper applies Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of the banality of evil and moral blindness to risk management, business ethics and organization ethics. The paper investigates figures of banality of evil in organizations and corporations on the basis of Han
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Introduction Since the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil (1964) there have been wide debates in political philosophy about the concepts of moral blindness and evil as a means of understanding the violence and domination inherent in social and political conflicts such as war and acts of terror. We have moved from totalitarianism to the problem of evil in terrorism as a burden of our times that ought to be explained (Goldhagen 1996). The focus of political philosophy has been to use the concepts of moral blindness and the banality of evil to explain the horrors of modernity, Auschwitz and the death camps, the Gulag, the terror of September 11, and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq (Bernstein 2002, 2005; Benhabib 2010). More recently, the question has been extended to whether such notions can explain the continuous harm and violence of poverty, racism, and discrimination around the world. Traditionally such evil has been ascribed to willed demonic human actions and the recent literature on the problem of evil is extensive. Nevertheless, our conceptualization of evil remains somewhat insufficient in the face of the radical incomprehensibility of evil actions (Arendt 1964). Rather than explaining terror and violence in terms of real evil based on direct conscious intentionality – as proposed by classical philosophy and some contemporary philosophy – the approach informed by Arendt and her followers considers the concept of moral blindness and the banality of evil based on relations between structures, systems, and human individuals in unreflective roles which has an implication for understanding risk and the moral implications of risk of human actions in organizations.
J.D. Rendtorff () Roskilde University e-mail: [email protected] C. Luetge and J. Jauernig (eds.), Business Ethics and Risk Management, Ethical Economy 43, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7441-4__4, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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J.D. Rendtorff
Despite the rich discussion of evil in political theory, this work has not been adequately extended to the notion of harm and wrongdoing in institutional contexts and risk taking in relation to morality of management in business organizations (Baumeister 1997). The discussion of the banality of evil as proposed by Hannah Arendt is directly relevant to risk management, business ethics and to the ethics of organizations and corporations. Though not manifesting in the form of political violence, private organizations and corporations that take enormous risk on behalf of society and its members often commit actions with very violent consequences for human beings, societies, nature, et cetera. Moreover, many administrators and risk managers are morally blind, in that that they do not really understand their own wrongdoing or culpability in decisions that can cause very severe pain to other people when they take risk in order to promote a particular economic gain or organizational development. Since Arendt’s
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