Quotes About Ethics

But this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.

What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?

The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

Hannah Arendt

si personne ne peut rendre la justice, c'est que tout le monde est coupable.

He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him.

Ce n'est ni une question d'intelligence ou de stupidité. Celui qui ne connaît pas le dialogue avec lui-même ne verra aucune difficulté à se contredire luimême, ce qui signifie qu'il ne sera jamais capable de – ni ne voudra - rendre compte de ce qu'il a dit ou fait ; il ne pourra non plus s'inquiéter de commettre quelque crime puisqu'il peut être sûr qu'aussitôt il l'oubliera

At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Who was he to judge? Who was he "to have [his] own thoughts in this matter"? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

Menselijke wezens zijn per definitie verdacht, op grond van hun vermogen om te denken, en deze verdenking kan niet afgewend worden door voorbeeldig gedrag, want het menselijk vermogen om te denken is ook het vermogen om zich te bedenken.[...]De volgende beslissende stap is [...] de moord op de morele persoon in de mens. Dit gebeurt hoofdzakelijk door het martelaarschap onmogelijk te maken.

As?l sorun tam da Eichmann gibi onlarca insan?n olmas?ndan, onlarcas?n?n ne sap?k ne de sadist olmas?ndan; ne yaz?k ki hepsinin eskiden de, ÅŸimdi de dehÅŸet verici biçimde normal olmas?ndan kaynaklan?yordu. s.281

Hannah Arendt

Another argument against extradition, offered by the observers the West German government sent to Jerusalem, was that Germany had abolished capital punishment and hence was unable to mete out the sentence Eichmann deserved. In view of the leniency shown by German courts to Nazi mass murderers, it is difficult not to suspect bad faith in this objection.

Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil." — Hannah Arendt

A melhor forma de determinar se uma pessoa foi expulsa do âmbito da lei é perguntar se, para ela, seria melhor cometer um crime. Se um pequeno furto pode melhorar a sua posição legal, pelo menos temporariamente, podemos estar certos de que foi destituída dos direitos humanos. Pois o crime passa a ser, então, a melhor forma de recuperação de certa igualdade humana, mesmo que ela seja reconhecida como exceção à norma.

The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm.

The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts.

Qui si devono giudicare le sue azioni, non le sofferenze degli ebrei, non il popolo tedesco o l'umanità, e neppure l'antisemitismo e il razzismo

Eichmann said about this episode in his last statement: "Nobody," he repeated, "came to me and reproached me for anything in the performance of my duties. Not even Pastor Grüber claims to have done so.

And if he did not always like what he had to do...he never forgot what the alternative would have been. Not only in Argentina, leading the unhappy existence of a refugee, but also in the courtroom in Jerusalem, with his life as good as forfeited, he might have still preferred—if anybody had asked him—to be hanged as Obersturmbannführer a.D. (in retirement) rather than living out his life quietly and normally as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company.

Justice, but not mercy, is a matter of judgment