Abstract

This paper deals with the recently published work by Hannah Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy", which is her most extensive discussion of moral issues. What emerges from this work is a fuller account of what genuine morality is. Writings that she published had prepared her readers for the idea that genuine morality is Socratic morality, which holds that it is better for the person to suffer wrong than to do wrong. That means, in the contexts of resistance to totalitarianism and to tyranny and despotism, that it is better to suffer wrong than to be an accomplice or passive bystander of wrong done to others when one could be safe if one did not resist. On the other hand, Arendt makes it clear that spurious morality in the form of what she calls "the morality of mores" makes people accomplices or passive bystanders. For them, morality is merely conformity to the prevailing norms, and their conformity is underlain by self-love. Thus, morality in one conventional sense sustains political evil, while morality in the real sense impels the individual's effort to resist evil. But this paper also tries to indicate that for Arendt the evil of totalitarianism is not simply the infliction of atrocious suffering and premature death on millions of people. Rather, the worst part of the evil is that atrocious suffering dehumanizes its victims. The loss of humanity is an existential loss: a deprivation of the human status. Correspondingly, the most noteworthy aspect of resistance to evil is to give testimony to the human stature: the unique human capacity to engage in free audacious activity. Status and stature constitute human dignity; and for Arendt human dignity is essentially existential in importance and only secondarily moral.