During his notorious trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Adolf Eichmann described himself as a sort of Kantian. But, he also said, Kant's thinking was too deep for him so he had devised a whittled-down Kantianism suitable for his mind, and THAT involved taking the Fuhrer's Word to be an expression of Duty. This explanation had no impact on the outcome of the trial. Eichmann was executed, and he would presumably also have been executed had he declared himself a utilitarian or anything else ending with "ian" or "ist" or the like. Or if he had never sought to wax philosophical at all. But it did have three consequences that interest me at the moment: 1) it helped persuaded Hannah Arendt that Eichmann's mind was "banal," 2) it was taken by some (Leonard Peikoff) as proof of the badness of Kantian ethics, 3) It has stimulated research into what if anything Eichmann can be found to have said about deep philosophical subjects when he WASN'T on t...
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"I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoint of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy ... nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where I actually am not. The more people's standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion." "Truth and Politics," THE NEW YORKER (1967).
A quote from the opening passage of her 1961 book, ON REVOLUTION. "Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite old although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political relations in the normal course do not fall under the sway of violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity, in so far as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence." Like many thinkers before and some since, Arendt tended to romanticize the Greek polis. I believe this passage exhibits that fact. Surely the slaves within the walls of Athens could have told stories about the use of violence against their persons to keep them in their status as beasts of burden. I doubt "persuasion" in a contrary sense had much to do with that. Still, I see her point. Before anybody would have thought ...