Should we be allowed to think whatever we want?
Our thoughts are our own, our minds free to roam as we wish. And only those who can think for themselves are as free as thought itself. For the last two hundred years we’ve been encouraged to consider possibilities rationally, develop our own convictions and use them as a basis for our actions. We hope that if a person can ‘think’ he or she won’t, say, commit murder. We innately trust people who can ‘think’ and assume that they are doing the right thing. But is that really true? In her startling new book, the philosopher Bettina Stangneth – who previously provoked a new debate about the nature of evil with her book on Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann – asks an unsettling question: do we have the right to think whatever we like, or does thinking itself require an ethical framework?
In this elegantly written essay, Stangneth explains and extends classical concepts of evil. Anyone who wants to fight evil, she maintains, must first be able to recognise it. Evil no longer comes in simple guises like the stupid barbarian, the sadistic thug or the thoughtless bureaucrat. Instead it often beguiles us with alluringly coherent arguments. For no matter how much we might wish it were true, for us humans there’s nothing beyond good and evil. Not even the act of thinking itself.
