Evil
1: Translation
Until the 1960’ies there has been looked at malicious actions as something unusual and extreme, which was an expression for mental disease. It was difficult to imagine, that quite ordinary people could commit inexplicable and monstrous crimes, and it was relievable when there was a biological explanation.
How can we define wickedness and malicious actions? It is something, that hurts others, and it both can be physical and mental. So the victim’s quality of life is getting reduced, but to speak about really wickedness, you have to add, that there have to be intentionally actions quite out of the ordinary. Also the offender does not have to show sympathy or empathy for the victim at the mitre time.

2: Blog entry
When I think about evil the first thing that comes to my mind, are for example war, raping, murdering and so on. A lot of people have the idea that some people don’t want to be evil; they’re saying that there are other explanations. But is there a universal definition of evil and could some situations that be justified?
In my opinion, there absolutely is a universal definition of evil. Of course, many people try to justify their actions by saying that their religion or their god forced them to act like they did. Some people also say that it’s their family or the social surroundings, where they learn things in another way than kids usually do when they get raised. An example is, that some young people don’t think about their actions, like if they fight with somebody they don’t thing about the consequences, where other young people don’t just beat other, because they know it’s wrong and that they will get their consequences. These are just two examples from many, but I think that neither the one reason nor the other is a good argument to act like some people do like they do.
I think that none of the actions with malicious background could or should be justified. If people for example rape young kids, they should feel that they have one sort of mental disease. Today there are so many places where you can get help, so if you feel something inexplicable you can get help. Maybe it’s not the persons that are evil, but their minds – which can be changed!

3: Comparison
The evil in the article “Bad or Mad?” is a little bit different compared to the evil in Hannah Arendt’s concept. While Hannah Arendt says, that ordinary people, who think they do the right things, are doing evil actions and are living up to the ideology of their state, the article says that people, who have decided to do evil actions, decided it by their own and actually know they did something wrong. The article says that people, who know they did something wrong, not necessarily are evil people, but have mental problems, with some parts of their brain not working as they should. While Hannah Arendt says that the psychopaths or sociopaths did not carry the great evils of history, the article asks us if people with mental illness or with medical treatment should be punished in another way than usually. It also asks us if psychiatrists should identify people, with these mental problems and should get them in some kind of prison for their own and for others safety. So Hannah Arendt’s concept of evil is kind of the opposite than what the article “Mad or Bad?” says. But you also have to think about the difference of time between the two attitudes; Hannah Arendt wrote her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in 1963 and the article “Bad or Mad?” is just from 2004. Hannah Arendt was very risky when she published her essays about the case, what she first did in The New Yorker and later she made a book out of it. The risk about this was, that many people at that time was very chocked and a lot of them got angry, but some also agreed with her.