Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

106 BRUNO HIDBERcommitted appeared banal or trivial in the way Eichmanndefended himself before the court. Hiding behind the structuresand mechanisms of power and bureaucracy, he claimed that hewould not ever personally have killed another human being andthat in all his actions he had carried out orders coming fromhis superiors in the regime. He had obeyed and his obediencewas to be considered a virtue.The example of Eichmann allows us to catch a glimpse, soto speak, of this new aspect of evil, of an evil that is globallypresent in the most banal economic and administrative structures,structures that can appear at once both innocuous andatrocious. 31Likewise, today there are scientific approaches to the problemof evil that can favor such strategies of banalization.Research in the human sciences, especially in psychology andthe social sciences, has shown that man is conditioned in histhinking and his actions in a variety of ways. This has someimmediate consequences on the way we view and interpret theevil actions. It is somewhat easy and plausible to see them as aconsequence of such conditioning. The anthropologist ErichFromm observed that the sciences are divided today along twobroad lines when trying to delineate the relationship betweenfreedom and evil: the “instinctivists” on one side, and the “environmentalists”or “behaviorists” on the other. 32The instinctivists are inclined to say: the root of evil is insome bio-genetic or psychological realm within man. Such arealm is innate. A man acts in one way or another because he isprogrammed in such a direction by the genes and psychicstructure he has received. For the most part, man cannotescape such conditioning.The environmentalists affirm that the roots of evil can befound in some structure or reality in the environment. Theparameters for man’s thinking and acting are transmittedthrough the education he receives at home, in school andthrough the influences which society imposes in a general wayon every person. Thus man’s actions, good or bad, depend upon31R. Ammicht-Quinn, Von Lissabon bis Auschwitz, 195-217.32Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York:Holt, 1973), 13-85.