Chapter 4, Excerpt 1 of 3
The Ethics of Evil

The Nazi party did attract a great many thugs, crooks, and drifters into its ranks. But such men are inconsequential minority in any country; they were not the reason for Hitler’s rise. The reason was the millions of non-thugs in the land of poets and philosophers. The reason was the good Germans, above all – their concept of “good.” There are two opposite approaches to morality, the ethics of egoism vs. the ethics of self-sacrifice. The second holds that the essence of virtue is unrewarded duty.

Augustine, the leading Christian think before Aquinas, says man is “sordid” . . . must give up on reason . . . which is the virtue is faith. He must give up a sense of self-value . . . the virtue of humility. He must serve the Lord . . . the virtue of love. Deny your will, echoes the German mystic Meister Eckhart, in a voice which carried to Luther and to Kant. The medieval moralist was caught in a contradiction. He urged man to forget his self to save his true self. To despise his own person . . . yet love his neighbor.

Man is, therefore, a creature in metaphysical conflict. His true will is free, free to acknowledge the supreme authority to those commandments and obey them. To make this conceivable, says Kant, “is precisely the problem we cannot solve . . . a reproach which we must make to human reason generally.” Moral imperatives and duties, Kant states, exist only for a “will not absolutely good.” It is personal values that Kant condemns, not as evil, but as a “subjective imperfection” of man’s lower nature.