Thinking and Moral Considerations

Toward the end of her life, Hannah Arendt turned her attention to our faculty of judgement. How do we form judgements about good versus evil, and beauty versus ugliness, and so on? In particular, what role does thinking (or a lack of thinking) play in our judgements?

In her 1971 essay "Thinking and Moral Considerations", she analyzes the example of Socrates along with concepts from Immanuel Kant to consider what use we have for thinking in making moral judgements. She does not believe thinking and judging to be one and the same. Thinking exerts a sort of paralysis on the thinker, but that may just be prerequisite for proper judgement.

Although she passed away before finishing or drafting the Judgement section of her posthumous book The Life of the Mind, this essay offers insights of its own as well as clues how she might've developed her thought on the topic. We will discuss it and its general questions in this Meetup. A link to the text can be found here.