We cannot escape from the personal responsibility of our actions

“The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is….we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism” (Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, Essay on the Banality of Evil).

Hannah Arendt here expresses a fundamental problem of the ethics of administration. Can we say that a public administrator or business manager is responsible for actions they have done when they were  following the orders given by their superiors? Arendt emphasizes that there is a dangerous inclination to regard such bureaucrats as insignificant ordinary people who are nothing but elements of a system or a larger whole. In this way bureaucratic evildoers may argue–as Eichmann did—that they were only “following orders” and therefore they cannot really be held responsible in a legal sense because as officials they are only administering the rules and regulations of the legal or bureaucratic system.  Or, in case of a corporation, the rules and values that are implemented as strategy from the top.

Yet this passage expresses our fundamental unease with such an understanding of bureaucratic or administrative responsibility. As Arendt says further in her work, we should never submit ourselves to this kind of determinism where the doer is not really responsible for his deeds. Eichmann – like every bureaucrat, administrator or middle manager—is always fundamentally responsible for his actions, even if he is not thinking about what he is doing and even if he is not responsible in a legal or institutional sense. Instead, Arendt suggests we must think through in fundamental ethical and moral sense of bureaucratic responsibility. This is the existential condition of the bureaucrat who never becomes totally a part of the system but always must try to consider his or her actions from outside the organization, institution, or bureaucracy.  It is from this perspective that he or she is able to make the critical judgment and evaluation of whether such actions would be justifiable from the point of view of universal morality and principles of justice.

-Jacob Dahl Rendtorff