Arne Johan Vetlesen

Arne Johan Vetlesen, born 1960, is professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is one of the most prolific writers among contemporary Norwegian philosophers. Impressioned as a young boy by personal accounts by Holocost victims in German concentration camps, his philosophical work has been concentrated in the fields of ethics and social and political philosophy. He has written more than ten books and is an active participant in current public debates about international conflicts and genocides. In his publication from 1994, Perception, Empathy and Judgement. An inquiry into the precondition of Moral Performance, he critiques Hannah Arendt, Alisdair MacIntyre and Jürgen Habermas for their cognitivist approaches to ethics and advocates the crucial role of emotions in ethical behaviour. He has written books on Emmanuel Levinas, the feminist ethics of Carol Gilligan and generally on The Ethics of Care.  His books are widely read among the members of the health professions in Norway. He claims that proximity – closeness to a unique Other – is the context where moral sensitivity is born. Against Arendt’s assertion of the banality of evil and Zygmunt Bauman’s emphasis on evildoing as the side effect of bureaucracy, he claims that evildoing has an irreducible element of human agency in being calculatingly gruesome. In 2004 he was awarded the prize “Concentration Camps Prisoners’ Testament”, which is in memoriam of Norwegian political prisoners in German concentration camps during the Second World War.  His most recent publication in English is Evil and Human Agency. Understanding Collective Evildoing, published by Cambridge University Press.