Hitler and evil

Deep in the account of a recent interview Will Smith is quoted as saying:

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'...."

He has been roundly criticized for the statement. But Joseph Bottum at First Things asks:

...don’t you have to push pretty hard to make this into anything like praise for Hitler? It looks like a straightforward Aristotelian proposition that human beings have to think the intentions of their actions good, or they wouldn’t do them. And Hitler, in Smith’s line, is clearly chosen as the example because we know that he did evil.

Ideas have consequences and Hitler's "idealism," however much he believed his was a battle of light against darkness, led to the grossest evil. The greatest dealers of violence and oppression justify and have always justified their actions to themselves and others by arguing that they are engaged in fighting for the good.

We are each fully capable of such self-deception in our daily lives - although thankfully far less capable of causing so much evil. In the final analysis, our subjective opinion of the goodness of our actions really doesn't signify. What does matter is the extent to which our behavior conforms to what God demands. That is the objective standard - and we all fall short of His demands.

Hitler, though, in the sheer quantity of death, pain and suffering he caused - in his responsibility for sheer overwhelming evil - is too guilty of too much to be used casually as an example of ordinary human sin and fallibility.

Will Smith: My Work Ethic Will Make Me A Legend - The Daily Record, First Things: Evil Intentions