Abstract

This dissertation argues that the writings of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt make a significant contribution to the study of ethics. The development of Arendt's ethical thought can be traced through three stages. The first stage is characterized by the theme of "love of the world." The phrase amor mundi occurs throughout her works and signifies her belief that one must love the world and have a secure place in it. That amor mundi is an ethical concern is evident in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she demonstrated the great evil that can be committed by and upon people who have been disenfranchised by their world. ;The second stage of development is Arendt's critique of values: most apparent in The Human Condition. For Arendt, the profound inadequacy of a system of values either to prevent or to comprehend fully the events of the Holocaust motivates a critique of value ethics informed by the works of Marx and Nietzsche. She holds that modern conceptions of ethics, expressed in terms of value, fail primarily due to the susceptibility of value to exchange. To constitute worth in a marketplace of demand and exchange is to produce sets of values easily substituted for each other, regardless of content. Arendt uses her formulation of exchange value to explain the ease with which the people of Germany exchanged their values for those of the Nazis, reversing the exchange at the end of the war. ;In the third and final stage of the development of her ethical thought, Arendt identifies thinking and judging, working in concert, as the locus of human moral action. I argue finally that Arendt's intention toward the end of her life was the expansion of the concepts of moral philosophy to include some concepts of political philosophy. Her primary source in this project was Kant's Critique of Judgment, which Arendt viewed as a work of political and moral philosophy rather than as a work of aesthetics