Judgment and solidarity: towards a phenomenology of moral and legal judging in Arendt and Adorno

Reeves, Craig (2011) Judgment and solidarity: towards a phenomenology of moral and legal judging in Arendt and Adorno. In: Murphy, C. and Green, P. (eds.) Law and Outsiders: Norms, Processes and 'Othering' in the 21st Century. Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, pp. 271-290. ISBN 9781847316349.

Abstract

The thought that a corrupt community might effectively undermine the ability of individuals to make moral judgments for themselves needs taking most seriously when it becomes most concrete—in the criminal law’s most difficult cases— and it is this that makes Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem1 so interesting from a legal point of view. The court-room led Arendt to wonder by what capacity human beings distinguish themselves in their ability to resist the overwhelming pressures of their circumstances and judge for themselves. In this chapter I follow Arendt’s journey towards a conception of judgment from the antinomies of Eichmann (section 1) through to her theory of judging, emphasising the extent to which it grasps at the aspect of humanity in judgment that seems irreducible to rational calculation (section 2), and begin a phenomenology of judging in the actor and the spectator orientations (section 3). I then show how Arendt’s theory of judgment falls short, contrasting it with Adorno’s natural-history perspective, showing how his naturalistic idea of solidarity helps to explain how moral autonomy is possible and what it would involve (section 4). I conclude by considering the implications of this approach for legal judgment and indicate the persisting difficulties that confront judgment in an antagonistic world (section 5).

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