Session with The Royal Academy Bhutan: Exploring legal frameworks and the Banality of Evil
Updated: 4 days ago
Given the success of our initial session with The Royal Academy Bhutan, SAYDF was invited to organise another session in October 2026.
Our session opened with a simple question: would you break a law to prevent serious harm to someone? A few people said yes straight away, but most landed on “depends,” and that set up everything that followed. We compared legal positivism, which says you follow the law as it is, with naturalism, which says an immoral law should change how you act. That led us to Hannah Arendt and her idea of the banality of evil, the claim that terrible crimes are often carried out by ordinary people going about their day, helped along by habit and distance from their victims. One participant pointed out that “just following orders” feels very different when you are the one giving them, and that sparked a long back and forth about where responsibility ends. The trolley problem made things personal, especially once the person on the track became your mother, and a couple of people admitted they changed their answer halfway through. From there we asked why people commit crime in the first place, and whether it is fair to punish someone for petty theft when the state has failed them. Someone brought up how unevenly the law gets applied, which pushed us into a real debate. We ended on prisons and whether deterrence and rehabilitation can coexist, using El Salvador as a case study.
Further Reading:
Legal Positivism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): covers the positivism vs. naturalism debate, including the Hart-Fuller debate on Nazi-era law
Hannah Arendt (SEP): includes Arendt's account of Eichmann and the criticisms of it
