This chapter turns to the collapse of moral judgment Arendt saw in the early weeks of the Third Reich, and which she connects to the collapse of common sense and adherence to conspiracy theories in mass societies. The chapter draws on The Origins of Totalitarianism, coupled with contemporary “virtue epistemology” – the study of intellectual virtues and vices and their relation to knowledge. Arendt, I argue, is an exceptionally insightful virtue epistemologist. The chapter analyzes Arendt’s account of how European social conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the collapse of common sense in the face of a barrage of political lies. She warns that “if everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore.” The result is a dangerous mix of gullibility and cynicism, what in the chapter I label culpable credulousness.

This conclusion pulls together the previous chapters. Arendt’s moral philosophy is, first and foremost, a moral psychology that turns on the concepts of thinking, judging, and common sense, and the catastrophic consequences of their absence. Its normative core lies in respect for human dignity, which she roots in the human conditions of plurality and natality. The chapter explains why Arendt’s early ambivalence about morality rests on mistakes. It then returns to four issues catalogued in Chapter 1: the problems of incongruity between person and act; the problem of principles and particulars; the problem of judgment; and the problem of moral realism. The chapter summarizes and expands on the solutions Arendt offers to these problems. It concludes by explaining the connections between Arendt’s moral thought and her ideas about international law. Holding perpetrators accountable for core crimes is one crucial way of acknowledging human dignity and of realizing the “idea of humanity.” Although Arendt is objectionably purist about the mission of international criminal justice, her contributions to its theory are impressive. They include a deep analysis of the crime of genocide, a critique of sovereign immunity, a recognition that states can be criminals, and an understanding of why some crimes are of international concern.

This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and William Morris’s New from Nowhere (1890) through the lens of the commons and what counts as “common sense.” Taking its cue from a question Morris poses about art’s role in radical social transformation, the chapter asks if the recent environmental turn in Victorian studies is interested in piecemeal or systemic change. Considering both modes of change, the chapter proposes a “poetry of the commons,” grounded in Carroll’s and Morris’s very different approaches to both the commons and common sense, as an alternative to the market economy and as more accurate approximation of how the commons traditionally worked. Accordingly, Alice and News can be seen as laying the foundations for something like “commons sense” and a practice and poetry of the commons adequate to the demands of the climate crisis.

The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

Weber overlooked Citizens, but this essay concludes that, in truth, this role in any society is not an independent factor but a “dependent variable.” It depends on “common sense,” which means understandings which are shared by members of the same community but differ from one community to another – such as between what is demanded of good Americans and good Indonesians. Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” helps us to frame the subject, though, by urging us to measure every candidate’s “cause” against its potential consequences and then instructing citizens to support only good cause candidates. Trump has no cause, though, because he does not offer intelligible policies (he issues no position papers) but exploits his “charisma” to engage in politics as a program of exciting “show business” where the goal is achieve headlines every day and get the show renewed. In this sense, Trump is a modern “Pied Piper,” using the arts of advertising, public relations, and propaganda to “entertain” rather than to “educate,” to “amuse” rather than to promote a coherent national “vision.” What scholars must investigate now is why 77,000,0000 million American citizens, in the words of Neil Postman, found Trump “amusing” and voted for him. Can democracy survive if citizens are tempted to vote for fun and, say, ignore a politician’s disdain for global warming, international alliances, science, and top-notch higher education?

This Introduction notes that 77,000,000 American citizens voted for Donald Trump even though he was a convicted felon and autocratic narcissist. They therefore abandoned the “self-evident truth” principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. That is, they failed to exercise citizenship as a vocation dedicated to good public behavior which supports voting in favor of candidates who will protect and maintain democratic values and institutions. Anticipating further analysis in later chapters, the Introduction ascribes this failure of responsible citizenship to, among other causes, the marketplace for ideas today which is overloaded with information and disinformation, leading to muddled thinking, a scarcity of common sense, and what Neil Postman called a media imperative of “amusing ourselves to death,” or entertainment rather than education.

The information system, now dominated by giant corporate platforms like Meta and Google, fractures our thinking by offering up, without qualitative distinction, every sort of fact and fantasy. The purveyors of such “sludge” offer a “confirmation” excuse by saying that they are merely confirming our preferences, some more reasonable than others. Actually, they have corrupted the marketplace of ideas promoted by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill who envisioned a post-Enlightenment forum that would moderately and respectfully assess propositions in order to try out “tentative truths,” thus seeking “knowledge” rather than “opinion.” But the current “marketplace for ideas,” conducted via “information system” instruments such as televisions and smart phones, is overloaded with so much information and disinformation that the shared understandings known to history as “common sense” cannot emerge from there, and citizenship is thus deprived of its major potential source of “wherewithal.” In such a time, community-wide “narratives” could take up the slack and point citizens in desirable directions. But such “Stories,” according to Neil Postman and Yuval Harari, do not emerge, because they are destroyed by relentless competition or undermined by academic debunking of historical Stories incorrectly framed before the rise of Science and Reason.

Chapter 6 makes it clear that definitions, categories and expertise have not ended interpretive issues. Definitions are disembodied. All forms of violence and suffering, their definition and recognition remain relational in reality, born out of a labyrinthine complexity – in terms of how they are constructed, communicated, filtered and understood. Preconceptions of who is deserving of recognition, the requisites for social identification, moral commitment or collective empathy reveal this to be the case. Social science takes suffering to be (inescapably) intersubjectively, textually and sensorially understood – so judicial determinations must also go beyond the technical and doctrinal. The chapter’s discussion on temporality continues the theme of sensing. It examines temporal registers in the recognition of torture – exploring the questions: how does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture? This discussion on time adds to the kaleidoscopic catalogue of sense-centric registers and reasoning operating in the anti-torture field – illustrating it to be a device of inclusion and exclusion.

Divergent perspectives are typically rooted in contrasting worldviews which, in their own right, help to establish a certain social order and structure social relations in determined ways. Worldviews not only grant meaning to individual existence; they also help communities to pursue collective goals that advance their members’ mutual interests. In their turn, individuals establish communities and participate in collective actions in pursuit of their own interests. This chapter argues that human action is, in this manner, characteristically self-interested and oriented towards social relations at the service of collective projects. These collective projects are legitimated by common sense that grants meaning to social objects and events. Processes of social re-presentation serve to fashion objectifications that do not challenge a community’s underlying project. In this way, overcoming conflict requires unpacking contrasting action strategies in terms of projects supported by logical perspectives – that is, perspectives that make sense to the individuals involved. We propose an argumentation analysis protocol that serves to identify convergent claims. Whilst these do not reconcile contrasting projects, they provide the building blocks for mutually satisfactory solutions and reveal targets for social representation intervention.

Chapter 5 discusses the concept of credibility and what sources align with what is credible. Thorough discussion of five information sources is presented, including that pertaining to anecdotal evidence and personal experience; common beliefs and common sense; expert opinion (and opinions in general); research findings; and statistics. Discussion also involves how information from these sources can be interpreted and how all these sources can be flawed (and in what contexts).

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

‘Contested Concepts: Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions’ by Thomas Bénatouïl addresses the question of how ordinary concepts, for instance a layman’s concept of a spider, intersect with a zoologist’s concept of that insect. While from the epistemological point of view the latter’s concept should be allowed to prevail, from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of mind it is not at all obvious that the scientific concept of spider should be allowed to rule over the corresponding lay concept, nor is it obvious that there is only one concept of spider whose content can be fixed for every context. Clearly, the Academics and the Stoics were aware of the importance of this and related problems. Plutarch’s dialogue On Common Conceptions, subtitled Against the Stoics, is a representative text of these schools’ respective stances, and its study by Thomas Bénatouïl aims to bring out both its historical significance and systematic interest.

This letter comments on the affinities between prudence and moderation. It starts from the definition of prudence given by the sixteenth-century Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián in his classic book, The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence (1647), and then examines the different faces of prudence as illustrated by Titian’s famous Allegory of Prudence.