Unmasking Administrative Evil Analysis

Although evil within the field of public affairs cannot be simply explained or delineated as evinced jointly by Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour through their text Unmasking Administrative Evil, the significance of this subject area is crucial to both administrators and the public given the detrimental repercussions evil actions may have on organizational, political, societal and legal spheres. The disturbing effects of such evils are present to this day yet, given the perceived “notion of progression” of society and civilization stemming from technical rationality, the ability to identify evil or administrative evils becomes lost in this age of modernity (Adams 6)(Adams 27). It is so “masked” that words like genocide are replaced with less abrasive word choices including phrases such as “increasing violence” in today’s vernacular which tend to carry a less thoughtful and desensitized meaning. These euphemisms collectively contribute to the break between the actions of humans and what we, as people, with basic human rights regard to …show more content…
The experiment however is invaluable as it brings so much to field of psychological and social studies and can be applied to other areas of human interactions. Evil, as explained in the text, is also a social construction and the fallacy in this logic is that a black and white comparison is used; the myth of pure evil however is a lie (Adams 16). This in effect, leads to the splitting in which “good and bad objects can be successfully integrated” and this tactic is most commonly used in addition to the practice of moral inversion (Adams 21)(Adams 24). Overall, with the power that is found in public service and the potential for given actors to manipulate others as well as their positions ethical behaviors need to be maintained in order to deter administrative