ABSTRACT
This chapter shores up accounts given by staff and administrators of Schedule 1 facilities in Ontario, as well as their relatives, who justify their violent conduct as care; and draws from political philosophy, particularly Hannah Arendt, to treat these accounts to critical analysis. It begins with conceptual scaffolding that takes Arendt as its foundation. The chapter demonstrates her applications to theories of institutional behaviour. When theorizing violence and its role in the political sphere, Hannah Arendt is careful to note that power and violence are distinct, despite their tendency to appear together. Moral and legal theory of violence accounts for the circumstances that bring it about, the role of the actors responsible and the impacts on victims. Arendt's construct of the banality of evil points to a larger legal problem, not simply a problem of the human psyche or moral core. The problem of the banality of evil exists in its inarticulability in law.
