How Hitler Is Like Mother Teresa

A Harvard psychologist says we group people into two broad categories: “moral agents” and “moral patients”; those who take action and those who receive the actions of others. “Both Hitler and Gandhi, for all their profound differences, are moral agents, whom we see as capable of deliberate morally freighted action, self-control, and planning. One used his moral power to inspire millions of his countrymen, of course, and the other to kill them. But their agency,” psychologist Kurt Gray argues, “is on some level first and foremost in our images of them.”