LINK: Norman Geras' interpretation of Arendt's 'banality of evil' is so good you must absolutely drop everything and read it right now:
"I also have a wider theoretical misgiving about the emphasis on perpetrator normality: this is that it runs the risk of permitting the sociology and psychology which is involved in trying to understand what happened to displace the ethical perspective."
So we know he's not a determinist (not a hard determinist, anyway); the interesting question is whether his sort of moral analysis is compatible with utilitarianism, because it seems to me to be very much not, which is a little surprising based on my (no doubt misguided) conception of how geras' thought-processes work. Or it'd require some sort of rule utilitarianism that would end up looking awfully like deontology*.
*but then again, all rule utilitarianism looks like an attempt to sneak in deontology without crediting it as such, so maybe I'm not the most unbiased of observers.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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