Philosophically speaking, outside of Hitler and Goebbels, there is no Nazi quite as instrumental to philosophy as Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust was to make sure all the trains that delivered the Jews to their deaths ran on time. After a decade-long global manhunt ending in Argentina, Eichmann stood trial for war crimes in Jerusalem in 1960.

Seated behind bulletproof glass, Eichmann testified that he was innocent, saying that he was only doing his job.

Hitler told him to kill the Jews and that’s what he did.

If anyone is responsible for the Holocaust, Eichmann claimed, it was Hitler.

In fact, his plea for pardon released earlier this year stated this pretty plainly: “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders”, Eichmann wrote. “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.

The New Yorker commissioned philosopher Hannah Arendt to cover Eichmann’s trial in a series of contemplative essays that would later be published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt would famously say of Eichmann’s plea for innocence: “The deeds were monstrous but the doer — at least, the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.”

Consider this in juxtaposition to the story of Mylan CEO Heather Bresch who many across the internet are calling PharmaBitch, an apt homage, surely, to Martin Shkreli’s sobriquet of PharmaBro.

Bresch rejects opprobrium for raising the price of a generic drug from $100 to $600 because she says she is a businesswoman doing business things. As CEO, she passes the buck to the forces of capitalism unto which she is merely a handmaiden. Or, I guess, in the words of Eichmann, a “mere instrument.”

“I am running a business,” said Bresch, “I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that.”

What I love about that quote is that Bresch lets it slip and says “I am a for-profit business.” She did not say I am an executive at a for-profit business. She says she *is* a for-profit business and that she’s not hiding from that.

“There is a work ethic and grit about that that allows me to help make a difference,” she says, after it’s revealed that she earns $19 million a year in annual salary.

That’s some big talk from a woman that runs a company that buys patents for generic drugs it does not invent or develop and profits entirely by gouging the prices in a country where the government is proscribed by law from regulating drug prices.

I mean, I guess that’s “grit” in some sense. I’d call it exploitation. But who’s to say?

What if, as a thought experiment, we imagined the EpiPen like any other rescue service, say like the Fire Department. If the Fire Department marshall came to your house and said the only way it would save your kids from a fire was for you to pay $600 — just in case — you’d probably start questioning the ethics of rescue distribution.

After all, this is a life-saving emergency they’re trying to capitalize on. A fire marshall trying to shake you down for cash would be in that scenario hedging against your child’s life. That doesn’t quite seem right, does it?

And it didn’t seem right to the nation’s founders, either. Did you know that Ben Franklin actually bureaucratized fire rescue? He saw that the city of Philadelphia had a problem putting out fires. So he convinced a bunch of other city founders to unionize themselves into a firefighting department— Ben’s Bucket Brigade. While at first, services were limited to the union, the idea that rescue should be unionized spread not only across the city but across the nation and fundamentally changed how Americans thought about the civics of rescue. To this day, now, we would challenge the ethics of anyone seeking to charge citizens for a service we think a civic right.

But when we commoditize rescue into a product, apparently, we stop imagining it as a service that we owe to each other’s children and allow people to think they can profit from rescue.

That’s where things start getting sick.

From where I sit, personally, I think we have no civic challenge greater than to unionize medical rescue. I think universal healthcare is the only ethical course of action and that we should honor the agreements we made in the UNDHR and concede that we are systemically denying the human right of healthcare to millions of our own citizens every day.

We are all complicit in this way with the banality of evil.

And it is in our cowardness as a people that allows PharmaBros and PharmaBitches to profit from the systemic suffering we inflict on each other.

Is Bresch a villain? Is the board that rewards her behavior a cockpile of profiteers? Are the investors only doing the bidding of the one true Market God?

Or are they all mere instruments in Capitalitler’s final solution, innocent until someone makes them stand trial for crimes against humanity?

Who’s to say?

All I can say for sure is that the only way to stop this from happening again is to stand up and demand healthcare as a human right and not allow it to be treated like a fucking market commodity.

Otherwise, we keep giving the monstrous their alibis.