(similar to BA) degree in sociology and anthropology, before studying at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 1985 to 1990 under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas.
[2] Vetlesen works interdisciplinary, often combining his philosophical theses with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology.
His books in English include Cosmologies of the Anthropocene (2019), The Denial of Nature (2015), A Philosophy of Pain (2009), Evil and Human Agency (2005), Perception, Empathy, and Judgment (1994), and Closeness (1997).
Vetlesen focuses on large-scale acts of evil such as the Holocaust and former Yugoslavia's “ethnic cleansing” in order to investigate how human agency allows an individual to cause harm to another intentionally and how personal intention turns into a collective evil.
He aims to push away what he considers to be the current “shallow” understanding of evil that observes an immoral action's bad effects or consequences by instead focusing on what causes someone to deliberately inflict harm or pain.