Bureaucratic distance makes actors’ moral standards irrelevant to operation success

Evidence

For our topic, two effects of such context of bureaucratic action are most important. First is the fact that the skills, expert knowledge, inventiveness and dedication of actors, complete with their personal motives that prompted them to deploy these qualities in full, can be fully mobilized and put to the service of the overall bureaucratic purpose even if (or perhaps because) the actors retain relative functional autonomy towards this purpose and even if this purpose does not agree with the actors’ own moral philosophy. To put it bluntly, the result is the irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic operation. The instinct of workmanship, which according to Thorstein Veblen is present in every actor, focuses fully on proper performance of the job in hand. The practical devotion to the task may be further enhanced by the actor’s craven character and severity of his superiors, or by the actor’s interest in promotion, the actor’s ambition or disinterested curiosity, or by many other personal circumstances, motives, or character features – but, on the whole, workmanship will suffice even in their absence. By and large, the actors want to excel; whatever they do, they want to do well. Once, thanks to the complex functional differentiation within bureaucracy, they have been distantiated from the ultimate outcomes of the operation to which they contribute, their moral concerns can concentrate fully on the good performance of the job at hand. Morality boils down to the commandment to be a good, efficient and diligent expert and worker. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 295

Categorization

• DEFINE: Condenses the whole chapter’s thesis: morality is redefined as technical diligence (‘to be a good, efficient and diligent expert and worker’).
• XREF: Directly scaffolds how modern administration, not evil intent, enables mass exclusion — the exact mechanism Islamophobia readings will need for analyzing bureaucratic state practices. — connects to: Bureaucratic killing efficiency requires emotional neutrality, not enthusiasm — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 698; Distance between act and consequence erases the act’s moral significance entirely — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 102; Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97 (+8 more)
• SEED: The ‘workmanship suffices even in the absence of motives’ point is an essay angle on how professional diligence, not ideology, sustains harmful systems.

Related

• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.83)
• Distance between act and consequence erases the act’s moral significance entirely (similarity 0.83)
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment (similarity 0.82)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors (similarity 0.80)
• Division of labour shifts evaluation from moral to technical criteria (similarity 0.79)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 547
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 546
• A few hundred drone operators’ moral feelings can be dismissed as irrelevant #exemplifies (0.90) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 627
• Expert legitimacy can override moral drives even when actors know their acts are wrong #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 564
• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 455