Bureaucratic language becomes structurally unfit for moral evaluation of human objects.

Evidence

Reduced, like all other objects of bureaucratic management, to pure, quality-free measurements, human objects lose their distinctiveness. They are already dehumanized – in the sense that the language in which things that happen to them (or are done to them) are narrated, safeguards its referents from ethical evaluation. In fact, this language is unfit for normative-moral statements. It is only humans that may be objects of ethical propositions. (True, moral statements do extend sometimes to other, non-human living beings; but they may do so only by expanding from their original anthropomorphic foothold.) Humans lose this capacity once they are reduced to ciphers. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 299

Categorization

• DEFINE: Specifies the mechanism behind dehumanization: a language of quantification that is categorically unfit for ethical propositions.
• XREF: Links to representational theory in Orientalism — naming/narrating an object constructs its moral status. — connects to: Official discourse systematically downplays Prevent’s harms as isolated errors. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 438; Abstraction erases the face so ethical rules no longer apply. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 644; Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 289 (+4 more)

Related

• Dehumanization begins when bureaucratic objects are reduced to quantitative, quality-free measures. (similarity 0.86)
• Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary (similarity 0.86)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.80)
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary #expands (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 457
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 455