Civil-servant honor substitutes discipline for individual moral responsibility

Evidence

This kind of behaviour means, for a civil servant, ‘moral discipline and self-denial in the highest sense’. Through honour, discipline is substituted for moral responsibility. The delegitimation of all but inner-organizational rules as the source and guarantee of propriety, and thus denial of the authority of private conscience, become now the highest moral virtue. The discomfort that the practising of such virtues may cause on occasion, is counterbalanced by the superior’s insistence that he and he alone bears the responsibility for his subordinates’ actions (as long, of course, as they conform to his command). Weber completed his description of the civil servant’s honour by emphasizing strongly the ‘exclusive personal responsibility’ of the leader, ‘a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 94

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Weberian mechanism by which ‘honour’ transfers moral responsibility upward and voids the subordinate’s conscience.
• XREF: connects to: State prestige can substitute for a class’s missing intellectual and moral authority; Duty-based moralities subordinate the individual to maintenance of social norms. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 553; Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 495 (+9 more)

Related

• State prestige can substitute for a class’s missing intellectual and moral authority (similarity 0.86)
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Duty-based moralities subordinate the individual to maintenance of social norms. #expands (0.85) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 553
• Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary #expands (0.82) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 457
• Moral responsibility can compel insubordination to socially upheld principles #contradicts (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 495
• Functional task separation replaces moral responsibility with technical responsibility #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 293
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 455