Conscience can be selectively disengaged without psychological instability

Evidence

Albert Bandura, in his 1986 book, Social Foundations of Thought and Action, gave us an account that addresses what is accomplished within the individual by the conversion process. He suggested that normal socialization processes produce what he called a “selfregulatory system,” which functions to regulate and control the actions of the normally functioning individual. However, these control mechanisms do not operate in invariant ways. “Development of self-regulatory capabilities does not create an invariant control mechanism, as implied by theories of internalization that incorporate entities such as conscience and superego as continuous internal overseers of conduct” (p. 375). He went on to remark that “self-evaluative influences do not operate unless activated” (p. 375), and it is also the case that they can be selectively disengaged as well. This might work as follows. Normally, people do not indulge in censurable behaviors because these will produce self-devaluative consequences as a result of the working of the self-regulatory system. However, “what is culpable can be made honorable through cognitive restructuring” (p. 376). One can morally justify harmdoing, find euphemistic labels for the action, minimize the harmful consequences, and dehumanize and blame the victim. There are also the usual possibilities of displacing responsibility for the detrimental actions elsewhere in the system. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940 (#expands, via linked claim)

It is this absoluteness of movements which more than anything else separates them from party structures and their partiality, and serves to justify their claim to overrule all objections of individual conscience. The particular reality of the individual person appears against the background of a spurious reality of the general and universal, shrinks into a negligible quantity or is submerged in the stream of dynamic movement of the universal itself. In this stream the difference between ends and means evaporates together with the personality, and the result is the monstrous immorality of ideological politics. All that matters is embodied in the moving movement itself; every idea, every value has vanished into a welter of superstitious pseudoscientific immanence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 631 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Technological rationality neutralizes guilt and conscience under reification — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 346; Deliberative consciousness can only be resisted, never fully escaped — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1033; Conscience operates as inward self-cruelty, not mere restraint — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 282 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Moral self-regulation is not a fixed conscience but can be selectively disengaged #expands (0.92) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940
• Moral justification erases guilt yet leaves intrusive remnants that demand suppression #complicates (0.80)
• The absoluteness of movements dissolves individual conscience and ends-means distinctions #complicates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 631