Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority

Evidence

We may surmise that the overall effect of such a continuous and ubiquitous responsibility shifting would be a free-floating responsibility, a situation in which each and every member of the organization is convinced, and would say so if asked, that he has been at some else’s beck and call, but the members pointed to by others as the bearers of responsibility would pass the buck to someone else again. One can say that the organization as a whole is an instrument to obliterate responsibility. The causal links in co-ordinated actions are masked, and the very fact of being masked is a most powerful factor of their effectiveness. Collective perpetuation of cruel acts is made all the easier by the fact that responsibility is essentially ‘unpinnable’, while every participant of these acts is convinced that it does reside with some ‘proper authority. This means that shirking responsibility is not just an after-the-fact stratagem used as a convenient excuse in case charges are made of the immorality, or worse still of illegitimacy, of an action; the free-floating, unanchored responsibility is the very condition of immoral or illegitimate acts taking place with obedient, or even willing participation of people normally incapable of breaking the rules of conventional morality. Free-floating responsibility means in practice that moral authority as such has been incapacitated without having been openly challenged or denied. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that unanchored responsibility is not an excuse but the very precondition of immoral acts — moral authority incapacitated without being openly challenged — is a paradigm-level insight about how ordinary people commit cruelty.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt-style arguments about the banality of evil and to organizational sociology; carries directly into how bureaucratic state machinery enables mass exclusion. — connects to: Authority is a constructed, analyzable mechanism rather than a natural given; Mediated acts belong to no one, freeing all players of responsibility — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 99; Functional task separation replaces moral responsibility with technical responsibility — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 293 (+13 more)

Related

• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.83)
• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness (similarity 0.82)
• Mediated acts belong to no one, freeing all players of responsibility (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment (similarity 0.80)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality (similarity 0.79)
• Levinasian responsibility precedes knowledge and intention unconditionally. (similarity 0.79)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil (similarity 0.79)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 547