Focusing on obeying subordinates ignores genocidal initiators and degrees of evil
Evidence
Another factor influencing people’s judgments of evil has to do with the perceived responsibility for the action. … This particular consideration has been surprisingly neglected by those who talk of the banality of evil as if it did not at all matter who initiated, or was primarily responsible for, the behavior being assessed. … Social psychology’s relative inattention to the great atrocities committed during the extermination program reflects the field’s failure to establish a conception of evil that differentiates among categories of wrongdoing. In so doing, there is a danger of trivializing terrible actions. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 2007
Categorization
- XREF: Berkowitz’s initiators-vs-subordinates distinction connects to the Frankfort-era debate over whether authoritarian personality can explain genocide-level evil, already covered in ch. 71 of this book. — connects to: Scholars shifted Holocaust study from Hitler to the bureaucratic middlemen — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 47; Milgram’s obedience theory locates harsh action in situational authority pressure, not internal hatred. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 602; Milgram and Arendt turned the obedience plea into an indictment of everyone — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 1992 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Effective systems of wrongdoing recruit dutiful subordinates who disown responsibility for harm
#qualifies(0.85) - Duty-driven obedience, not personality, predicts cruelty under authority
#qualifies(0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 434 - Leading a killing organization does not automatically make one evil
#responds-to(0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3990 - Totalitarian leadership monopolizes responsibility, unlike the tyrant’s distancing from subordinates
#expands(0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 868