Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness

Evidence

The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts … As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions become motions without consequence. With the consequences out of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility … — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 552

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s banality of evil and to the silence module’s treatment of what escapes perception as escaping ethics. — connects to: Total social mapping enables obliterating people without any trace; Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 98; Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 97 (+8 more)

Related

• Total social mapping enables obliterating people without any trace (similarity 0.83)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.82)
• Mediated acts belong to no one, freeing all players of responsibility (similarity 0.82)
• Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority (similarity 0.82)
• Obscuring the causal link between action and suffering sharply raises obedience (similarity 0.82)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.81)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.81)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil (similarity 0.81)
• Moral suspension, not mobilization, enables ordinary people’s participation (similarity 0.80)
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.80)
• Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity (similarity 0.79)
• Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it (similarity 0.79)
• Distance between act and consequence erases the act’s moral significance entirely (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucratic desk work destroys people while hiding causal links from actors (similarity 0.79)
• Institutional evil requires a social psychology of how settings override members’ moral scruples (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Technical remoteness from victims enables moral substitution #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 459
• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #expands (0.75)
• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #qualifies (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550