Mediated acts belong to no one, freeing all players of responsibility

Evidence

The result is that there are many acts no one consciously appropriates. For the person on whose behalf they are done, they exist only verbally or in the imagination; he will not claim them as his own since he never lived through them. The man who has actually done them, on the other hand, will always view them as someone else’s and himself as but the blameless instrument of an alien will… — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Unclaimed acts underwrite the diffusion of responsibility that later Islamophobia texts link to casual, everyday complicity. — connects to: Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 98; Systemic complexity disperses responsibility so no individual is originator of an action; Totalitarian leaders absorb total responsibility for all subordinates’ acts (+3 more)

Related

• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness (similarity 0.82)
• Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority (similarity 0.81)
• Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Systemic complexity disperses responsibility so no individual is originator of an action #corroborates (0.90)
• Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463
• Totalitarian leaders absorb total responsibility for all subordinates’ acts #contradicts (0.80)
• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 552
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #corroborates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613