Moral character holds coexisting possibilities that circumstances alternately surface

Evidence

A few years ago a journalist of Le Monde interviewed a sample of former hijack victims. One of the most interesting things he found was an abnormally high incidence of divorce among the couples who went jointly through the agony of hostage experience. Intrigued, he probed the divorcees for the reasons for their decision. Most interviewees told him that they had never contemplated a divorce before the hijack. During the horrifying episode, however, ‘their eyes opened’, and ‘they saw their partners in a new light’. Ordinary good husbands, ‘proved to be’ selfish creatures, caring only for their own stomachs; daring businessmen displayed disgusting cowardice; resourceful ‘men of the world’ fell to pieces and did little except bewailing their imminent perdition. The journalist asked himself a question; which of the two incarnations each of these Januses was clearly capable of was the true face, and which was the mask? He concluded that the question was wrongly put. Neither was ‘truer’ than the other. Both were possibilities that the character of the victims contained all along – they simply surfaced at different times and in different circumstances. The ‘good’ face seemed normal only because normal conditions favoured it above the other. Yet the other was always present, though normally invisible. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 50

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense argument that ‘normal’ conditions merely favor one face of a person rather than revealing a truer self — the situationist bedrock on which the entire chapter’s theory of moral invisibility rests.
• FICTION: The hostage-divorce finding is itself a compressed story-generating device — character revelation under duress — ripe for narrative work.
• XREF: connects to: Human morality is contingent rather than invariant across circumstances. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 390; Moral dispositions resist contrary incentives yet people overestimate their behavioral role — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 216; Border situations force whole-being choices that abstract thought cannot resolve — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 274 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Human morality is contingent rather than invariant across circumstances. #expands (0.85) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 390
• Moral dispositions resist contrary incentives yet people overestimate their behavioral role #complicates (0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 216