Moral doubts can be converted into private discomfort within organizations

Evidence

The task for the new doctor was to fit into this machine. Other doctors provided whatever rationalizations were necessary to promote this “adaptation.” This being the task, then it was in some sense better to still one’s doubts about what one was doing, to develop a network of beliefs that stilled the moral doubts. … Doctors became preoccupied with adapting themselves to that reality, and moral revulsion could be converted into feelings of discomfort, unhappiness, anxiety, and despair. Subjective struggles could replace moral questions. They became concerned not with the evil of the environment but with how to come to some terms with the place. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3911

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism whereby subjective emotional struggles substitute for moral questions — the conversion of revulsion into anxiety and despair as a way of neutralizing judgment — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about moral psychology in institutional settings.
• XREF: connects to: Group silence about workplace harm coexists with genuine private sympathy — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 958; Managerial corporate culture treats open skepticism as a pathological attitude to be corrected — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2341