Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible

Evidence

As Milgram’s experiments dramatically demonstrated, the silencing of the moral urge and the suspension of moral inhibitions is achieved precisely through making the genuine (though often unknown to the actor) targets of action ‘remote and barely visible’, rather than through an overt anti-moral crusade, or an indoctrination aimed at substituting an alternative set of rules for the old moral system. The most obvious example of the technique which places the victims out of sight, and hence renders them inaccessible to moral assessment, are modern weapons. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Directly builds the scaffold the Islamophobia readings will reuse — the construction of the Other through distance. Also echoes the earlier silence/noise module’s idea that what is out of sensory range escapes moral assessment. — connects to: Total social mapping enables obliterating people without any trace; The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty; Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613 (+21 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism of moral neutralization via remoteness — a load-bearing concept for this chapter.

Related

• Technical remoteness from victims enables moral substitution (similarity 0.89)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.81)
• Modern technology extends action beyond the moral vanishing point, enabling harm (similarity 0.81)
• Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence (similarity 0.80)
• Genocide’s moral invisibility recruits far more participants than conscience-stifling does (similarity 0.79)
• Mass murder required neutralizing proximity-based moral drives. (similarity 0.79)
• Morality dies when social distance replaces proximity, enabling mass murder (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing #exemplifies (0.95) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 404
• Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots #exemplifies (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669