Moral restraints weaken when no specific victim is salient

Evidence

In many organizational settings in which an action that is going to result in harm to others is taken, at least initially, there is no overt target for the actions committed, no salient other human who is seen to be a victim of the actions. The individual who decides to let the assembly line use substandard cord in the fabrication of radial tires is not thinking of the accidents that decision could cause; he or she is simply keeping the assembly lines moving. Because a good many of the forces that cause people to avoid doing harm to others rely on the salient presence of specific or specifically imagined victims, if they are not present, then restraining forces are considerably weakened. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4008

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgram’s obedience studies, Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, and the road-rage/experimentation literatures on deindividuation and the identifiable-victim effect. — connects to: Privileged innocence is purchased at the cost of others’ suffering — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 167; Moral conduct grounds itself in physical fear and solidarity with tormentable bodies, not rationalization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2563
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the strength of moral restraint depends on a mentally available victim — not abstract principles — is a profound, hard-working claim about how ethics operates in practice.