Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society

Evidence

As long as morality is understood as a social product, and causally explained in reference to the mechanisms which, when they function properly, assure its ‘constant supply’ – events which offend the diffuse yet deep-seated moral feelings and defy the common conception of good and evil (proper and improper conduct) tend to be viewed as an outcome of failure or mismanagement of ‘moral industry’. The factory system has served as one of the most potent metaphors out of which the theoretical model of modern society is woven, and the vision of the social production of morality offers a most prominent example of its influence. The occurrence of immoral conduct is interpreted as the result of an inadequate supply of moral norms, or supply of faulty norms (i.e. norms with an insufficient binding force); the latter, in its turn, is traced to the technical or managerial faults of the ‘social factory of morality’ – at best to the ‘unanticipated consequences’ of ineptly co-ordinated productive efforts, or to the interference of factors foreign to the productive system (i.e. incompleteness of control over the factors of production). Immoral behaviour is then theorized as ‘deviation from the norm’, which stems from the absence or weakness of ‘socializing pressures’, and in the last account from defectiveness or imperfection of the social mechanisms designed to exert such pressures. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 490

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Bauman’s ‘social factory of morality’ is a genuinely top-tier analytic move: it shows how an industrial metaphor capacitates an entire explanatory scheme, and it directly parallels his critique of the bureaucratic gardening state — worth sitting with.
• XREF: The factory/bureaucracy metaphor for society connects directly to Weber’s iron cage and to Bauman’s later argument that the Holocaust was a rational managerial project; also parallels Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. — connects to: Modern society weakens morality through distance, technical responsibility, and segregation — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 567; Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476; Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566 (+7 more)

Related

• Socialization manipulates but never produces moral capacity (similarity 0.82)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.82)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality (similarity 0.81)
• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production (similarity 0.81)
• Sociology reduces morality to derivative products of non-moral social institutions (similarity 0.81)
• Moral capacity arises socially but not from societal institutions (similarity 0.81)
• Durkheim’s sociology holds that all morality originates in society’s coercive civilizing force (similarity 0.80)
• Durkheim’s framework equates morality with social origin, leaving only animal drives as alternative (similarity 0.80)
• Orthodox sociology assumes social regulation produces morality and restrains savagery (similarity 0.80)
• Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity (similarity 0.79)
• Modern society weakens morality through distance, technical responsibility, and segregation (similarity 0.79)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern society weakens morality through distance, technical responsibility, and segregation #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 567
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566
• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476
• Sociology reduces morality to derivative products of non-moral social institutions #epitomizes (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 481
• Societal requirements transform into self-justifying norms devoid of social origin #complicates (0.75)
• Ideology’s imaginary relation functions to reproduce capitalist production relations #corroborates (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 195