Morality operates only on known persons and fails on abstract categories
Evidence
What would stir their moral conscience if focused on persons they knew, aroused hardly any feelings when targeted on an abstract and stereotyped category. … Until, for the young German soldiers and SS men entrusted with the task of ‘liquidation’ of so many Figuren, the Jew was ‘only a “museum-piece”, something to look at with curiosity, a fossil wonder-animal, with the yellow star on its breast, a witness to bygone times but not belonging to the present, something one had to journey far to see.’ Morality did not travel that far. Morality tends to stay at home and in the present. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 533
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the key opposition between known persons and abstract categories as the precondition for moral failure — core vocabulary for the scaffolding.
- XREF: connects to: Proximity grounds moral responsibility while abstract categories remain morally neutral. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 526; Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 547; Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 546 (+1 more)
Related
- Proximity grounds moral responsibility while abstract categories remain morally neutral. (similarity 0.87)
- Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.85)
- Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance (similarity 0.82)
- Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production (similarity 0.81)
- Moral capacity arises socially but not from societal institutions (similarity 0.80)
- Individual moral judgment can remain intact without any supporting social rules (similarity 0.79)
- Moral value is assigned externally to actions, not intrinsic to them. (similarity 0.79)
- Morality precedes society and society merely manipulates an already-existing moral structure (similarity 0.79)
- Morality dies when social distance replaces proximity, enabling mass murder (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity
#corroborates(0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 546 - Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance
#expands(0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 547 - Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production
#complicates(0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476