Organizational loyalty redirects moral drives toward abject ends without loss of integrity

Evidence

Under the conditions of bureaucratic division of labour, ‘the other’ inside the circle of proximity where moral responsibility rules supreme is a workmate, whose successful coping with his own task depends on the actor’s application to his part of the job; the immediate superior, whose occupational standing depends on the co-operation of his subordinates; and a person immediately down the hierarchy line, who expects his tasks to be clearly defined and made feasible. In dealing with such others, that moral responsibility which proximity tends to generate takes the form of loyalty to the organization – that abstract articulation of the network of face-to-face interactions. In the form of organizational loyalty, the actors’ moral drives may be deployed for morally abject purposes, without sapping the ethical propriety of intercourse within that area of proximity which the moral drives cover. The actors may go on sincerely believing in their own integrity; — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the milgram obedience literature and to the later Islamophobia material on how ordinary bureaucratic conscience legitimates exclusion. — connects to: Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612; Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 455; Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 457 (+4 more)

Related

• Bureaucracy shifts moral concern from targets onto superiors’ judgment (similarity 0.85)
• Bureaucracy replaces moral language with loyalty-duty-discipline vocabulary (similarity 0.82)
• Means-ends reasoning excludes moral categories by structuring action technically rather than ethically. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Organizational reward structures tie agents’ interests to the organization, not clients #corroborates (0.85)
• Loyalty prioritized over competence produced inefficient Egyptian officers #exemplifies (0.80)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #responds-to (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Continuous responsibility shifting across a hierarchy creates free-floating responsibility that incapacitates moral authority #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 463