Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity

Evidence

In a nutshell, Milgram suggested and proved that inhumanity is a matter of social relationships. As the latter are rationalized and technically perfected, so is the capacity and the efficiency of the social production of inhumanity. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 436

Categorization

• DEFINE: The chapter’s thesis compressed: inhumanity is relational and strengthened, not weakened, by rational-technical perfection.
• XREF: Bridges directly to Weber’s rationalization of modernity and to the reader’s scaffolded concepts of bureaucratic rationality enabling mass exclusion. — connects to: Purges weaponize guilt by association to sever all social and family bonds; Workplace puritanism protects workers from physiological collapse under rationalized labor; The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (+12 more)

Related

• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it (similarity 0.88)
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.88)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.86)
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality (similarity 0.84)
• Organizations suppress morality because it cannot be rationalized (similarity 0.81)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.81)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.80)
• Obscuring the causal link between action and suffering sharply raises obedience (similarity 0.80)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil (similarity 0.80)
• Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society (similarity 0.79)
• Workplace puritanism protects workers from physiological collapse under rationalized labor (similarity 0.79)
• Long intermediary chains let people commit abhorrent acts without role awareness (similarity 0.79)
• Means-ends reasoning excludes moral categories by structuring action technically rather than ethically. (similarity 0.79)
• Rational bureaucracy rendered murder morally neutral in perpetrators’ eyes. (similarity 0.79)
• Socialization manipulates but never produces moral capacity (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #corroborates (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 435
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613
• Social relations enable malfeasance on a larger scale than their absence does. #corroborates (0.85) — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 11
• Moral resistance is personal while immorality requires social production #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 476