Reductive mechanism’s emotional distance normalises modern warfare and machine-economy harms

Evidence

The framework of reductive mechanism permits the emotional distance which enables power and control, killing and warfare, to seem acceptable, just as it did in the case of the animals Descartes’ followers used for experimentation. The language of ‘collateral damage’, of ‘body counts’ and ‘surgical strikes’ is the language of reductive mechanism. It is the language too of the machine economy which increasingly dominates public life, in which ‘gross domestic product’ replaces ‘good’ or ‘happiness’ and people appear as market resources. In such a framework, the modern subject loses a sense of itself not only as an organic but as a social being, as an agent in and chooser of political, economic and technological frameworks. It comes to see itself and others as components of relentless machinery rather than as active participants in a political community. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 448

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The mechanism-heightens-moral-distance mechanism fits the environmental-ethics thread in Eco-Justice: how ‘collateral damage’ and GDP framing obscure nature and people as agents.
• STORYSTEM: A world whose leaders have fully adopted corpuscular selfhood — sees beings only as annexable property or machine components — could anchor dystopian speculative fiction about environmental collapse.
• XREF: connects to: Mechanism removed the moral barrier that had made controlling nature seem impious — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 419; Capitalist cyberspace has normalized precariousness, competitiveness, and casual aggression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 772; Hierarchical distance from harm weakens moral restraint on actions — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 451 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Hierarchical distance from harm weakens moral restraint on actions #corroborates (0.90) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 451
• Empathy discourse is repurposed to legitimize mechanized killing #expands (0.85)
• Distributed lethal systems fabricate irresponsibility by diluting causal attribution. #corroborates (0.85)
• Capitalist cyberspace has normalized precariousness, competitiveness, and casual aggression #qualifies (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 772