Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality

Evidence

The organization’s answer to the autonomy of moral behaviour is the heteronomy of instrumental and procedural rationalities. Law and interest displace and replace gratuity and the sanctionlessness of moral drive. Actors are challenged to justify their conduct by reason as defined either by the goal or by the rules of behaviour. Only actions thought of and argued in such a way, or fit to be narrated in such a way, are admitted into the class of genuinely social action, that is rational action, that is an action that serves as the defining property of actors as social actors. By the same token, actions that fail to meet the criteria of goal-pursuit or procedural discipline are declared non-social, irrational – and private. The organization’s way of socializing action includes, as its indispensable corollary, the privatization of morality. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the heteronomy of rationality against moral autonomy and introduces ‘privatization of morality’ as the corollary of rationalized social action.
• XREF: Connects to Bauman’s own framework if earlier chapters establish the pre-societal moral impulse, and echoes Weber’s disenchantment/iron cage lineage. — connects to: Organizations suppress morality because it cannot be rationalized — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 611; Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 613; Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566 (+25 more)

Related

• Organizations suppress morality because it cannot be rationalized (similarity 0.91)
• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible (similarity 0.89)
• Social organization neutralizes morality by making action adiaphoric, neither good nor evil (similarity 0.86)
• Socialization manipulates but never produces moral capacity (similarity 0.86)
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility (similarity 0.85)
• Orthodox sociology assumes social regulation produces morality and restrains savagery (similarity 0.85)
• Sociology reduces morality to derivative products of non-moral social institutions (similarity 0.85)
• Rationalized social relationships increase the efficiency of producing inhumanity (similarity 0.84)
• Moral capacity arises socially but not from societal institutions (similarity 0.84)
• Capitalist rationalization attempts to co-opt worker militancy through co-operative management schemes (similarity 0.83)
• Morality precedes society and society merely manipulates an already-existing moral structure (similarity 0.82)
• Institutional evil requires a social psychology of how settings override members’ moral scruples (similarity 0.82)
• Means-ends reasoning excludes moral categories by structuring action technically rather than ethically. (similarity 0.82)
• Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society (similarity 0.81)
• Rationality and order produce inhumanity, not merely contain it (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Modern societal organization can weaken moral drives and make immorality more plausible #corroborates (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 566
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• Moral capacity arises socially but not from societal institutions #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 499
• Organizational loyalty redirects moral drives toward abject ends without loss of integrity #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 557
• Morality precedes society and society merely manipulates an already-existing moral structure #contradicts (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 514