Technical remoteness from victims enables moral substitution

Evidence

With astonishing consistency, Milgram’s experiments turned evidence of the positive dependence between the effectiveness of the substitution, and the remoteness (technical more than physical) of the subject from the ultimate effects of his actions. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 459

Categorization

• XREF: The remoteness mechanism foreshadows how ‘technical’ administrative distance lets state apparatuses inflict harm as in later biopolitics/necropolitics texts. — connects to: Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia: Still a Challenge for Us…, 337; The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty; Authorization, routinization, and dehumanization erode moral inhibitions against violence — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 93 (+14 more)

Related

• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible (similarity 0.89)
• Modern technology extends action beyond the moral vanishing point, enabling harm (similarity 0.88)
• Remote killing removes reciprocal constraints that traditionally shaped warrior morality. (similarity 0.81)
• Remote killing of humans drew less moral outrage than remote hunting of animals (similarity 0.81)
• Mass murder required neutralizing proximity-based moral drives. (similarity 0.80)
• Moral inhibitions do not act at a distance and depend on proximity (similarity 0.80)
• The extermination machinery aimed to eliminate personal sadism and reduce cruelty (similarity 0.80)
• Functional task separation replaces moral responsibility with technical responsibility (similarity 0.79)
• Morality dies when social distance replaces proximity, enabling mass murder (similarity 0.79)
• Modern artillery made killing morally irrelevant by severing aim from effect (similarity 0.79)
• Drone technology produces a strong moral buffering effect that offsets visual proximity to victims. (similarity 0.78)
• Remote killing free from retaliation creates a moral hazard problem (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Faceless blurry drone imagery reduces moral resistance to killing #exemplifies (0.90) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 404
• Moral responsibility to others shrinks and vanishes with increasing distance #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 547
• Drone morality inverts ethics to make unendangered killing good #corroborates (0.85) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 453
• Rationalized social organization structurally enables cruelty by mediating responsibility #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 441
• Drone design produces a strong moral buffering effect on operators #expands (0.82) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 407
• Ethical-robot rhetoric is a Trojan horse that lowers moral barriers to killer robots #expands (0.78) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 669