SHUTTING OFF THE MORALITY SWITCH

Beelzebub, "Lord of the Flies," from Beelzebub as depicted in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is what the social sciences can tell us about human cruelty and violence. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned yesterday, social psychologist Albert Bandura's research indicates that most people have a sense of morality that includes not doing bad things to others and helping them out when they need it. To repeat, that's the good news. The bad news is that we're pretty good at shutting morality down under certain conditions. He called this "moral disengagement."

Two ways of doing this that were discussed yesterday were redefining the situation and using euphemisms. But there are other ways as well. They include:

*advantageous comparison. "We didn't do bad stuff and if we did, it wasn't as bad as what the other guys do."

*displacement of responsibility. "...and besides, we were just carrying out the orders of our superiors."

*diffusion of responsibility. "I didn't kill anybody directly--I just put them on the train/pushed a button/etc." Modern atrocities, it should be noted, often have a complicated division of labor. If everyone just does one small part of the operation, it's easy for people to think they really weren't responsible.

*disregard or distortion of consequences. "It wasn't that bad."

*dehumanization. "And besides, they were just a bunch of [fill in the blank]."

*attribution of blame. "They had it coming anyway."

Here's a final thought. According to Bandura, moral disengagement usually doesn't happen all at once. It usually starts small and escalates over time as people get used to it. El Cabrero is reminded of a quote from Dostoevsky that I've used here more than once:

Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel.

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GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

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GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED