People often look at some immoral action by others and say, ‘how could they do that?’, they can’t imagine doing something like that.
Yes, the actions keep happening, and people keep not understanding it.
I thought about this some decades ago, and came up with a theory for it I call ‘distributed accountability’.
What it means is, that while you might not easily walk up to another person and shoot them in the head, if we can break up the moral choices into several parts for different people, it’s a lot easier.
The example I used was an innocent person sentenced to capital punishment. Of course, confronted simply with the fact of it, everyone expresses horror and says it’s totally unacceptable.
They’ll easily speak in platitudes about how we must prevent that and it’s worth the cost to prevent it, and feel good that they’re not ‘for it’.
But if you look at actual cases of it, you see that no one approved the whole result — many people made smaller compromises that seemed justified and pointed at others.
If you have an overzealous prosecutor, they can point at how they are incented, and that both the system are supposed to put the rules on them and the jury make the actual decision.
Each person in the process only has a small piece of the accountability and can point at other parts someone has.
Similarly for military actions — soldiers are told it’s not their job to ask questions about lawful orders. Officers above them, also, as they plan the actions for the soldiers. By the time you get up to people who are the policy makers issuing the edicts, they’re so far removed that their world is nothing but politics and pandering and remote views, so that things like ‘we can’t choose not to have that conflict, our honor is at stake!’ and such make sense.
A policymaker without the figures below to carry out the orders is just a loudmouth, but the system is designed so that everyone involved can point at others — the president at the public.
And there’s that gap between the guy on his couch saying ‘if our president doesn’t wipe them out he’s an idiot’ and the people actually pointing guns at other human beings and killing.
Not many people take a bigger picture look at what’s right and wrong — even if, for example, people who ‘just follow orders’ can’t help be see the harm and then have long-term guilt and PTSD.
There’s no easy answer to this.
If we could break up the systems and make each person more completely responsible for actions, we could improve one thing, while breaking far more. There is power in organization, and that support of approach — so appealing to anarchists — simply leads to new tyranny, because that’s what is rewarding.
And that’s why we’re stuck with a least-evils sort of compromise, in which far too much that is immoral happens — but less than could happen. The more people who are the more responsible to get informed, to have values and empathy, to try to improve policies, the better things will go. But they’ll always be far less than needed to prevent great harms.
And so, we’ll continue to have these complex distributed systems created that spread out moral choices and accountability where the system does what individuals would not.
It’s tempting to want to look for easy answers. I mentioned that anarchy doesn’t work. We could look at Nazi Germany and how one person could spread wrongdoing down a hierarchy, and think ‘if we could just get rid of that one person, get power distributed to at least a large committee of people, it’d be less likely to have bad things happen’. Except we can look at that, too — the communists had politburos, even our Congress now run by Republicans — how much of a check are they against party wrongdoing? Almost none.
So no easy solutions here — but I think it’s helpful to understand the problem more, and watch out for unintended consequences of creating powerful systems that bring these problems.
Take the CIA, for example — it was created with all kinds of limited scope and caution, its creator President Truman wanting it to only report intelligence.
Under the terrible and ambitious Alan Dulles, it quickly wormed its away around all of those limitations and made the intelligence function an asterisk to its new real mission, operations.
It developed all kinds of capabilities for global actions from empowering dictators to kill citizens fighting for freedom, to coups, to propaganda and much more — all in the name of ‘national interest’, a mission mindset that eventually led some of its leaders to think in terms of feeling they could be justified supporting the assassination of American leaders they felt were a ‘danger to the country’, and with a history of actually violating the orders of presidents for that purpose.
This is why so much evil is linked to the phrase, ‘just doing my job’ (or the movie cliche, about to shoot someone, ‘it’s not personal, it’s business’).
In short, selfish goals like making money and seizing power have great resources behind them, while morals are reduced to lies in propaganda to justify wrongdoing. “No, no, we liberated them!”
The counter to this is, for better or worse, people behaving morally and organizing opposition — what most are interested in on this site, and good for them.
If nothing else, perhaps this diary can be a bit of a morale boost for the cause reminding that they’re on the right side. And let’s try to help the other side understand the morality issues better.
When we can, we get things like the idealism such as in our pledge of allegiance about ‘liberty and justice for all’ that were a bad joke when it was adopted and still too often violated.
Let’s remember to judge systems by results, not intent and piecemeal justifications.
The Vietnam war was an indictment of our warmaking processes- inadequately addressed by the War Power Act.
The Great recession was an indictment of our regulator processes, inadequately addressed by Dodd-Frank.
Police violence against blacks had little progress when each incident was addressed alone, but looking at the national picture has led to awareness of a need for improvement.
Almost no one supported these systems doing wrong — but each step of their doing so had ‘justifications’ looked at piece by piece.
Politicians, by their nature, rarely have time to consider bigger picture issues and solutions — they’re driven, when they come up for air from fundraising, by day to day political incidents and opinions.
Tweak this, tweak that, explain this, explain that, to keep the people — by which of course I mean donors first, then voters — happy.
This is why our government is so haphazard. Our very founding was opposed by the founding fathers for many years, as they instead tried to get a concession here and there from the crown, and failed, until finally events led to the revolution. The FBI was opposed by Congress when introduced as a dangerous ‘secret police for for the president to abuse’.
We now look pretty positively on entering WWI and WWII — both strongly opposed by the citizens at the time, while Vietnam had pretty broad support (as did Iraq, after a sales pitch).
I’ve already reviewed how the government was very cautious creating the CIA, all for nothing.
So, there are no simple answers to any of this. But it’s just good to understand the history and the issues more and how the law of unintended consequences will be on the books after the ACA.
To come full circle, we need to encourage citizens to take more moral responsibility. To look not only at the innocent life possibly saved by trump’s ban on refugees — but how many innocents the ban will kill and how much suffering it will cause. People are too often led around by pandering to this or that selfish little interest, not looking at the larger impacts.
Some time ago, I made a list of questions to determine whether you are right-wing or left-wing.
The first question was, are you a citizen of the world first and nation second, or nation first and world second?
Sorry for rambling, and hope it had some benefit.