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I mean as a practical matter, removing the moral elements, this is how the world tends to work. Most of us meekly follow along with the powers that be. We might grouse about it, but we’ll do it because most of us have remarkably little power in our lives. If you have to at least pretend to love big brother (in whatever form it takes) just be a you have to eat, keep a roof over your head and so on. If you have to feed your and especially your kids, you’ll give your consent to a lot of things that if they were proposed without the stick you’d be opposed to. I don’t think anyone in a cold state would agree that any given medical procedure should be a condition for getting into a store or restaurant. But if you know you’ll be fired if you don’t check the vaccine card, you’ll check the card.
There’s a gulf between mitigating circumstances and true innocence. The OP relies on the latter, because otherwise, there would be something left to make it down the chain. Real life has lots of mitigating factors and a shortage of absolutes.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, because I would and do endorse mandatory vaccination. The MMR vaccine is my preferred example, but I’ll still bite the bullet on most of the original COVID restrictions.
For what it’s worth, I had coworkers who outright quit before the government-contractor mandate was suspended. Mostly older ones who were both very right-wing and very close to retirement.
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The man who submits to undue authority is himself making a moral choice. His slavery is a choice.
One's life or that of one's family's may be to steep a price to pay for one to oppose evil, but it is nevertheless a bargain one strikes. A bargain no different from all other such compromises in nature.
Most conceptions of morality still require you to act right under difficult circumstances. Arguably, morality is only useful under such.
The virtuous man does not free himself from the burden of conscience at the first sign of a cost, and the heroic man does not do so even in the face of annihilation.
The man who does the wrong thing enthusiastically is a bad man. The man who does the right thing at great cost is a hero. Somebody who does what he can, when he can, is just a man.
I look up to people who do brave things, but I don't think it's fair to look down on people for not being superhuman. That said, people should exert what agency they do have - I just find the philosophy implied by "Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit." a bit too yeschaddish for my tastes.
The problem with this idea is what Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil. The idea that one can do evil without being evil.
In modern societies, acts, a fortiori evil acts, are parts of large, complex, systems and institutions where a whole bunch of collective actors do small reasonably small evils that ultimately culminate in large atrocities for which no single human can be held accountable.
This state of affairs evidently requires a stricter sense of morality to prevent those large atrocities than one that accepts the small pragmatic transgressions of people whose interactions do not have reach beyond their immediate circles.
Some solve this problem by encouraging strong militancy in everyone ("you can't be neutral in a moving train", etc). Others, like myself, prefer to require of everyone the ethical discipline that used to be reserved for kings. But one's responsibility has to be established somehow.
This is a well-written rebuttal, and I understand your position. To be frank, I do not believe that we can meaningfully address this. It’s just a feature of how humans are, and how they behave in groups. We can deal with individual monsters (serial killers, rapists, child-killers etc. but we cannot bring down large-scale tyrannies until they’ve already begun to decay. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t want to condemn people for merely being a human and doing what humans do.
That said, the minimum I demand is this:
DON’T be enthusiastic. DON’T help. Don’t go along with things unless you can’t get out without significant cost, and to the extent that you must participate, do so as reluctantly and inefficiently as you can get away with.
In the context of Nazi germany, you don’t have to be the guy smuggling Jews out of Germany (although good on you if you are) but don’t you dare be the one who tips off the gestapo for giggles or to get a promotion. In the context of the modern day, don’t go along with cancellation campaigns against your friends, and if you have to join in with some stuff don't look like you enjoy it. In short, if you must commit small evils, keep them as small as possible.
Ideally, this leads to a slow spreading understanding that all of this is bullshit that nobody wants. Enforcing it gets harder and the bounds of acceptable heresy grow until the thing falls over. It’s slow and unsatisfying but I don’t think there’s a realistic alternative. We (conservatives) failed to nip this stuff in the bud and now it’s too late for anything except attrition. And keeping the memory of sanity for when it’s possible for it to grow again.
I believe this is the attitude invoked in the CIA’s field manual for sabotage:
https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2022/05/06/cia-sabotage-manual-for-organizations/
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Why is that a problem? If most people are merely banal gears in the mechanism of evil, then they are indeed not particularly responsible. The argument is smuggling in the assumption that there aren't other humans who are actually are evil running the thing... but there are. Both the Nazis and the Stalinists had plenty of evil people with a lot more agency than even Prison Camp Guard #1629, let alone Private Soldier Schmidt/Kuznetsov.
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He’s the weakest man, a leaf in the wind. He is indistinguishable from an amoral man. If he’s lucky, he’s on the good side, his self-interest happens to coincide with morality, so he’s good. If he’s on the bad side, he’s evil.
Sure, people are weak, and you can’t damn most of humanity for weakness. But the question remains: should one carry out the immoral order/fight an immoral war? You “commend them for [fleeing or disobeying]”, and I agree. @FCfromSSC and friends’ position, as I understand it, is that they should obey, out of ‘honor’, duty to their homes, oaths, loyalty to their superiors, because ‘obedience is good’, etc.
Secondly, even if we agree that people are weak, we can expect more or less of them. At the extreme end (and I do see it on themotte sometimes), their hands are metaphorically tied when they face the slightest cost, and their wills are inert.
He is almost indistinguishable from an amoral man. But the almost is important, I think :)
I expand a bit on immoral orders here: https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/165384?context=8#context
In short, yes, I won’t look down on you for following explicit orders but I will for showing initiative or being enthusiastic.
With respect to war it gets a bit more complicated, I think. If it’s an offensive war and you aren’t conscripted, then obviously don’t help unless you have no choice (as above). If you are conscripted, or it’s a defensive war, then it’s tricky because defending your comrades or your people is something that I would regard as morally good. I don’t think that I would regard a nazi as evil for shooting me or my friend in battle, even though to some extent he is implicitly defending Auschwitz. Obviously he’s still the enemy and I’ll shoot him if I can but that’s pure practicality. When I talked about fleeing or disobeying, I meant the guard in the concentration camps not the guy who sells his wife’s friend bacon.
Basically it would be case-by-case.
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Any combination of those, or even not. It remains my opinion that it there are good moral grounds for people to choose either compliance or resistance, that both options can be backed by good reasons and do not categorically deserve condemnation. That most people are, in @Corvos' words above, just men, and we gain nothing by holding them to the standards of heroes. Of course one can still condemn outright villains.
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There are orders which cannot be carried out honorably, and those should never be followed. It seems theoretically possible that there could be an entire war that was similarly dishonorable, but I can't think of an actual example.
You've said that you would rather the general on the other side of a war torture prisoners to death for sport rather than fight with honor. That is madness.
I didn't say that. I said one can, and should, avoid heaping evil upon evil. I said it would be better if the evil general was dishonorable coward and a drunkard rather than a competent general, like it is better to be a german thief than an upstanding nazi baker.
You're not answering the question. Did lee, rommel and the grunts make the right decision to fight for their count(r)y ?
You think being a Nazi thief is better than being a Nazi baker, because the evil the thief does harms the Nazi government and the good the Baker does serves it.
If a nazi general tortures and murders prisoners, and this reduces the morale and thus effectiveness of his own men and increases the morale and thus effectiveness of the soldiers on the other side, would that not be better, by your lights, than the same general treating prisoners with respect and decency, if doing so created the opposite effect? In this scenario, the torturer, like the thief, harms his government, does he not? And if he harms his own government, you should prefer him over an otherwise identical honorable man for the same reason you prefer the thief to the baker.
If heaping evil on evil should reduce the effectiveness of the evil to resist the good, would you be for it?
I don't know. I do know that they didn't obviously make the wrong one, the way the troops working the camps did. What they did was not more obviously evil than fighting for America or Britain.
The moral system you argue for is exactly how evil is reliably heaped on evil. Your blindness to this fact is exactly why that outcome is inevitable.
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I also think that the sheer size of the US, and its initial consequent egalitarianism, created an expectation of personal agency that just doesn't work in crowded societies with fairly rigid social structures.
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Right. You explain it to them, because I’m not getting through. Doing the right thing isn’t supposed to be costless. Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit.
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