Moral injury, modern bureaucracy, and “just following orders”
Act as though responsibility does not diffuse.
One of a single-digit number of things of value I’ve gotten via my 2-year IB LnL HL course is the concept of moral injury (Wikip), which is the idea that one can sustain trauma from taking actions that one feels conflict with one’s moral compass. Much of the research and writing done on this topic pertains to the US military, even though many members of the military knew they were signing up to kill people, and willingly signed up anyway, and so one suspects they should have expected to feel bad about having killed people (although, yes, some but not all people who join the military are economically incentivized to do so).
However, I think moral injury can also occur in occupations that less directly involve killing humans. For starters, this paper discusses how animal shelter workers, who are probably a population somewhat selected for caring about animals, feel distressed because their jobs require them to continually kill animals. For instance, one anonymous shelter employee quoted in the paper describes experiences that sound like they could be depression: “I think it’s [animal euthanasia] made me an angry person. I want to be alone most of the time. I drink sometimes to numb the stress of the day. I eat and sleep more than I feel I need.” The rest of the paper bears this out with statistical evidence.
This article discusses the emotional harm low-level bureaucrats suffer from having to make so many decisions based on vague rules and having to allocate sparse time—both of which could shape the lives of the people they must serve, and cause great harm if misapplied. I’ve spoken to someone who worked at a California welfare agency and felt distressed by not being able to help everyone. In some cases, personal judgment is the bottleneck where one must reckon with morality; in some cases, the problem is that the underlying rules which must be applied are unjust and harmful. (In some cases, the problem is the stressful work environment.) I suspect that the stress of making choices that could harm people every day—while still wanting to not harm people—as well as following rules one perceives to be unjust (as with the animal shelter workers in the above paragraph) could in some cases qualify as moral injury.
Little Eichmanns are people who make atrocity possible by “just following orders”. When one “just follows orders”, it means that one acts to fulfil the letter of the law while not considering whether the law is just or moral, thus outsourcing one’s conscience to one’s superiors. In a sense, one is a cog in a machine, a box which receives input, applies a predictable and standardized function to it, and produces a mass-produced output.—I believe that in our modern industrial world there is a place for bureaucracy and standardization and cogs in machines, and I believe that our modern industrial world is beautiful and has made so many things possible and made so many people’s lives better. So I don’t think it would do to do away with bureaucracy and all the rest entirely.—But Little Eichmanns are reviled, and rightfully so, for outsourcing their consciences to their superiors.
US court judges must also “just follow” the law. To fulfil the job, one must not allow political considerations to interfere with one’s interpretation of what is legal or illegal, although measures like injunctions can soften the blow (for instance, in 2021, a federal judge ruled that the DACA program was illegal, but, acknowledging that ending the program would upend people’s lives, only (!) barred new applications). For judges, this means that one acts to interpret legality according to the law while not considering whether the law is just or moral, thus outsourcing one’s conscience to one’s superiors. In a sense, one is a cog in a machine, a box which receives input, applies a predictable and standardized function to it, and produces a mass-produced output. Yet judges are respected input-output boxes, and certain bureaucrats are vilified input-output boxes. Is this all about the law they are following—one held to be good, one bad?
It’s because of the tyranny of small decisions, as applied to governance.
(A similar problem: in the early days of the American republic, it was debated whether legislators should be impartial channels of their constituents’ desires or, even if doing so would contravene their constituents’ will, vote according to their convictions. If legislators voted according to their own beliefs, one would vote for a legislator based on eir beliefs. If legislators channelled constituents, then what’s the point of being a legislator anyway, and what would be the effect of having to vote for measures you actually disagree with? The Italian Five Star Movement is like this:—
The movement bases its principles on direct democracy as an evolution of representative democracy. The idea is that citizens will no longer delegate their power to parties (considered old and corrupted intermediates between the state and themselves) that serve the interests of lobby groups and financial powers. They will succeed only by creating a collective intelligence made possible by the Internet.[120] In order to go in this direction, the M5S chose its Italian and European parliamentary candidates through online voting by registered members of Beppe Grillo's blog.[124][125] Through an application called Rousseau reachable on the web,[126] the registered users of M5S discuss, approve or reject legislative proposals (submitted then in the Parliament by the M5S group). For example, the M5S electoral law was shaped through a series of online votes,[127] like the name of the M5S candidate for President of the Republic.[128]The choice to support the abolition of a law against immigrants was taken online by members of the M5S even if the final decision was against the opinions of Grillo and Casaleggio.[129]”
—(Emphasis mine.))
To “just follow orders” in good conscience, one must expect the rest of the machine/system which one is part of to be sound, because one must rely on the rest of it to check the parts one is not checking. To take a more anodyne example, say that a group of people are making a website or app. Perhaps one is responsible for writing code, one is responsible for writing page content, one is responsible for editing ideas, and one is responsible for proofreading. If all is going well, then the one who writes page content doesn’t need to worry about proofreading because ey can trust that the person who is responsible for it will do it. However, if the person responsible believes that every typo is a valid way of spelling a word, then the others will have to pick up the slack, because that element—that cog—has failed.
One cannot “just follow orders” when the rest of the system-machine is not sound. One should not follow orders from Nazis. When one is a gear in a sound system-machine, perhaps one may follow orders, but still one must be vigilant to see that those orders do not deteriorate into immoral orders when one isn’t looking. Act as though responsibility does not diffuse. Do not outsource your conscience to your superiors.