Social production of distance

Being inextricably tied to human proximity, morality seems to conform to the law of optical perspective. It looms large and thick close to the eye. With the growth of distance, responsibility for the other shrivels, moral dimensions of the object blur, till both reach the vanishing point and disppear from view.

This quality of moral drive seems independent of the social order which supplies the framework of interaction. What does depend on that order is the pragmatic effectiveness of moral predispositions; then

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capacity to control human actions, to set limits to the harm inflicted on the other, to draw the parameters in which all intercourse tends to be contained. The significance and clanger - of moral indifference becomes particularly acute in our modern, rationalized, industrial technologically proficient society because in such a society human action can be effective at a distance, and at a distance constantly growing with the progress of science, technology and bureaucracy. In such a society, the effects of human action reach far beyond the 'vanishing point' of moral visibility. The visual capacity of moral drive, limited as it is by the principle of proximity, remains constant, while the distance at which human action may be effective and consequential, and thus also the number of people who may be affected by such action, grow rapidly. The sphere of interaction influenced by moral drives is dwarfed by comparison with the expanding volume of actions excepted from its interference.

The notorious success of modern civilization in substituting rational criteria of action for all other, and by the modern definition irrational criteria (moral evaluations looming large among the latter), was in decisive measure conditioned by the progress in remote control', that is in extending the distance at which human action is able to bring effects. It is the remote, barely visible targets of action which are free from moral evaluation; and so the choice of action which affects such targets is free from limitations imposed by moral drive.

As Milgram's experiments dramatically demonstrated, the silencing of the moral urge and the suspension of moral inhibitions is achieved precisely through making the genuine (though often unknown to the actor) targets of action 'remote and barely visible , rather than through an overt anti-moral crusade, or an indoctrination aimed at substituting an alternative set of rules for the old moral system. The most obvious example of the technique which places the victims out of sight, and hence renders them inaccessible to moral assessment, are modern weapons. The progress of the latter consisted mostly in eliminating to an ever-growing extent the chance of face-to-face combat, of committing the act of killing in its human-size, commonsensical meaning, with weapons separating and distantiating, rather than confronting and bringing together the warring armies, the drill of the weapon-operators in suppressing their moral drives, or direct attacks on 'old-fashioned morality, lose much of their former importance, as the use of weapons seems to bear merely an abstract-intellectual relation to the moral integrity of the users. In the words of Philip (.aputo, war ethos seems to

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