194 Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality

be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons.'²² As long as one does not see the practical effects of one's action, or as long as one cannot unambiguously relate what one saw to such innocent and minuscule acts of one's own as pushing button or switching a pointer, a moral conflict is unlikely to appear, or likely to appear in muted form. One can think of the invention of artillery able to.hit a target invisible to those who operate the guns as a symbolic starting point of modern warfare and the concomitant irrelevancy of moral factors: such artillery allows the destruction of the target while aiming the gun in an entirely different direction.

The accomplishment of modern weaponry can be taken as a metaphor for a much more diversified and ramified process of the social production of distance. John Lachs has located the unifying characteristics of the many manifestations of this process in the introduction, on a massive scale, of the mediation of action, and of the intermediary man - one who 'standsJsetween me and my action, making it impossible forme to experience it directly'. . . . .

The" distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our

Ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of

the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and

our acts ... As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions --§--

become motions without consequence. With the consequences out -|~

of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without .i

ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility ... _j_

[It is extremely difficult] to see how our own actions, through i

their remote effects, contributed to causing misery. It is no cop out f

to think oneself blameless and condemn society. It is the natural -i result of large-scale mediation which inevitably leads to monstrous jT~

Ignorance.25 ------- - ....... ,_j-

Once the action has been mediated, the action's ultimate effects are j_

located outside that relatively narrow area of intercourse inside which __k_

moral drives retain their regulating force. Obversely, acts contained within that morally pregnant area are for most of the participants or !

their witnesses innocuous enough not to come under moral censure. T

Minute division of labour, as well as the sheer length of the chain of acts f ~

that mediate between the initiative and its tangible effects, emancipates most - however decisive - constituents of the collective venture from moral significance and scrutiny. They are still subject to analysis and

Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 19^

evaluation - but criteria are technical, not moral. 'Problems' call for better, more rational designs, not for soul-searching. The actors occupy themselves with the rational task of finding better means fof the given -and partial - end, not with a moral task of the evaluation of the ultimate objective (of which they have but a vague idea, or for which they do not

feel responsible).. . .

. In his detailed account of the history of invention and deployment of the infamous gas, van, the initial Nazi solution to the technicaj task of fast, neat and cheap mass murder, Christopher R. Browning offers the following insight into the psychological world of the people involved.

Specialists whose expertise normally had nothing to do with mass murder suddenly found themselves a minor cog in the machinery of destruction. Occupied with procuring, dispatching, maintaining, and repairing motor vehicles, their expertise and facilities were suddenly pressed into the service of mass murder when they were charged with producing gas vans ... What disturbed them was the criticism and complaints about faults in their product. The shortcomings of the gas vans were a negative reflection on their workmanship that had to be remedied. Kept Fully abreast of the problems arising in the" field, they strove for ingenious technical adjustments to rnakerheir product more efficient and acceptable to its operators ... Their greatest concern seemed to be that they might be deemed inadequate to their assigned task.²⁴

Under the conditions of bureaucratic division of labour, 'the other' inside the circle of proximity where moral responsibility rules supreme is a workmate, whose successful coping with his own task depends on the actor's application to his part of the job; the immediate superior, whose occupational standing depends on the co-operation of his sub­ordinates; and a person immediately down the hierarchy line, who expects his tasks to be clearly defined and made feasible. In dealing with such others, that moral responsibility which proximity tends to generate takes the form of loyalty to the organization - that abstract articulation of the network of face-to-face interactions. In the form of organizational loyalty, the actors' moral drives may be deployed for morally abject purposes, without sapping the ethical propriety of intercourse within that area of proximity which the moral drives cover. The actors may go on sincerely believing in their own integrity; indeed, their behaviour does conform to the moral standards held in the only region in which other standards remained operative. Browning investigated the personal