196 'Inwards a Sociological Theory of Morality

stories of the four officials manning the notorious Jewish Desk (D III) at the German Foreign Ministry. He found two of them satisfied with their jobs, while two others preferred transfer to other tasks.

Both were successful in eventually getting out of D HI, but while they were there they performed their duties meticulously. They did not openly object to the job but worked covertly and quietly for their transfer; keeping their records clean was their top priority. Whether zealously or reluctantly, the fact remain's that all four worked efficiently ... They kept the machine moving, and the most ambitious and unscrupulous among them gave it an additional push.²⁵

The task-splitting and the resulting separation of moral mini-communities from the ultimate effects of the operation achieves the distance between the perpetrators and the victims of cruelty which reduces, or eliminates, the counter-pressure of moral inhibitions. The right physical and functional distance cannot be attained, however, all along the bureaucratic chain of command. Some among the perpetrators must meet the victims face-to-face, or at least must be so close to them as to be unable to avoid, or even to suppress, visualizing the effects their actions have upon time. Another method is needed to assure the right psychological distance even in the absence of the physical or the functional ones. Such a method is provided by a specifically modern form of authority - expertise.

The essence of expertise is the assumption that doing things properly requires certain knowledge, that such knowledge is distributed unevenly, that some persons possess more of it than others, that those who possess it ought to be in charge of doing things, and that being in charge places upon them the responsibility for how things are being done. In fact, the responsibility is seen as vested not in the experts, but in the skills they represent. The institution of expertise and the associated stance towards social action closely approximate the notorious Saint-Simon's ideal (enthusiastically endorsed by Marx) of the 'administration of things, not people'; the actors serve as mere agents of knowledge, as bearers of the know-how', and their personal responsibility rests entirely in representing knowledge properly, that is in doing things according to the 'state of the art', to the best of what extant knowledge can offer. For those who do not possess the know-how, responsible action means following the advice of the experts. In the process, personal responsi­bility dissolves in the abstract authority of technical know-how.

Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality 197

Browning quotes at length, the memo prepared by a technical expert Willy Just in respect of the technical improvement of the gas vans. Just proposed that the company assembling the vans should shorten the loading space: the existing vans could not negotiate the difficult Russian terrain fully loaded, so too much carbon monoxide was needed to fill the remaining empty space, and the whole operation took too much time and lost considerably in its potential efficiency:

A shorter, fully loaded truck could operate much more quickly. A shortening of the rear compartment would not disadvantageously affect the weight balance, overloading the front axle, because actually a correction in the weight distribution takes place auto­matically through the fact that the cargo in the struggle toward the back door during the operation always is preponderantly located there'. Because the connecting pipe was quickly rusted through the 'fluids', the gas should be introduced from above, not below. To facilitate cleaning, an eight- to twelve-inch hole should be made in the floor and provided with a cover opened from outside. The floor should be slightly inclined, and the cover equipped with a small sieve. Thus all 'fluids' would flow to the middle, the 'thin fluids' would exit even during operation, and thicker fluids' could be hosed out afterwards.²⁶

AH inverted commas are Browning's; Just did not seek nor use knowingly metaphors or euphemisms, his was the straightforward, down-to-earth, language of technology. As an expert in the truck construction, he was indeed trying to cope with the movement of the cargo, not with the human beings struggling for breath; with thick and thin fluids, not with human excreta and vomit. The fact that the load consisted of people about to be murdered and losing control over their bodies, did not detract from the technical challenge of the problem. This fact had anyway to be translated first into the neutral language of car-production technology before it could turn into a 'problem' to be 'resolved'. One wonders wherher a retranslation was ever attempted by those who read Just's memo and undertook to implement the technical instructions it contained.

For Milgram's guinea pigs, the problem' was the experiment set and administered by the scientific experts. Milgram's experts saw to it that the expert-led actors should, unlike the workers of the Sodomka factory for whom Just's' memo was destined, entertain no doubts as to the suffering their actions were causing, that there should be no chance for a

198 Towards a Sociological I"henry of Morality

I did not know' excuse. What Milgram's experiment has proved in the end is the power of expertise and its capacity to triumph over moral drives. Moral people can be driven into committing immoral acts even if they know (or believe) that the acts are immoral - providing that they are convinced that the experts (people who, by definition, know something they themselves do not know) have defined their actions as necessary. After all, most actions in our society are not legitimized by the discussion of their objectives, but by the advice or instruction offered by the people in the know.