Technology moralized

One of the most remarkable features of the bureaucratic system of authority is, however, the shrinking probability that the moral oddity of one's action will ever be discovered, and once discovered, made into a painful moral dilemma. In a bureaucracy, moral concerns of the functionary are drawn back from focusing on the plight of the objects of action. They are forcefully shifted in another direction - the job to be done and the excellence with which it is performed. It does not matter that much how the 'targets' of action fare and feel. It does matter, however, how smartly and effectively the actor fulfils whatever he has been told to fulfil by his superiors. And on this latter question, the superiors are the most competent, natural authority. This circumstance further strengthens the grip in which the superiors hold their subordinates. In addition to giving orders and punishing for insubordination, they also pass moral judgements - the only moral judge­ments that count for the individual's self-appreciation.

The commentators have repeatedly stressed that the results of Milgram's experiments could be influenced by the conviction that the action was required in the interest of science - undoubtedly a high, rarely contested, and generally morally placed authority. What is not pointed out, however, is that more than any other authority science is allowed by public opinion to practise the otherwise ethically odious principle of the end justifying the means. Science serves as the fullest epitome of the dissociation between the ends and the means which serves as the ideal or rational organization of human conduct: it is the ends which are subject to moral evaluation, not the means. To the expressions of moral anguish, the experimenters kept replying with a bland, routine and insipid formula: 'No permanent damage to the tissue will be caused.' Most of the participants were only too glad to accept this consolation a

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preferred not to think through the possibilities which the formula left undiscussed (most conspicuously, the moral virtue of temporary damage to the tissue, or simply of the agony of pain). What mattered to them was the reassurance that someone on high' had considered what is and what is not ethically acceptable.

Inside the bureaucratic system of authority, language of morality acquires a new vocabulary. It is filled with concepts like loyalty, duty, discipline - all pointing to superiors as the supreme object of moral concern and, simultaneously, the top moral authority. They all, in fact, converge: loyalty means performance of one's duty as defined by the code of discipline. As they converge and reinforce each other, they grow in power as moral precepts, to the point where they can disable and push aside all other moral considerations - above all, ethical issues foreign to the self-reproductory preoccupations of the authority system. They appropriate, harness to the interest of bureaucracy and monopolize all the usual socio-psychical means of moral self-regulation. As Milgram puts it, 'the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.... Superego shifts from an evaluation of the goodness or badness of the acts to an assessment of how well or poorly one is functioning in the authority system.⁷

What follows is that contrary to a widespread interpretation, a bureaucratic system of authority does not militate against moral norms as such, and does not cast them aside as essentially irrational, affective pressures which contradict the cool rationality of a truly efficient action. Instead, it deploys them - or, rather, re-deploys them. Bureaucracy's double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral significance of non-technical issues. It is the technology of action, not its substance, which is subject to assessment as good or bad, proper or improper, right or wrong. The conscience of the actor tells him to perform well and prompts him to measure his own righteousness by the precision with which he obeys the organizational rules and his dedication to the task as defined by the superiors. What kept at bay the other, 'old-fashioned' conscience in the subjects of Milgram's experiments, and effectively arrested their impulse to break off, was the substitute conscience, put together by the experimenters out of the appeals to the 'interests of research' or the needs of the experiment', and the warnings about the losses which its untimely interruption would cause. In the case of Milgram's experiments, substitute conscience had been put together hastily (no individual

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experiment lasted more than one hour), and yet proved amazingly effective.

There is little question that the substitution of morality of technology for the morality of substance was made much easier than it otherwise could be by the shifting of balance between the subject's closeness to the targets of his action, and his closeness to the source of authority of the action. With astonishing consistency, Milgrams experiments turned evidence of the positive dependence between the effectiveness of the substitution, and the remoteness (technical more than physical) of the subject from the ultimate effects of his actions. One experiment, for instance, showed that when 'the subject was not ordered to push the trigger that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subsidiary act... before another subject actually delivered the shock ... 37 out of 40 adults ... continued to the highest shock level' (one marked on the control desk 'very dangerous - XX'). Milgram's own conclusion is that it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action.⁸ To an intermediate link in the chain of evil action, his own operations appear technical, so to speak, on both ends. The immediate effect of his action is the setting of another technical task - doing something to the electrical apparatus or to the sheet of paper on the desk. The causal link between his action and the suffering of the victim is dimmed and can be ignored with relatively little effort. Thus 'duty' and 'discipline' face no serious competitor.