Материал: Bauman.Zygmunt..modernity and holocaust, polity press 1989

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no moral issue here. Of course the next shock is more powerful, but only slightly so. Indeed every shock is only slightly more powerful than the last. The quality of the subject's action changes from something entirely blameless to something unconscionable, but by degrees. Where exactly should the subject stop? At what point is the divide between these two kinds of action crossed? How is the subject to know? It is easy to see that there must be a line; it is not so easy to see where that line ought to be.

The most important factor in the process, however, seems to be the following:

if the subject decides that giving the next shock is not permissible, then, since it is (in every case) only slightly more intense than the last one, what was the justification for administering the last shock he just gave? To deny the propriety of the step he is about to take is to undercut the propriety of the step he just took, and this undercuts the subject's own moral position. The subject is trapped by his gradual commitment to the experiment.⁶

In the course of a sequential action, the actor becomes a slave of his own past actions. This hold seems much stronger than other binding factors. It can certainly outlast the factors which at the start of the sequence seemed much more important and played a truly decisive role. In particular, the unwillingness to re-evaluate (and condemn) one's own past conduct will still remain a powerful, and ever more powerful, stimulus to plod on, long after the original commitment to the cause' had all but petered out. Smooth and imperceptible passages between the steps lure the actor into a trap; the trap is the impossibility of quitting without revising and rejecting the evaluation of one's own deeds as right or at least innocent. The trap is, in other words, a paradox: one cannot get clean without blackening oneself. To hide filth, one must forever draggle in the mud.

This paradox might be a moving factor behind the well-known phenomenon of accomplices' solidarity. Nothing binds people to each other stronger than shared responsibility for an act that they admit is criminal. Commonsensically, we explain this kind of solidarity by the natural wish to escape punishment; the game theorists' analyses of the famous prisoner's dilemma' also teach us that (providing no one confuses the stakes) to assume that the rest of the team will remain solidary is the most rational decision any member may make. We may

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wonder, however, to what extent the accomplices' solidarity is brought about and reinforced by the fact that only the members of the team which originally engaged in the sequential action are likely to conspire to defuse the paradox, and by common consent offer some credibility to the belief in the legitimacy of past action in spite of the growing evidence to the contrary. I suggest, therefore, that another 'binding factor' named by Milgram, situational obligations, is, to a large extent, a derivative of the first, the paradox of sequential action.

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.

Free-floating responsibility

The system of authority in Milgram's experiments was simple and contained few tiers. The subject's source of authority - the experimenter - was the topmost manager of the system, though the subject could be unaware of this (from his point of view, the experimenter himself acted as an intermediary; his power was delegated by a higher, generalized and impersonal authority of science' or research). Simplicity of the experimental situation rebounded in the straightforwardness of the findings. It transpired that the subject vested the authority for his action with the experimenter; and the authority indeed resided in the experimenter's orders - the final authority, one that did not require authorization or endorsement by the persons located further up in the hierarchy of power. The focus, therefore, was on the subject's readiness

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to renounce his own responsibility for what he had done, and particularly for what he was about to do. For this readiness, the act of endowing the experimenter with the right to demand things which the subject would not do on his own initiative, even things which he rather would not do at all, was decisive. Perhaps this endowment stemmed from an assumption that by some obscure logic, unknown and unfathomable to the subject, the things the experimenter asked the subject to perform were right even if they seemed wrong to the uninitiated; perhaps no thought was given to such logic, as the will of the authorized person did not need any legitimation in the eyes of the subject: the right to command and the duty to obey were sufficient. What we do know for sure, thanks to Milgram, is that the subjects of his experiments went on committing deeds which they recognized as cruel solely because they were commanded to do so by the authority they accepted and vested with the ultimate responsibility for their actions. These studies confirm an essential fact: the decisive factor is the response to authority, rather than the response to the particular order to administer shock. Orders originating outside of authority lose all force ... It is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.'' Milgram's experiments revealed the mechanism of shifting respons­ibility in its pure, pristine and elementary form.

Once responsibility has been shifted away by the actor's consent to the superior's right to command, the actor is cast in an agentic state¹" - a condition in which he sees himself as carrying out another person's wishes. Agentic state is the opposite of the state of autonomy. (As such, it is virtually synonymous with heteronomy, though it conveys in addition an implication of the self-definition of the actor, and it locates the external sources of the actor's behaviour - the forces behind his other-directedness - precisely in a specific point of an institutionalized hierarchy.) In the agentic state, the actor is fully tuned to the situation as defined and monitored by the superior authority: this definition of the situation includes the description of the actor as the authority's agent.

The shifting of responsibility is, however, indeed an elementary act, a single unit or building block in a complex process. It is a phenomenon that takes place in the narrow space stretched between one member of the system of authority and another, an actor and his immediate superior. Because of the simplicity of their structure, Milgram s experiments could not trace further consequences of such responsibility shifting. In particular, having intentionally focused the microscope on basic cells of complex organisms, they could not posit organismic'

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questions, such as what the bureaucratic organization is likely to be once the responsibility shitting is occurring continuously, and at all levels of its hierarchy.

We may surmise that the overall effect of such a continuous and ubiquitous responsibility shifting would be a free-floating responsibility a situation in which each and every member of the organization is convinced, and would say so if asked, that he has been at some else's beck and call, but the members pointed to by others as the bearers of responsibility would pass the buck to someone else again. One can say that the organization as a whole is an instrument to obliterate responsibility. The causal links in co-ordinated actions are masked, and the very fact of being masked is a most powerful factor of their effectiveness. Collective perpetuation of cruel acts is made all the easier by the fact that responsibility is essentially unpinnable', while every participant of these acts is convinced that it does reside with some proper authority'. This means that shirking responsibility is not just an after-the-fact stratagem used as a convenient excuse in case charges are made of the immorality, or worse still of illegitimacy, of an action; the free-floating, unanchored responsibility is the very condition of immoral or illegitimate acts taking place with obedient, or even willing participation of people normally incapable of breaking the rules of conventional morality. Free-floating responsibility means in practice that moral authority as such has been incapacitated without having been openly challenged or denied.

Pluralism of power and power of conscience

Like all experiments, Milgram's studies were conducted in an artificial, purposefully designed environment. It differed from the context of daily life in two important respects. First, the link of the subjects with the 'organization' (the research team and the university of which it was a part) was brief and ad hoc, and was known to be such in advance, the subjects were hired for one hour and one hour only. Second, in most experiments, the subjects were confronted with just one superior, and one who acted as a veritable epitome of single-mindedness and consistency, so that the subjects had to perceive of the powers that authorized their conduct as monolithic and totally certain as to the purpose and meaning of their action. Neither of the two conditions is frequently met in normal life. One needs to consider, therefore, whether

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and to what extent they might have influenced the subjects' behaviour in a way not to be expected under normal circumstances.

To start with the first of these points: the impact of authority so convincingly shown by Milgram would, if anything, have been more profound still were the subjects convinced of the permanence of their link with the organization the authority represented, or at least convinced that the chance of such permanence was real. Additional factors, absent for obvious reasons in the experiment, would then have entered the situation: factors like solidarity and a feeling of mutual duty (the I cannot let him down' feeling) which are likely to develop between members of a team staying together and solving shared problems over a long period of time, diffuse reciprocity (services offered freely to other members of the group, hoped, if only half-consciously, to be 'repaid' at some unspecified future time, or just resulting in a good disposition of a colleague or a superior which again might be of some unspecified use in the future), and most important of all, the routine (a fully habitualized behavioural sequence which renders calculation and choice redundant and hence makes the established patterns of action virtually unassailable even in the absence of further reinforcement). It seems most likely that these and similar factors will only add strength to the tendencies observed by Milgram: those tendencies stemmed from the exposure to a legitimate authority, and the factors listed above certainly add to that legitimacy, which can only increase over a span of time long enough to allow for the development of tradition and for the emergence of multifaceted informal patterns of exchange between members.

The second departure from ordinary conditions might have, however, influenced the observed reactions to authority in a way not to be expected in daily life. In the artificial conditions carefully controlled by Milgram, there was one source of authority, and one only, and no other frame of reference of an equal standing (or even, simply, another autonomous opinion) with which the subject could confront the command in order to put its validity to something like an objective test. Milgram was fully aware of the possibility of distortion that such unnaturally monolithic character of authority must carry. To reveal the extent of distortion, he added to the project a number of experiments in which the subjects were confronted with more than one experimenter, and the experimenters were instructed to disagree openly and argue about the command. The outcome was truly shattering: the slavish obedience observed in all other experiments vanished without trace. The subjects were no longer willing to engage in actions they did not like;