I have been thinking about people’s moral horizons lately, and how one of the big differences between good people and bad people is how large their moral horizon is.

Let me give you an example.

Say you’re the CEO of a big sociopathic corporation. You sign off on a plan for one of your products that, because it uses a cheaper part, you know damned well will kill between 100-500 people but will save $5 per unit. You sign it because the lawyers say it will be cheaper to settle the wrongful death lawsuits than it will be to use a more expensive part.

By most people’s standards, what you just did is monstrous. Horrible. They can’t imagine how anyone could be so callous.

But look again. What did you actually do.

You went to a room with a bunch of people you know and work with all the time and you signed a piece of paper. That’s it. You signed it because people told you it was a good idea and you are a popular CEO precisely because you have a knack for agreeing with everyone. You signed it because you are pretty sure it will result in more money for you in the long run. And you signed it because like everyone else in this crazy world, you try to do what it expected for you.

You will never see the people you have just killed. They are a number, a statistic, an abstraction. You don’t even know who it will be. So these people have no faces, no names, no identities to you. They are just a range of numbers, and that can’t possibly hold as much weight in your mind as the immediate issues of doing what you are told, getting all the money you can, and doing what is expected of you.

And at the end of the day, you will still be a wealthy person with a lifestyle that tells you how special and important you are, and a very important sounding job that really impresses the boys at the club.

You can think this way precisely because your moral horizons are very close. You don’t really think about or connect with anything outside your immediate, personal life. You leave those abstruse abstractions to someone else. You are a businessman, not a social worker!

So the real crime that leads to such monstrous acts is not pure evil, but merely the act of keeping your moral horizons small. And that is an action people don’t even know they are doing. We are not, usually, aware of how our moral horizons expand and contract.

That’s how people can do damned near anything and feel no guilt, or at least, not nearly enough to keep you from doing it. That CEO probably felt a little guilt and a certain amount of pity for those faceless people who will die as a result of your signature. After all, he’s not a monster. But none of that is nearly as important as doing what is expected of him so he can keep feeling important and powerful as the CEO, and make a lot of money in the process, which makes your wife happy.

The thing that opens the door to evil, then, is not some melodramatic decision to devote yourself to coldblooded evil, but the simple act of deciding not to think about that kind of thing.

Even some of history’s greatest monsters have used this technique. A Nazi commandant orders a group of Jewish prisoners to be worked to death. But what did he really do? He signed a piece of paper and left the rest to someone else because that is all his job required of him.

Even the guards who gassed the Jews at Auschwitz could use this technique. We think we cannot imagine how these men lived with themselves afterwards. But what did they really do? They did a little plumbing then pushed a button. They didn’t have to be in the same room as their victims. Afterwards, they still got to go home to their wife and children and live a normal life. And they can just tell themselves that they didn’t make the decision to kill the Jews.

They were just following orders.

That is why the 20th century saw the birth of the idea of total personal responsibility. The Nuremberg Defense dies a little more with each passing day. We demand that people be held responsible for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, no matter how divorced by time and space they are from the consequences.

That Nazi guard knew what he was doing would kill Jews. That CEO knew people would die as a result of his signature. That Nazi commandant was fully aware of what the consequences of that work order would be.

Therefore, we hold them rightfully responsible for those actions, no matter how they “tried not to think about that kind of thing” and were “just following orders”.

It could be argued that some people have no choice but to have narrow, close moral horizons because they are just plain not smart enough to have anything else. And that is definitely a possibility.

But I think there are far more people who deliberately do not even try because they know that looking at the real, full consequences of their actions would make them unhappy and be terribly inconvenient.

It might even lead to risking their social position and comfortable lifestyle, and why should someone do that for someone they don’t even know?

So they keep their moral horizons very close, only ever thinking about their immediate lives, and letting other people deal with the messy bits.

This is how you can have an entire organization that does awful things all the time, but every person in that organization can deny responsibility. Who decided to kill those people?

Well, everybody, really. In other words… nobody.

That’s why the real heroes are the whistle-blowers, the Edward Snowdens of the world, who are willing to throw away everything in order to do the right thing.

It’s sad how few there are.

That’s all from me for today, folks! See you tomorrow.