I am not suggesting that if all Jews in the camps had behaved in these ways, their fate would necessarily have been better. The predominant motivation to kill and abuse had become too strong by that time. The Nazis would simply have learned better discrimination; an ordinary human action would no longer have brought forth a human response. The overwhelming influence of the system and its consonance with the resocialized motivational system of individuals would have permitted nothing else.
Thus instances of kindness have limited significance. Life was cheap and the SS could grant favors and act kindly without coming into serious conflict with their dominant goals. Their family life is understandable in the same framework: the family environment activated different motives. Complex processes give rise to particular motives and actions. Variations in the behavior of the SS can be understood in the same way as in anyone else’s; for example, a driver may ignore a hitchhiker at one time and give him a ride at another time. An already-active motive limits attention or response to the environment.
While splitting of realms can develop into doubling, people tend toward integration. As they evolve, most perpetrators develop unitary selves by changes in their motives, world views, and beliefs and by achieving highly differentiated orientations to different groups of people.
Moral equilibration, choice, and responsibility
I have described a situation in which people who start with varying degrees of predisposition act increasingly destructively, changing along the way and contributing to the evolution of an increasingly destructive system. This does not exclude responsibility. Along the way, there are many opportunities for choice. Unfortunately, choosing often takes place with-out awareness or conscious deliberation. To make a true choice when facing a conflict between a motive and a moral value that prohibits the actions required a fulfill the motive, a person must be aware of the conflict. Then the person must bring in additonal considerations – further values and norms that tilt the balance in favor of moral restraint (or moral action) or reasons, rationalizations (reasons that would not seem valid to impartialoutside observers), and justifications that tilt the balance against moralvalues. This “work of choosing” places demands on cognitive processing and may involve intense feelings.
But many choices are made without awareness, either preconsciously or unconsciously. All of us have a wide range of moral values and rules at our disposal. Some have been superseded but remain in our repertoire and can be called forth. Some stand side by side, even though they are potentially contradictory. Facing a conflict between a nonmoral motive and a moral value, a person may reduce the conflict by moral equilibration, a shift to a different moral value or principle. For example, the moral principles that prohibit killing or harming other human beings are replaced by the principle of “social good,” defined as protection of the German nation from internal subversion and genetic contamination by Jews. Or loyalty and obedience to authority may become the relevant “moral” principles.
Although this can happen consciously, moral equilibration often occurs without awareness: a person automatically selects values and standards that allow the expression of the motive in action. A preconscious or unconscious equilibration circumvents moral conflict. As people progress along a continuum of destruction, moral equilibration becomes more automatic. Moral conflict can still be reawakened by such sights as a heap of dead naked bodies; Eichmann and Himmler both felt sick, overcome. I noted the Nazi doctors’ initial shock in Auschwitz. Such emotional and bodily reactions can serve as signals to the self, even in people who have moved to the stage of automatic (and not conscious) moral equilibration. However, by this time Eichmann’s, Himmler’s, and the Nazi doctors’ commitment to the Final Solution and their embeddedness in the Nazi group made a renewal of moral conflict or change in its modes of resolution unlikely.
Individual responsibility
In the progress toward genocide, there were many choice points for each Nazi. The responsibility of individuals is partly a function of the culture and society in which they live. A group can foster psychological and moral differentiation between the group and its members to different degrees. A man raised in the society of Mundurucú headhunters is socialized into behavior that might be judged immoral by outsiders. Many groups require males to kill designated enemies. To the extent a group completely socializes its members into such conduct, we cannot expect them to have a separate perspective or to question its conduct or their own.
But many groups, especially in the modern age, teach their members individual moral responsibility. To the extent that socialization clearly teaches this, it is reasonable to hold people responsible for their moral decisions and actions. However, there is usually ambiguous and conflicting instruction. Loyalty to the group is required and often defined as obedience to its standards and leaders. Loyalty and obedience are even taught as moral values. Part of the tragedy of Germany was that loyalty and obedience were exalted over individual moral responsibility.h
Another requirement for individual responsibility is self-awareness: awareness of one’s needs, motives, desires, and psychological processes (see Part IV). For example, devaluation and scapegoating are often non-reflective psychological processes that arise without awareness and make moral equilibration easier. Even absorbing an ideology that helps one to comprehend a chaotic world can be largely nonreflective. Some cultures and modes of socialization enlarge the capacity to bring such nonreflective processes into awareness. German culture and especially German childrearing practices did not.
Some people develop “processing mechanisms” that enable them to test their psychological reactions and consciously evaluate them in light of their goals, moral values, and beliefs. Such persons are less likely to be pushed and pulled by external forces. Who they are and what they believe and value still define both their initial reactions and how they process them, but their greater internal flexibility provides them with the opportunity for moral choice.
Even in a society that fosters individual moral responsibility, there is no guarantee that individuals will oppose
