#moral injury
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The moral injury of having your work enshittified
This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."
This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:
https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/
The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:
https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html
The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.
It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.
But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend
But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.
Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.
But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.
In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.
This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.
Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.
But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.
And they came up with mottoes.
Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently
And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.
My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.
There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.
Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"
Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."
The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.
Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.
Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/
Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html
Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.
It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373
Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":
Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.
In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/
Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:
https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/
Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.
I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.
But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.
And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:
https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome
My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.
This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:
https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182
Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.
What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11
Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.
As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:
https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism
Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.
His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.
Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
#pluralistic#moral injury#enshittification#worker power#google#dont be evil#monopoly#sam altman#openai#vocational awe#making a dent in the universe
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“Becoming a teacher to help students, only to be forced to participate in a system that fails them at every turn, creates moral injury.”
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“The truth is that no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen; similarly, people who live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country where you are not wanted.
“The result is that every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can, because there is no freedom of speech, and merely to be overheard making a seditious remark may damage his career. All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right company, their hidden bitterness overflows.
“I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Half an hour’s cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was ’safe’; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire– damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.”
~George Orwell, The road to Wigan pier
Orwell himself was at the time he describing an officer of the imperial police, which made an especially acute mark on his conscience. I think about this passage often; it provides for one thing a better lens of analysis for some of his better known works than easily half the eisegesis usually supplied for him on either side of the aisle. But there’s really quite a lot to say about it besides
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Boyle, Robert (1627-1691)
A Free Discourse against Customary Swearing. And a Dissuasive from Cursing.
London: Printed by R.R. for Thomas Cockerill Snr. & Jnr., 1695.
#books#moral injury#philosophy#1600s#17th century#enlightenment#cursing#profanity#language#literature#book cover#art#Typography#antique
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Check in with your veterans this weekend, USians. It's difficult, being thanked and celebrated for something you're ashamed of.
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I know I talk a lot about issues within inpatient psychiatry and how they affect the patients (and this should frankly be the #1 priority), but I think how these issues affect the staff is important too. This paper goes into moral injury amongst psychiatric hospital staff in depth, and is the only systemic analysis I've been able to find on the topic.
Some quotes from staff members that I found particularly striking:
"The medicalisation approach of care for psychiatric patients has overlooked the principles of “care” in the context of nursing, and consequently the emphasis seems to have shifted more towards safety management. . ."
"What stops me from acting was I am part of a team . . . if I intervene in these situations I’m interfering with primary nursing, and I think I would be seen as splitting the team by taking the side of the patient."
"When I expressed my concern over what seemed like a blatant error in diagnosis, my instructor . . . who I held in really high esteem . . . just said “Docs don’t misdiagnose . . . there’s no misdiagnosing here,” and I was thinking, “Are you kidding me? Like, isn’t that against everything we’ve ever learned about critical thinking and looking at the specifics and questioning. . .?”"
"It’s not to be taken lightly when you put your hands on somebody. It’s wrong really. It’s like the opposite of therapeutic touch."
"I run to another ward when we hear the assault alarm and find a half-naked woman lying on the floor. As I understand it, the patient has “moved into top gear” and will be given an injection. . .. I’m distressed about the woman lying there half naked (why didn’t anyone think of covering her with a blanket?)"
Most of what the article discussed in the "implications for practice" section is about giving psychiatric healthcare workers more avenues to report immoral acts, along with trainings on how to deal with moral injury, but I have another takeaway. Both patients and staff are traumatized by this system. Why aren't we fundamentally changing something?
(Additionally, this system is perfect for burning out staff that have strong ethics and leaving the abusive staff to run things. So there's issues on both a systemic and individual level.)
#psychiatry#mental healthcare#inpatient psychiatry#moral injury#psychiatric abuse#abuse cw#public health#psychiatry critical#psychiatric nurse#psychiatric staff#mental health nurse#psych ward#psych hospital#tfw a cool epic paper came out JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO WOOOO#why is everyone not clambering over themselves to give this post notes. Surely there is something wrong with them and not me
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I feel like fandoms really fail to empathize with characters whose trauma is moral injury. Moral injury is the term for the trauma that comes from doing bad things. And I understand how it can be difficult to care about a character who feels bad about doing something bad, like, just don't do the bad thing. But the thing is that there are a lot of scenarios in fiction in which people will do awful things without fully understanding, or under the effects of mind altering stuff, or coerced, or forced into doing those things, and even still fandoms don't often empathize with them. People either criticize the character for being evil (bad) or pretend that what the character did is right(way worse).
I had a big post that was going to go into a bunch of detail on characters I think are examples of this but it felt way too long and depressing.
#moral injury#fandom culture#Fate Shinji Matou is an example of the first#and SW Anakin Skywalker is an example of the latter
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How would you describe saitamas morality? I've seen him placed all over the moral "scale" when the topic comes up (though i cant say i understand the "lower" placements), so I'm interested in others thoughts on it
I'd say Saitama is a person with high morally good values and integrity.
Warning: long ass meta ahead about morality.
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One of the ways Saitama's morality and his values are illustrated is in the dream which Saitama has, directly after Beefcake basically killed thousands of people and he did not bat an eye, because he was losing his capacity to empathize with people. Then he squished his own brother and Saitama again, did not bat an eye. On the contrary, he found malicious humour in it instead.
This fact started to bother him when he realized what was happening to him.
After he recalled the time when he started out as a hero and Beefcake incident, it subconsciously bothered him so much it manifested as dream where 70% of the population had died and someone he knew more closely had also died, because he had just been callous and feeling like he failed to act on his high sense of moral virtues and deserving some kind of punishment. Practically a Lucid dream based on his intuition alone that something was wrong. Not only that, but I believe it was his subconscious also showing him that even if he let go of his inhibitions and showed some actual emotions, his emotions would not steer him wrong towards his goal of being a protector, something he is afraid of.
And wouldn't you know, the first thing he did was punt the subterranean boss in the head. Then he went out and saved Genos.
This feeling of caring for people a lot and yet failing to act on his high moral virtues that he demands of himself once again rears it's head in the Saitama vs Garou fight where Saitama dumps his virtues in the trashbin, to not kill other humans by choosing to serious punch Garou.
The moral ambiguity moment comes from the fact that we do not actually know the outcome of the serious punch squared. We also have Blast as an example who's first priority was to get everyone else to safety, as a neat little counterpoint to Saitama's actions in the heat of the moment when he wasn't thinking clearly anymore.
Saitama acknowledges this wanting to punch Garou to smithereens as a moral failure on this part. Yet letting Garou just go around free is also not morally correct thing to do because he basically murdered people and would continue down that same path, so it is a moral dilemma for Saitama who has high sense of moral values.
It is further moral dilemma that he ends up destroying Jupiter and I.O when he tries to stop Garou though, one that he does not have a good justification for, because he was showing off with little care at that point. He was relying on his ability to show superiority to make him back down, but they did intentionally destroy the moon and Jupiter.
"For the greater good" is a slippery slope.
But the facts that he can question whether or not he is morally right or wrong and is highly critical of himself, is what makes him truly a high moral person in the end. If one never questions themselves, their sense of right and wrong and remains rigid in their interpretation without considering the circumstances, then sense of morality can end up becoming very black and white. More rigidness can mean less empathy if morality is cut and dry.
Saitama is always trying to improve himself as a person too, this includes his sense of morality. So in this sense, his moral code may change and/or improve when new evidence emerges.
True morality is not bound by ethics either, because someone can violate ethics all the time while thinking they are morally correct in doing so.
Saitama does not let societal rules, ethics, determine his sense of right and wrong. Ethics are a social construct that people often follow, such as law and culture and in this case, the ethics of killing monsters in world of OPM, but Saitama follows his moral compass without being bound by the expectations of the society he lives in and what is considered ethically acceptable and unacceptable.
Not to say he's ethical or unethical just because ethics and morals are different. Ethics and morality often go hand in hand, but distinction has to be made.
So when it comes to moral values that Saitama has, they are very high moral values. He's far from flawless, but he's always trying to do the right thing based on his set of moral values.
One of the ways to evaluate the person's type of moral values and integrity is when they uphold said values even when nobody is looking or holding them back.
Saitama has all the power to just get what he wants like punch the soda machine, even a little bit, just to get the soda he wanted, grab all the cash he wants when the car got wrecked and nobody would know. He would never have to be poor again. He has all the power in the world to do whatever he wants and infinite growth potential to boot and nobody would be able to oppose him.
But he won't. What he chooses to do instead is pick up litter and save a little kid held hostage. That would make him a morally good aligned person with high integrity.
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Saitama at his core, believes in the good of people and that everyone can change if given the chance to do so, like he himself always strives to change himself to be a better person.
Which is one of the reasons why when Saitama thought he had Garou figured out, that Godrou dealt Moral injury on him.
Among other kinds of mental injuries he suffered like high emotional damage. Saitama was already moderately to highly stressed from everything that had happened before that and was relying on his dominant cognitive function, introverted intuition, to get him through the Garou fight as a stress reaction.
It was a Full KO in that sense.
Moral injury is defined as harm that is done to an individual when their most deeply held beliefs and values are violated.
Saitama could not believe that Garou could have done something as heinous as kill other people in cruel blood, just to taunt him and make him give his all because he instantly understood the motive behind it. That is the dark side of the personality type, capacity of understanding even if someone acts in completely heinous ways.
His willpower to maintain his self-control was already in shambles from the personal hell of MA arc, when he let Garou feel his negative emotions behind his carefully controlled mask. Saitama probably does not handle stress well at all.
(Which I've yet to make a meta about how well it's crafted to specifically destroy his willpower over maintaining his self-control)
(In a more direct translation basically saying "You did this for this, right?" You got exactly the kind of reaction you wanted Garou, are you not entertained?)
Saitama believing in this human ability to change, to be morally good, is what he believes cost him everything, so to the trashbin it went and what makes it such a great moral ambiguous moment that it seemed that he would have destroyed the Earth on the same go. Because him lashing out was such a poorly planned out, impulsive act that he did not exactly think it through that Garou would also punch him back and it would endanger earth.
Chances are, it would not have if it was just his own punch, but what he let go is belief in himself to be a morally upstanding person. That it is pointless if he tries to be morally righteous and caring individual because ironically that got people killed and instead he was being callous when he tried to care more.
In this, it would seem that he then put all his remaining care in doing right by Garou, at least, to make sure that at least one person makes it out from this mess and believing in this one person to change back into the person they used to be.
And maybe trying to redeem himself at the same time, that he could be excused for his own lapse of control, if he held tight to this belief. Losing control is not worth it.
The quirk of this personality is that in right situations, they can logically justify anything.
If he does not believe in that, his core value that humans can inherently change to be better, then he would lose his sense of self.
It was Genos' belief in him being able to be a hero, that allowed Saitama to still keep a grip on himself and his values. Because Saitama no longer truly believed in his own values that he had just thrown away, like his lack of belief in his heroism would mean his clothes would shred instantly, he needed the core as memento to remind him of those values. To remind him why he's a hero.
Maybe he could do one last thing correctly at least, while keeping himself in control over his emotions.
(Chances are he actually changed his mind about letting himself loose here, because he was reminded of his values. Huh.)
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This belief in humans ability to change, even if at first they seem to be merciless and understanding the motives when someone takes a more morally questionable action can be observed when Saitama for instance, chastises Genos weakly when Genos suddenly blasted away house of evolution without making sure that there wasn't any humans occupying the upper floors and Saitama is floored by Genos suddenly doing that.
Genos never presented himself as irredeemably merciless, in Saitamas moral opinion though. What genos did was wrong because there could have been human casualties, but he understood the motive behind suddenly incinerating the entire house because they were also bad guys sending mutants to attack people and after them specifically. So they were the aggressors first and Genos and Saitama were defending themselves. Hero association had nothing bad to say about Genos code of conduct either and probably won't.
Genos wants to eliminate evil just as bad as Saitama wants to, but chances are, Saitama's only awakening sense of humanity like emotions and morals after the warning that he was losing himself entirely, allowed him to shrug off genos' blatant disregard for ethics and possible lost human lives there as casualities in his quest to exterminate evil, when it turned out that the baddies were probably hiding underground and no actual human lives were lost.
When Genos no longer disregards other human lives as potential casualties, including his own, Saitama commends him for it. His disciple has come around to understand Saitama's deeply entrenched moral code.
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On the moral scale? I would say Saitama ranks high on the moral scale, all things considered.
It took a loss of a very close loved one, the loss of everything he owns, being responsible for allowing someone go against his core values of murdering people, damaging the planet he lives on and highly stressfull situation in general and lowered amount of self-control, to make him re-evaluate his values and let go of his inhibitions.
It is a moral failure he has yet to own up to because he does not remember it, yet, though it was something that never ended up happening and he "redeemed" himself for it by traveling backwards with the help from Garou to deny the causality of his lack of action and action taken.
But even when he has literally nothing left and no reason to even exist, he ultimately, still tries to uphold the one last and most important moral value he has; not taking a life unless he has to.
It is a thing that he already suffers from emotionally, because his morality regarding killing monsters does not line up with the ethics of the Hero association and them killing monsters, because some monsters used to be human. One of the reasons why being a hero did not line up with what he thought it would be; helping people and defeating evil and this will probably become more and more apparent.
But the theme seems to be that he would strive to do the right thing. Within his capabilities and within his knowledge.
What he deems as morally right and wrong though, that may change if he gets more emotionally invested and his emotions and his full empathy makes a return and he may even make some morally questionable decisions based on feelings alone. For better...and for worse if he regards it as moral failure on his part to actually take care of and save every single person. To be an ideal hero.
No doubt he will get morally tested from time to time however and we'll see how sound his moral judgement remains.
#opm#one punch man#saitama#opm meta#morality#opm manga panels#opm anime screencaps#moral ambiguity#moral failing#moral injury#ethics#moral dilemma#moral alignment#asks
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Every word of this article.
Every goddamned syllable.
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Cont. to read Dirty Work
Ch. 3 Prisons have always been geographically isolated and visually lackluster, I assumed after these visits, the better to avoid attracting unwanted attention from outsiders. As I subsequently learned, this assumption was wrong. During the Jacksonian era, “Americans took enormous pride in their prisons, were eager to show them off to European visitors, and boasted that the United States had ushered in a new era in the history of crime and punishment,” notes the historian David Rothman.
Among the visitors invited to see the early prisons of the new republic was Charles Dickens, who toured the grounds of Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, chatting freely with convicts as he passed from cell to cell. “Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given.” In both America and England, prisons in the nineteenth century tended to be built in prominent places that were exposed to the public. Some boasted soaring turrets and stone arcades and were likened to palaces.
At the time, America’s penal system was shaped by a belief that prisons could be designed to foster moral uplift and turn chastened offenders into law-abiding citizens. By the 1980s, a more punitive philosophy had taken hold, which made prison administrators and public officials all the more inclined to limit access to their grounds.
But the shift to the margins of society could also be attributed to something else. In Pratt’s view, it reflected the triumph of “civilized punishment”—civilized not in the conventional meaning of the term, but in the sense that Norbert Elias described, whereby distasteful and disturbing events were removed from sight and pushed “behind the scenes of social life.”
...In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the transition to the more refined technologies of punishment in the modern era—most notably, the prison—was driven by the desire to control and observe the bodies of criminals, rendering them docile and obedient. Criminologists influenced by Elias have emphasized another rationale, arguing that the shift was propelled by a desire to hide these bodies from respectable citizens who no longer wanted to glimpse the sordid business of punishment with their own eyes.
The fact that corporal punishment came to be viewed as sordid was, in theory, a sign of progress. Yet as Elias’s disciples have noted, the “civilizing process” he outlined did not suggest that brutal violence would cease, only that it would be relegated to more private spaces. According to the scholar David Garland, who introduced Elias’s work to the sociology of punishment, violence would not offend civilized sensibilities so long as it unfolded behind closed doors or could be sanitized.
...Flogging prisoners clearly violated the “threshold of repugnance” among modern Americans. But caging them in hidden, segregated “isolation units” did not. The fact that solitary confinement’s “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as Dickens had observed in 1842, was precisely why so many people failed to find it offensive. “Routine violence and suffering can be tolerated on condition that it is discreet, disguised, or somehow removed from view,” observed Garland. What mattered was not the level of brutality, but its visibility and form. Viewed in this light, the remoteness of Florida’s prisons was not an accident. Throughout the Western world, “the civilized prison became the invisible prison,” Pratt observed, hiding the system’s violence and making it that much easier for “good people” to ignore or forget about what was happening behind the walls.
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Moral injury researchers typically use a version of an evaluation tool developed by Dr. Brett Litz of Boston University that asks subjects if they have personally committed a morally transgressive action, witnessed someone else committing such an action (often not stopping it), and/or experienced a deep betrayal of their own moral code.
Litz and his team found moral injury offered a better explanation than post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the psychological problems some veterans were feeling. A chronically heightened fear and stress response caused by a traumatic event does happen, but deep shame and guilt caused by participating in something that violates one’s moral code is a different problem. A more accurate diagnosis allows researchers to develop better methods to treat symptoms like depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidality.
-The Nightmare of American Public School Teaching
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My newest blog!
"I really thought I had been holding the line. I recognized the warning signs and was practicing my mindfulness strategies, taking time to rest (when I could), exercising, working with my counselor, building support within the nonprofit that I work for, making sure that I was eating and drinking even though I didn’t have much of an appetite and doing everything that I have been taught to do, but it wasn’t enough. Not this time. I had been running a race, keeping myself in front of the burnout, but just one more extra stress tipped the scales and burnout caught up and tackled me to the ground.
The day it hit me, it felt like my body forgot how to breathe. I had no energy to even cry. I was in sensory and emotional overload. My stress was so high that I was nauseous and vomiting. It took everything just to move enough to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. I crashed hard!"
#actually autistic#autism#autistic burnout#trauma#moral injury#therapy#functioning labels#mental health#sensory overload#emotional overload
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Dear diary, notes for tomorrow - interesting things to think about />>
When Cas found out his superiors were letting the seals fall, there are immediate implcations for the Dean mission in Hell being purposely botched; i.e. potentially, angels put forth bad intel to ground soldiers; potentially, did someone let the first blood get shed for The prized Destiny fight?
Need to rewatch and pay attention to if angels submitted to the prize fight idea before Dean shed blood, or simply went along with it after that fact. Michael sounded very convinced that the fight had to happen if I recall...
Either way, Cas might be suspicious they were letting it happen all along. It motivated him enough to determine that the angelic war was a war of aggression and manipulation on humans, and that in turn motivated him to break rank and try to get a message to the humans. That's a full on moral injury; "my cause is corrupt; my superiors are acting wrongly" injury
Then he got tortured. :(
////
And later in Chuck's house>>> Raphael killing Cas = personal betrayal to him? He knew he would die but maybe he was surprised a little bit, hurt, even (vengeful?) Could this have set up a personal thing with Raphael. It seemed personal in 5x03. I like the idea of Cas being closer to Raphael and it representing a more hurtful breach. (i don't think it's a new idea in fandom; i just like it)
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Why was Raphael so demoralized. "We just want it to be over." Why so despondant, nihilistic, depressed?" Why was he so rearin' to pick up the apocalypse again? Is he just nihilistic? Similar to AU Michael? Or lost without his brothers. It's a life without meaning, immortality without reprieve...
Metatron changes only when he almost dies, right before he meets up with Chuck. It was the almost-dying, mercy, and miracle of being alive that renewed him to the point he stood up to Chuck.
////
After the end of season 5, Cas went to Heaven to be like a "sheriff." That looked callous to Dean BUT Cas was concerned about the chaos...worried
He snapped into mission mode immediately but kept the details mostly private.
He then became ashamed of the angels for wanting to go after the humans again. Frustrated.
////
And due to what he went through in seasons 4-5, he's got that weighty moral injury telling his brain to be mistrustful of superiors and angels. Of course, he's feeling like he is partially home, and partially in enemy territory. Of course that sets him up to distrust his angelic soldiers, even the ones going up against Raphael with him!
The fallout of this is why Cas needs constant reassurance from his soldiers, and it's why he needs allegiance to feel comfortable.
His "family" operated in this all-or-nothing fashion. To Cas, this is what support looks like. To Cas, this is the type of power his distant father wielded. Loving punishment. Ruthlessness punctuated with gentleness.
////
And I think about this one a lot:
Would he have started a civil war without Crowley or submitted to / died heroically against Raphael?
CROWLEY What are you planning to do about Raphael?
CASTIEL What can I do besides submit or die?
CROWLEY Submit or die? What are you, French? How about resist?
CASTIEL I'm not strong enough, and you know it.
CROWLEY Ah, not on your own, you're not. But you're not on your own, are you? There's a lot of angels swooning over you. "God's favorite." Buddy boy, you've got what they call sex appeal.
CASTIEL Thank you. Get to the point.
CROWLEY Angels need leaders, so be one. Gather your army and kick the candy out of each and every angel that shows up for Raphael.
CASTIEL Are you proposing that I start a civil war in heaven?
CROWLEY Ding! Ding! Ding! Tell him what he's won, Vanna.
///
CASTIEL This is pointless. Your plan would take months, and I need help now.
///
CROWLEY Everything you've worked for -- everything that Sam and Dean have worked for -- gone. You can save us, Castiel. God chose you to save us. And I think...Deep down...You know that.
CASTIEL I wish I could say I was clean of pride at that moment...
INT. KEN LAY'S HEAVEN
CASTIEL Or the next. (Castiel uses the power of the souls to remove Raphael from the room.) There will be no Apocalypse. And let it be known -- you're either with Raphael or you're with me. And so went the long road of good intentions...The road that brought me here.
///
Cas's inability to trust his own rebel angels is interesting, but it does make sense and it results in a sort of wild, tragic (and often well founded) paranoia.
I just. Hmmmmm these problems existed in Cas way, way before The Winchesters. He's a morally injured soldier at this point, and it shows.
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I haven’t made my mind up yet about young John’s psyche. I’m still in the most charitable/least charitable phase of thinking about him.
He’s definitely driven to tackle big causes and attracted to idealism. Overall, I find he’s a bit adrift, like he can’t find purpose in life. He’s definitely not adjusting to civilian life at all, so he finds a new cause as soon as he gets back.
Being a soldier didn’t fill the hole in his life like he thought it would.
Obviously John wants to matter and make a difference in the world; but he is blind that he matters to his mom. (Resentment! Millie also wasn’t enough for his dad to stay.) Pretty typical for a young person whose parent walked out on them, damaging their sense of self-worth. (It’s not weird per se, or unique to John, but it’s immature.)
At first, it was: “I wasn’t lovable enough for him to stay.” Then it was: “Mom wasn’t enough for him to stay / she somehow caused it.” Now, in the young adult coming of age, it’s: “I wasn’t worth passing on heritage to. I’m not a worthy son.”
It's a bit like that old Jimmy Novak curse. You want to matter and make a difference so much that you miss that what matters is right there.
#spnwin#soldiernatural#moral injury#ideological violence#i can totally seeing millie getting hurt#and john blaming mary though#due to henry's circumstances it was the complete sudden type of abandonment#kids blame their parents until they grow up to see them as flawed complex human beings#and obv ppls reasons for serving are complex and varied#it IS often familial tradition though#the dynamics have changed in late 90s onwards
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“The combination of the lethality of the virus and the seemingly total abandonment of collaboration from the management I was under produced anxiety and fear in me I had never felt, never,” said Willmeng, who had worked in emergency rooms and a trauma intensive care unit in Colorado and Chicago. “I was watching nurses sign their advance directives right there at the nursing station, preparing to be intubated and die. It was terrifying.”
The term “moral injury” was coined by former U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs psychiatrist Jonathan Shay based on his work with Vietnam veterans, as explained in a December 2020 white paper by the National Nurses United (NNU) union. Moral injury involves the “deleterious long-term, emotional, psychological, behavioral, spiritual, and/or social effects” of “perpetrating or failing to prevent acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations in a high-stakes environment,” the paper notes
The nursing shortage makes conditions more stressful and dangerous for those who stay in the profession, creating an intense negative feedback loop rife with the potential for continued moral injury.
This cycle is also exacerbated when nurses leave unionized staff jobs to become traveling nurses with much higher pay but no job security, collective organizing rights or sense of permanency with their patients and community. In keeping with the cycle of blame and guilt typical of moral injury, traveling nurses have been criticized for taking high pay and abandoning their staff posts, when the underlying problem is hospitals’ failure to create physically and morally sustainable staff jobs.
Organizers stress that they want to identify and explain the concept of moral injury so that healthcare workers channel their trauma into organizing rather than turning inward or dropping out. The NNU white paper cites trauma experts saying that:
Those who experience moral injury as a perpetrator of an immoral act or from failing to prevent an immoral act typically respond with internalizing emotions such as guilt and shame, whereas those who experience moral injury as a witness who was unable to prevent an immoral act typically respond with externalizing emotions such as anger and resentment. It is crucial that those involved ascribe the blame to the responsible actor(s) and not inappropriately take responsibility for failing to prevent a transgression, if that was not in their power. Anger and resentment are more likely to lead to the collective action necessary to redress transgressions by authoritative leaders or institutions while emotions such as shame and guilt may lead to withdrawal.
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The Philosophy of the Soldier
The philosophy of the soldier encompasses a range of ethical, moral, and existential considerations related to the role, responsibilities, and experiences of individuals serving in military organizations. It delves into the complex interplay between duty, honor, morality, and the harsh realities of armed conflict. Here are some key aspects of the philosophy of the soldier:
Duty and Service: Central to the philosophy of the soldier is the concept of duty—the obligation to fulfill one's responsibilities and obligations to the military, nation, and fellow soldiers. Soldiers often grapple with conflicting duties, such as loyalty to superiors versus adherence to moral principles, and must navigate these ethical dilemmas in challenging situations.
Honor and Integrity: Soldiers are often guided by principles of honor and integrity, striving to uphold ethical standards and moral values even in the face of adversity. The philosophy of the soldier emphasizes the importance of maintaining personal integrity, honesty, and accountability in all actions, regardless of the circumstances.
Morality and Just War Theory: Soldiers confront ethical questions related to the justification and conduct of warfare, drawing upon principles of just war theory to assess the morality of military actions. They contemplate the principles of jus ad bellum (justification for war) and jus in bello (justice in war), considering factors such as proportionality, discrimination, and the protection of non-combatants.
Loyalty and Brotherhood: Soldiers often develop strong bonds of loyalty and camaraderie with their fellow servicemembers, forming tight-knit communities characterized by mutual trust, support, and solidarity. The philosophy of the soldier explores the nature of these interpersonal relationships and the moral obligations they entail.
Sacrifice and Selflessness: Soldiers are willing to make profound sacrifices, including risking their lives, for the greater good and the defense of their nation. The philosophy of the soldier contemplates the nature of sacrifice and the moral dimensions of selflessness, recognizing the inherent dangers and hardships of military service.
Post-Traumatic Growth: Soldiers may experience profound psychological and existential challenges as a result of their military experiences, including trauma, loss, and moral injury. The philosophy of the soldier considers how individuals cope with these challenges and strive for personal growth, resilience, and meaning-making in the aftermath of war.
Moral Injury and Healing: Soldiers may grapple with moral injury—the psychological distress resulting from actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs or values. The philosophy of the soldier addresses the complex process of moral repair and reconciliation, exploring avenues for healing, forgiveness, and moral resilience.
Civil-Military Relations: The philosophy of the soldier also encompasses broader societal and political considerations, including the relationship between the military and civilian institutions, the role of the military in democratic governance, and the ethical responsibilities of military leaders and policymakers.
Overall, the philosophy of the soldier engages with profound questions of duty, honor, morality, and humanity in the context of military service, offering insights into the moral complexities and existential challenges faced by those who serve in uniform.
#philosophy#epistemology#knowledge#learning#chatgpt#education#ethics#psychology#Soldiers#Military ethics#Duty#Honor#Morality#Just war theory#Loyalty#Sacrifice#Post-traumatic growth#Moral injury#Civil-military relations
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