[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Oberon

the Autobahns

Wait a moment there. It is a great myth that the Nazis "invented " the Autobahn, or that the Autobahn program helped to massively battle mass unemployment. The idea for building specialized high-speed streets reserved for car traffic exclusively was introduced already in 1924 or 25 in Frankfurt, an organisation was founded to boost that idea and get that project started. And the building of just more of the same had a minor impact on the unemployment only. Ober 6 million workers had no jobs, but the autobahn projects of the Nazis bound only around 125 thousand workers, and maybe another 125 thousand at max in attached business companies who delivered the material. It was a propaganda coup in the main, because to the wide public the Autobahnen were sold as "the Führer's roads". At the same time the working conditions were extremely primitive even for the conditions of that time, machinery was rarely used, for the most it was all done by worker's hand, with shovels.

The Autobahnen and the Führer, that is a long-living story of myth and misperception.

It's only with hindsight that we hold those people responsible for making a wrong decision, if the Nazis had won the war, then this conversation would be completely different.

I think you mix up the moral guilt aspect and the aspect of technical responsibility, in a causal understanding, too easily. Keep both more separate, but linked. Decisions you form on the basis of knowledge that you have and deal with, or that you ignore. Basing on indeed misinformation or wrong data, is something different. However, one then must ask whether or not you share responsibility for not having better information, or having helped in establishing a mechanism that feeds you false information. And so on and on. If you get lied to by a person who before always spoke the truth, that is one thing. If you believe a person whom is known to be a notorious liar, that is something different.

But I do see where you're coming from, and it's not that radical a view, the concept of free will dove-tails nicely into having a responsibility for ones decisions, however the concept does not always work equally across the board, sometimes things occur that are not intended consequences of your actions. For example, if you were to walk down a street at night and be mugged, would you hold responsibility for walking down that street at night?

The quesiton you seem to ask is whether the victim is morally guilty of havign walked down a lon ely street at night!?

Certainly there are actions one can take to limit such occurrences, for example if the street is a known trouble spot, don't walk down it at night, or better still avoid it altogether.

However. I see that we get distracted here. The issue is "responsibility for your obedience". I remind of the other Hannah Arendt quote I gave: "In politics, loyalty is active support." Obedience implies you stay loyal to an authority you accept to rate above yourself in the power hierarchy. That it is more powerful in said hierarchy, must not necessarily mean it is right. You make a decision to comply with its claims for power, or not. You are obedient, or not. You either support it in its intentions, or you don't. You obey your general's order, or you don't. Both has consequences. Your choice on whether or not to comply, and the consequences that you knowingly accept by that, tell something about you. And here is where you can stay conform with to the authority's demand, you comply - and by that become morally guilty, not just responsible in a causal-technical manner. Obviously, conscience has a lot to do with it. And to me, my conscience is the highest authority to which I indeed owe justification for my decisions and actions. Not a deity. Not a general or president. Not a people electing me. Not my family and not my friends. But my conscience. If I am not in congruence with my conscience, then I'm in trouble. Do I allow to get bought? Do I comply with something my conscience protests over, because else my life is in danger? And how relates a decision for or against compliance with an external authority, to the thread that if I do not violate my conscience, other people, innocents, will suffer or die?

Tricky. And I am responsible for how I navigate through this labyrinth. Me. Nobody else. The external authority manipulating me and blackmailing me, just is what it is and does what it does,. How I face that challenge - that si what it is about.

The concept also breaks down when it encounters another common human occurrence, deceit, certainly most common in politics. For example, do the people who voted for Tony Blair and the Labour Party in the 2001 election take responsibility for the Prime Ministers decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States in 2003? It was not a stated goal of the PM to do so, in fact, in June 2001 few could have foreseen the events of a few months later and the results that they would have on the world.

If a person lies to you, and you believe them, do you take responsibility for believing them?

Technically, yes, but the moral guilt is reduced when you had no reason to not trust the other whose lies you believed. But in case of politicians I do argue - as you have noticed in other threads, I'm sure - that lies are part of their daily business ands manipulation of opinion is their profession. You are responsible for having believed somebody I would label as a known liar. And that is a moral guilt as well.

Oh, and don't worry, I don't believe for a second that the mentality of 'my country right or wrong' is limited to just Germany of that era, it is a founding principle of nationalism and jingoism that's been all around the world since the dawn of the nation state.

It's not just nationalism and extremism. Take the Western idealists in uniform who seriously believed their leaders who send them to Afghanistan or Iraq. Two weeks ago, I touched upon the naivety of German soldiers depicted in a German TV film I had a thread about. There is a certain kind of opportunistic gullibility amongst professional soldiers, especially those without too much experience. They indeed believe they go to Afghanistan to help build democracy. They indeed believed the lies told by Bush. You see, while seeing the good will of theirs, I also hold them responsible for their naivety - a naivety that maybe already starts with the decision to voluntarily join the army. To what degree a moral guilt results from that, again is a follow-on question depending on many variables.

In conclusion, I do understand where you're coming from, and agree, but it's a hard concept to put across the board on a planet with so many variables, but if people did take more responsibility for their actions instead of blaming it solely on others, well...this world would be quite a different place, wouldn't it?

Accepting responsibility for your decision and actions, can plot you a course into troubled seas, that is for certain. And before we have never faced existential challenges, we cannot claim with certainty what we would do in an extreme situation. We only can say what we hope we would be courageous and honest - may I say: noble? - enough to do or to decide. As long as we have not been in such a situation, we do not know for sure.