When Neutrality Becomes Complicity: Lessons on Moral Courage from FASPE
by Israel Oladejo, 2025 Business Fellow
“Am I watching or witnessing? Am I complicit or courageous?”
During my time as a FASPE Fellow, I found myself asking several questions I never thought I’d wrestle with so deeply. Questions that sat with me, followed me, disturbed me as I observed the documented atrocities on the trip. One of those questions was: am I watching, or am I witnessing?
We traveled through Germany and Poland, walking in places where history still breathes, in conference rooms where evil was designed and communicated, in corporate buildings where ethics were bartered, and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where humanity itself seemed to collapse. That journey did not just leave me with knowledge. It left me with questions. Uncomfortable, probing questions that still sit with me.
Since then, I have come to the realization that watching is passive, standing by while life happens. Witnessing, on the other hand, carries weight. To witness is to be implicated, to acknowledge, to take responsibility for what my eyes have seen, undeterred by possible ramifications.
And then there is the harder question: am I complicit, or am I courageous? In our FASPE sessions, we explored how ordinary professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and business leaders rationalized their complicity during the Nazi era. They did their jobs, claimed moral neutrality, and let ambition guide them down a slippery slope. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau made that history real: I walked through rooms of shoes, glasses, prayer shawls, prosthetic legs—everyday items stripped from people before their lives were taken. I thought not only about the victims but about the bystanders. The guards. The sympathizers. The ones who knew and said nothing. Were they watching? Or were they witnessing, choosing complicity? What would I have done?
But then I remember the story of the little Polish girl who buried apples for the prisoners to find. She was not powerful, not armed, not in control of the system. But she witnessed. She was courageous. Her actions did not topple the Nazi regime, but they said, “I refuse to let my humanity fade away.” There were a few other stories of minor dissidents here and there. The Roman Catholic bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who brought the world’s attention to the T4 Program, remains one of the most poignant examples I can think of.
Those stories stay with me because they reframe the “Bystander Effect.” They lead me to ask myself:
- Am I any different from those who chose silence then, or am I capable of the same fading today?
- What happens to my moral compass if I keep seeing wrong and still remain silent?
- How do I know when I am rationalizing instead of reasoning?
Am I any different from those who chose silence then, or am I capable of the same fading today?
Short answer? I am not made of better clay. And that realization is not self-accusation; it is the humility that keeps me awake.
History is direct here. Ordinary people—clerks, nurses, salesmen—slid into atrocity not because they were born monsters but because they obeyed, conformed, and rationalized. Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil: evil made ordinary by thoughtlessness and careerism rather than cartoonish villainy.1 Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men shows a police unit of middle-aged reservists who, step by step, became mass murderers. Very few refused.2
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments show how far people go when an authority calmly insists that they “continue.” Most did. They felt uneasy; they still complied.3 That is the part that haunts me. Feeling wrong does not automatically produce doing right. And, in emergencies, John Darley and Bibb Latané found that the more bystanders that are present, the less any one person acts: diffusion of responsibility dulls agency.4 That is a trap I can fall into without noticing.
So no, I’m not different by nature. My difference must be chosen, deliberately cultivated, in the moment: noticing, naming, and acting. That’s the seed of courage. In that sense, I appreciate those sessions during the fellowship when we paused to reflect, notice, name, and act—building my moral agency.
What happens to my moral compass if I keep seeing wrong and still remain silent?
Silence is not neutral; it edits me. If I keep quiet long enough, my compass does not just “freeze.” It recalibrates to the room.
Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick call this ethical fading—the ethical dimensions of a choice fade from view as I reframe it as “business,” “policy,” or “efficiency.”5 I preserve my self-image while my actions drift. That is the danger: I can be wrong and still feel right.
Albert Bandura describes moral disengagement: how we soothe ourselves by sanitizing language (“collateral damage”), diffusing responsibility (“everyone signed off”), minimizing harm, or blaming or dehumanizing the target.6 The more I repeat these moves, the less my conscience enters the equation
There is also the slippery slope. Tiny compromises teach my brain that the new line is fine; next time the line moves again. Studies show dishonesty can escalate gradually as our emotional alarm dulls with repetition, like a dimmer switch on our consciences.7
Put plainly: repeated silence becomes a workshop where my better self is slowly re-engineered into a comfortable self. And that’s why small acts matter. When I speak up, help, or dissent, I keep my compass calibrated. The little Polish girl hiding apples was not “fixing the system,” but she was contributing in her own way, reminding everyone around her that human goodness was not dead.
How do I know when I am rationalizing instead of reasoning?
This is the question I keep taped to the inside of my mind.
Psychology gives me a few red-flag patterns. Ziva Kunda’s work on motivated reasoning shows how we recruit “smart” thinking to reach the conclusions we already prefer.8 We do not twist facts with knives. We select them with velvet gloves. If my desire is steering my data, I am not reasoning, I’m aiming.
Leon Festinger’s notion of cognitive dissonance adds that when my actions and values clash, I will feel inner friction, and I will want to reduce that discomfort. One easy solution is to adjust my story instead of my behavior.9 This is nothing but rationalization tied up in a neat, little bow.
Building upon what we discussed during the fellowship trip, I have learned to give myself practical tests—simple, human, doable, despite the rush of real life:
- The Fresh-Eyes Test. If someone with no stake in the outcome read my email or watched my decision, would it make moral sense to them without my backstory? If my explanation needs a fog machine, I’m rationalizing.
- The Flip Test. If the roles were reversed, if my group were on the receiving end, would I still call this “reasonable?” If the answer wobbles, that’s rationalization.
- The Name-It Test. Can I describe what’s happening without euphemisms? Bandura warns that pretty words can launder ugly deeds. If I need laundering, I need honesty first.
- The Principle-Before-Person Test. Can I write down the principle first and the decision second? If I pick the outcome and then backfill a principle, I’m arguing like a defense attorney, not a conscience.
- The Time-Travel Test. In five years, when the heat has cooled, will I be proud I did this, or will I explain it away as “context”? If future-me winces, present-me should pause.
- The Audience-of-One Test. Could I explain this choice to a younger version of me who still believed the honor code I signed in my second year of college: “I will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate those who do”? If that kid looks confused, I need to re-align.
And because I’m human, and therefore could be biased, I invite others into the loop:
- Circle of advisors. Two or three truth-tellers with the right to blow the siren. If I notice I’m only calling comforters, that’s a sign I’m shopping for rationalizations, not wisdom.
- Pre-commitments. My red lines, written in calm times: “I will not target the vulnerable,” “I will not falsify numbers,” and “I will not retaliate against dissent.” Pre-commitments beat adrenaline.
- Micro-bravery. A script I can actually say under pressure: “I’m not comfortable with this as stated,” “can we add a ‘human impact’ line to the slide?,” “before we green light this, can we hear one dissenter?” Small sentences that keep my courage muscles active.
- The Good / Right / Fitting check.
- Good (utilitarian): does this minimize harm and maximize human well-being?
- Right (principled): would this be acceptable as a universal rule?
- Fitting (virtue): does this reflect the kind of character I want to practice today?
When those three conflict (and they will), I slow down and name the tension instead of hiding it. Naming tension is not weakness; it’s how we stay honest.
Am I different from those who chose silence? Only if I choose to be, on purpose, with practice. The motivations that drove people then remain the same: obedience, diffusion, ambition, fear, and fatigue. The difference is not superior virtue; it is disciplined attention backed by small, consistent acts.
What happens to my compass if I stay silent? It drifts. My language cleans things up, I relabel stakes, and soon I can’t see what I used to see. Ethical fading is not a cliff; it’s a dimmer switch. I keep the lights on by speaking up, kindly, clearly, and early.
How do I spot rationalization? I look for fog: euphemisms, special pleading, results-first logic, the need for complicated backstories. Then I run my tests, phone my truth-tellers, or pick one micro-brave sentence to say out loud. If I can do that much, I’m witnessing not just watching.
That, to me, is the point of everything FASPE stirred in me. Not to crown myself as “better” but to stay awake, to keep asking: am I watching or witnessing? Am I complicit or courageous? And to let those questions move my feet.
One of cohort’s faculty members, Rob Hayward, once asked me a question during one of our side talks at Auschwitz-Birkenau: “If you switch your mind from that of a bystander to that of one of many witnesses, what agency does that give you?”
Israel Oladejo was a 2025 FASPE Business Fellow. He works as a program manager at Schneider Electric.
Notes
1. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.
2. Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins.
3. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. Harper & Row.
4. Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4p1), 377–383.
5. Tenbrunsel, A. E., & Messick, D. M. (2004). Ethical fading: The role of self-deception in unethical behavior. Social Justice Research, 17(2), 223–236.
6. Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
7. Welsh, D. T., Ordóñez, L. D., Snyder, D. G., & Christian, M. S. (2015). The slippery slope: How small ethical transgressions pave the way for larger future transgressions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 114–127.
8. Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.
9. Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.