This is a great blogpost on moral thinking. I think it's in line with the work of the german-american political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt who did reflect on these very questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

Arendt was of german and jewish decent and experienced first hand the rise of totalitarianism and persecution during the 1930s. She was able to escape with her family to the United States in 1940. Post-war she became a writer and a visiting scholar teaching at many academic institutions. She developed her political theory during the 1950's publishing various seminal works.

Notably, in 1961-1963, she attended the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem on behalf of The New Yorker, eager to test her ideas developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was especially interested in Adolf Eichmann as an individual and how he ended up becoming the architect of the Holocaust.

> On this, Arendt would later state "Going along with the rest and wanting to say 'we' were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible". What Arendt observed during the trial was a bourgeois sales clerk who found a meaningful role for himself and a sense of importance in the Nazi movement. She noted that his addiction to clichés and use of bureaucratic morality clouded his ability to question his actions, "to think". This led her to set out her most famous, and most debated, dictum: "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil". By stating that Eichmann did not think, she did not imply lack of conscious awareness of his actions, but by "thinking" she implied reflective rationality, that was lacking. Arendt, who eschewed identity politics, was also critical of the way Israel depicted Eichmann's crimes as crimes against a nation state, rather than against humanity itself.

> Arendt was also critical of the way that some Jewish leaders associated with the Jewish Councils (Judenräte), notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust, in cooperating with Eichmann "almost without exception" in the destruction of their own people. She had expressed concerns on this point, prior to the trial. She described this as a moral catastrophe. While her argument was not to allocate blame, rather she mourned what she considered a moral failure of compromising the imperative that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. She describes the cooperation of the Jewish leaders in terms of a disintegration of Jewish morality: "This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story". Widely misunderstood, this caused an even greater controversy and particularly animosity toward her in the Jewish community and in Israel. For Arendt, the Eichmann trial marked a turning point in her thinking in the final decade of her life, becoming increasingly preoccupied with moral philosophy.

It's an interesting observation since Arendt points out that the moral failure of compromising on an imperative is a far more nuanced story then first meets the eye. The lack of reflective rationality can happen regardless of time and place.

The failure to reflect on one's own actions came to the foreground in another highly covered court case: the My Lai massacre (1968) in which a company of U.S. Army soldiers ended up killing 347 south-vietnamese unarmed villagers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

The court case ended up a scandal as officers, NCO's as well as privates where accused and prosecuted. Most notably, the failure of "command responsibility" and the fact that many involved resorted to "I was only following orders" stirred outrage.

I think it's interesting here to look at those cases with the hindsight of history and see how those dynamics and the questions raised about the morality of our actions still apply today. Even more so, I think this is the exact reason why education systems should teach about these cases and show what happens if you eschew your responsibility of reflecting on your own actions in order to own up to a shared imperative.