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waveman comments on Ethical Injunctions - Less Wrong
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Indeed. I remember an IT project manager telling me the German people should have stood up to Hitler and stopped him. I pointed out that she was not even prepared to tell her manager the truth about the state of her project (running later than advertised of course).
All she had at stake was the size of her end of year bonus.
I remember reading about a man who voted against Hitler in the referendum to make him dictator. He was severely beaten, his house was burned down, and he wife and daughter were gang-raped.
The penalty for telling the truth about the state of your project is less than the penalty for defying Hitler, but the good done by telling the truth about the state of your project is also less than the good done by defying Hitler.
That is true. Whether higher stakes* would give her more courage, I doubt, but it is possible.
( * It was not entirely clear until it was too late, if you look at the people who had nice things to say about Hitler early on. The number of people int he resistance during the war (as opposed to after the war, in retrospect) was not very high. I am not suggesting I would have been one of those who took arms against him).
Anthony Beevor's book Dresden has a good description of what happened to people who opposed Hitler.
For most people the good done by defying Hitler isn't that great. One individual more or less doesn't make a huge difference.