I think it comes down to personal ethics versus a "structure" per se. We learn personal ethics from how we are raised by our parents and community. In anthropology these are referred to as explicit or inherent rules, but they really are practices and trained thinking on how to behave towards others and community. You can have "rules" that are horrible in bad, but the government says it is illegal not to obey. And you can have religious righteousness that does horrible things as well, such as attacking people of another religion just because of what or who they worship. Both are fundamentally bad because, if we have grounded personal ethics, we realize neither have justification for treating others horribly. On the other hand, if we're raised with warped ethics, such as believing everything is about us, then it might seem perfectly normal to treat the masses as fodder.