Moral disengagement

Moral disengagement is the process of justifying harmful conduct while avoiding moral self-condemnation. It operates by changing how people interpret actions, consequences, victims, and responsibility.

Moral justification: A cognitive process that frames harmful conduct as serving a worthy moral or social purpose. It recasts harmful acts as necessary for a supposedly higher good.
Moral agency: The capacity to guide conduct through moral standards and to accept responsibility for actions. Disengagement works by selectively suspending self-regulation within moral agency.
Albert Bandura: A Canadian-American psychologist known for social cognitive theory, observational learning, and moral disengagement. Bandura formulated moral disengagement as part of his account of moral agency.
Organizational misconduct: Wrongful conduct carried out by members of an organization in connection with its activities. Organizational goals and hierarchies can supply justifications and diffuse accountability.
Moral licensing: The tendency for prior moral behavior or self-perception to make later questionable behavior feel permissible. Licensing draws on moral credentials; disengagement neutralizes judgment of a harmful act.
Euphemistic labeling: The use of softened or sanitized language to make conduct seem less harmful. Renaming an act can mute the self-condemnation its plain description would trigger.
Moral self-regulation: The process by which people use internal moral standards to guide and evaluate their conduct. Disengagement alters the self-sanctions that would otherwise restrain harmful behavior.
Stanley Milgram: An American social psychologist whose obedience experiments examined compliance with authority. His experiments illuminate how obedience can support displacement of responsibility.
War crimes: Serious violations of the laws and customs of war that incur individual criminal responsibility. Dehumanization and moral justification can help explain how perpetrators rationalize such crimes.
Moral hypocrisy: The appearance of moral commitment without equivalent adherence in one's own conduct. Hypocrisy describes a gap between standards and behavior, not the specific process that excuses it.

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