Moral Dissengagement Essay, Research Paper
Moral disengagement is the process by which people justify emotionally, morally, and physically, behavior they or others would normally consider reprehensible. By instituting moral disengagement, societies, and therefore the people that make up said societies, are able to plan and execute certain actions that, if not morally disengaged from their normal self-sanctioning and self-controlling behaviors, would be undertaken with extreme difficulty at best. However, most people possess certain self-regulatory and self-sanctioning behavior mechanisms that prevent them from committing inhumane acts against others. The problem with self-controlling behavior mechanisms, though, is two-fold. First, the behavior is founded on the willingness of the individual to adhere to the humane behavior. Secondly, the existence of several mechanisms with which circumvention of self-regulatory behavior is facilitated allow a readily accessible means of coming to terms with inhumane actions.
One of the main types of moral disengagement is the process of reconstruing detrimental conduct by moral justification. According to Bandura, “One set of disengagement practices operates on the construal of the behavior itself. People do not ordinarily engage in reprehensible conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions. What is culpable can be made righteous through cognitive reconstrual. In this process, detrimental conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it as in the service of moral purposes. People can then act on a moral imperative.” That is to say, that if people are having difficulty with a certain type of behavior they are committing, they can mold the behavior that they see as being inhumane into behavior that is seen either as humane or “inhumane but necessary” simply by basing the actions on moral beliefs, whether founded or otherwise. For example, terrorism is based on moral principles, as the perpetrators commit such heinous acts that they are required to resort to believing that they have the right to do what they do based on their ideological, religious, or political beliefs. The normal human being would be unable to commit such acts unless he or she thought they were doing the right thing based on one or more of the three above mentioned beliefs.
Another mechanism with which to attain moral disengagement is referred to as euphemistic labeling. “Language shapes people’s thought patterns, on which they base many of their actions. Activities take on a very different appearance depending on what they are called,” according to Bandura. As I see it, euphemistic labeling is a ten dollar replacement for political correctness. What does that mean? To make certain acts come off as being less destructive than they really are, all one has to do is simply identify the acts with a more benign term. In his article, Bandura relates a study held by Gambino, in which Gambino identifies the different varieties of euphemisms. According to this study, “… palliative expressions are widely used to make the reprehensible respectable.” This is the politically correct aspect of euphemistic labeling. Palliative expressions are terms that mean something, but make it sound much less destructive than it really is. For example, the term innocent bystanders is changed to “collateral damage,” killing is changed to “terminating with extreme prejudice,” and so on and so forth. The second form of euphemistic labeling is known as the agentless passive form. In this process, people commit moral disengagement by doing away with individuality, and making it seem as though illegitimate acts are carried out by a valid group or force rather than a single, culpable “agent.”
A third major mechanism that allows moral disengagement is advantageous comparison. “Whenever events occur or are presented contiguously, the first one colors how the second one is perceived and judged,” says Bandura. Using this mechanism allows people to justify self-deplored acts by comparing and contrasting the self-deplored acts to blatant acts of inhumanities. For example, someone can morally disengage from a self-deplored act such as murder by comparing their crime to the number of murders committed by Robert Yates, and then surmising that they are not a murder per se, as they only killed one person. “In social conflicts, injurious behavior usually escalates, with each side lauding its own behavior but morally condemning that of their adversaries as heinous…. …Cognitive restructuring of behavior through moral justifications and palliative characterizations is the most effective psychological mechanism for disengagement of moral self-sanctions. This is because moral restructuring not only eliminates self-deterrents but engages self-approval in the service of destructive exploits. What was once morally condemnable becomes a source of self-valuation” (Bandura, 1990).
Displacement of responsibility is another method of moral disengagement, and is put into effect when the people who are committing inhumane acts can readily see the effects that their actions are having on the victims. It is also used when the acts leave the perpetrator as the only one hanging if the tables are turned. This mechanism is based on the theory that people will always act in a manner inconsistent with their beliefs, provided a suitable and credible authority figure accepts responsibility for the consequences of the actions. Based on this, the people who are actually committing the acts are spared the self-prohibiting reactions as they assert that they actions that they are committing are of the authority’s direction, hence, the blame is displaced to the authority.
Diffusion of responsibility follows the trend of the above-mentioned mechanism by allowing the individuals to displace blame. In this method, the individual decreases his or her amount of responsibility by obscuring the link between conduct and its consequences. For example, someone who works on the assemble line of a large machine gun manufacturer is not directly responsible for any inhumane acts committed with one of the weapons the individual helped to assemble, but as the individual had a hand in the creation of the device used to carry out the heinous act, they are responsible, albeit indirectly, to a certain extent. There are several forms of this type of mechanism, such as division of labor, turning decisions made by individuals into group decisions, etc.
Disregard or distortion of harmful consequences is another one of the many mechanisms for moral disengagement. This simply means that people who are committing inhumane acts either ignore or purposely distort the consequences their actions have so that they might morally disengage from the self-sanctioning that is as result of their actions. The best example I could come up with for this mechanism is a bomber pilot. He knows that what he or she is doing is resulting in the deaths of many people, but because he or she is so far removed from the suffering, they have a tendency to take their actions more lightly. When people act alone when committing inhumane acts, they are more likely to minimize the injurious acts, as they are more accountable for their actions. “It is relatively easy to hurt others when their suffering is not visible…” (Bandura, 1990).
Blaming and dehumanizing victims is one of the main reasons hate crimes are so prevalent. These mechanisms base the moral disengagement on beliefs that the victim is “subhuman” or at fault for a plight that the aggressor feels is hindering him or her. These two go hand in hand, as they both are based on the aggressor’s belief that the victim is less than human, and is to blame for all of the difficulties experienced by the aggressor. Hate crimes are based on these two moral disengagement mechanisms. I feel that people who commit hate crimes do so as they blame the victim for an obstacle or low point in life, which then leads to the dehumanization, which leads to the aggressive behavior, and so on and so forth.
There is no concrete way of stating why people commit hate crimes. What the theory of moral disengagement does is open the door to understanding how the people who commit hate crimes live with themselves on a day- to – day basis, and justify what they do to others. It says in the article that, when combined, several disengagement factors potentiate each other rather than simply producing additive effects. This explains why and how people commit hate crimes in that it shows how the state of mind is reached. Things such as bureaucratization, urbanization, automation, and so on and so forth are seen as instigators of self-regulated behaviors, but nonetheless, the cause of hate crimes is still not something that can be readily defined in black and white terms. Moral disengagement is a means to an end in the case of hate crimes, as it tells the how, but only partially the why.
In the fairly recently released movie American History X, the acts of dehumanization and blaming of minorities was rampant, as that is what the basis of the main characters’ (Danny and Derek) hate was founded on. Without someone to focus their hate one, they would have had nothing to do. However, when a black man killed “Danny’s and Derek’s” father, they began to hate.
Therefore, one can see that it is not so much a matter of moral disengagement causing hate crimes, but moral disengagement that allows hate crimes to be committed in a manner such that the person committing the crimes is not as offended by their actions as the intended victim. The article states that it takes the right social conditions to produce heinous situations, as opposed to monstrous people producing the situations. “[If] the appropriate social conditions are in place, normal, decent people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things” (Bandura, 1990).
The problems that this theory as it relates to explaining why people commit hate crimes is that it states that people commit hate crimes based on the right social conditions, not because of the moral disengagement alone. Without the right social conditions, moral disengagement could not result in the creation of people who commit hate crimes. While the article does define what the social conditions are and how they are created, it does not impart solutions to the problems. It proposes solutions to the problems of moral disengagement, but that is all. The article also states that, based on the vast number of psychological means of circumventing self-regulating behavior, societies cannot rely on individuals to refrain from committing heinous acts. This, obviously, raises the question of whose rights should be squelched by society. The Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech, but the article states that simply by changing the way something is referred to is a means of inciting inhumane actions without the hindrance of self-regulating or self-sanctioning behavior. Therefore, who has the right or power to decide what constitutes someone’s thoughts, and when the thoughts have crossed the line and become hate crimes?
In conclusion, moral disengagement is a means by which people can more easily commit inhumane acts, and is a theory as to why people commit these acts. However, the article that defines moral disengagement and its mechanisms so well fails to propose any fixes for the social conditions that it claims are the most likely to cause outbursts of heinous behavior.
Bibliography
Bandura, Albert. (1990). Selective activation and disengagement of moral
control. Journal of Social Issues, 46. p. 27-46.