Acquired moral standards do not regulate conduct unceasingly

Evidence

Moral standards, whether characterized as conscience, moral prescripts, or principles, do not function as unceasing internal regulators of conduct. People often face pressures to engage in harmful activities that provide desired benefits but violate their moral standards. To engage in those activities and live with themselves, they have to strip morality from their actions or invest them with worthy purposes. Disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables people to compromise their moral standards and still retain their sense of moral integrity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bandura’s social cognitive theory and to cognitive dissonance literature (Festinger); also resonates with how institutions enable moral compromise, like the diamond-trade extralegal regime readings. — connects to: Intellectual conviction alone does not make people act on danger — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 317; Moral lines like ‘no torture’ hold only as impulse, not as rationalized principle — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2562
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 56