Adding a higher-priority duty like national security lets professionals rationalize causing harm.

Evidence

The APA altered its code of ethics, stating that psychologists have a dual ethical obligation—to refrain from inflicting harm on others and to protect the security of the nation. The latter addition to the code of ethics provided honorable justification in the name of national security for psychologists to participate in military interrogations. The APA board of directors declared an emergency meeting where they approved the report as official policy and then expedited its publication. The purpose for the hasty publication was to use it as an antitorture public relations statement in anticipation of a New Yorker article about to be published on the interrogation program. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2374

Categorization

• XREF: This is moral justification by palliative comparison / displacement of responsibility into a higher duty — hooks into vault claims about Cooper’s social-conservatism moral framework.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2374