Advocates dismantle moral restraint by denying an offense occurred and blaming conspirators

Evidence

Once again Donohue came to the rescue (Donohue, 2012d). He argued that no crime had been committed: “The case did not involve child sexual abuse—no child was ever abused, or touched… . Nor did this case involve child pornography.” He attributed the trial to an anti-Catholic conspiracy: … [W]e find the chorus of condemnations targeting Bishop Finn to be as unfair as they are contrived” (Donohue, 2012d). By denying the offenses and blaming conspirators for the alleged unfair trial, Donohue stripped the immorality from pornographic abuse of young children. In 2015, Finn resigned from the Church and Pope Francis accepted his resignation. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Bandura’s disengagement mechanism (euphemistic labeling, denial of responsibility, blame of victims/others), and connects to the vault’s existing claims about how ordinary people rationalize support for harmful policy.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the disengagement tactic of denying the offense and attributing accusations to conspiracy, stripping moral weight from the act.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 512