Agentless passive language erases human responsibility for harmful acts

Evidence

The agentless passive form is a linguistic device for creating the appearance that harmful acts are the work of nameless forces rather than of individuals (Bolinger, 1980). … Gambino describes how the passive voice is used to “create an illusory animistic world where events have lives, wills, motives and actions of their own without any human being responsible for them” (Gambino, 1973). … And crimes are erased by construing them as things one did not do, as former New York mayor David Dinkins explained his failure to pay taxes: “I haven’t committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s claims about how ordinary people rationalize harm - the linguistic mechanism parallels Bellah’s ‘pocketbook issues’ framing of self-interest as the language of the culture. — connects to: Technocratic report genres enable megadam harm by masking intent in affectless language — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 472
• SEED: Article angle on how corporate/government bureaucratic language doesn’t just conceal wrongdoing but actively dissolves the speaker’s own sense of agency.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 383