Attributing environmental harm to nature absolves people of moral self-assessment.

Evidence

Nor is there any need for moral self-evaluation if Mother Nature is the doer. As will be shown later, exoneration of the human connection is at odds with a mounting body of scientific evidence documenting it. Forests removed by clear-cutting, water supplies polluted by discharges of industrial and agricultural wastes and raw sewage, fish stocks depleted by overfishing with vast nets, and species made extinct by destruction of their habitats are but a few examples of environmental degradation that are plain to see, quantifiable, and unquestionably of human doing. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2714

Categorization

• XREF: Attributing harm to an impersonal doer (‘Mother Nature,’ ‘the system’) is the same moral trick vault claims of shifting responsibility for Islamophobic/racist policy onto faceless external forces.
• QUESTION: Bandura says local degradations are ‘plain to see and unquestionably human’ — worth probing how concentrated, visiblible harm near home sustains versus defeats moral connection.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2714