Blaming consumers for harms deflected corporate responsibility for engineered addiction

Evidence

Independent researchers had found that smokers compensate for low nicotine delivery in so-called light cigarettes by inhaling more deeply or smoking more cigarettes. The smokers were blamed for the number of cigarettes they smoked. Brown & Williamson announced that “the choice of number of cigarettes smoked rests with the consumer and we don [ sic] directly influence this decision in either direction” (Brown & Williamson Co., 1984). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1667

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the reader’s core theme: transferring blame onto victims as a moral-disengagement mechanism used to rationalize harmful policy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1667