Counterterrorist states must apply moral disengagement just as terrorists do

Evidence

Military counterterrorism involves two-sided moral disengagement with terrorists on one side and counterterrorists on the other side. We already have addressed the ways in which terrorists enlist the mechanisms of moral disengagement. However, targeted nations also must morally justify lethal means and disengage moral self-sanctions so that they can gain public support for intervention with force and mount military campaigns that will necessarily inflict death and destruction. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2302

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: The symmetry claim — both sides of a conflict need the same moral machinery — is the book’s core destabilizing insight and worth sitting with.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘both-sides’ analysis usually flattens moral weight, yet Bandura’s point is descriptively accurate — how to hold the symmetry claim without false equivalence.

Related

• Democratic moral constraints give terrorists strategic leverage over democracies (similarity 0.88)
• States must morally justify war to mobilize public support and troops (similarity 0.87)
• Terrorists engage morality to justify their mission while disengaging it for lethal acts (similarity 0.83)
• Indiscriminate terrorism requires trained moral disengagement that targeted violence does not (similarity 0.83)
• Religious terrorism does not differ in method from secular terrorism (similarity 0.82)
• Humanitarian constraints make democracies more vulnerable to terror than autocracies (similarity 0.82)
• Brutal counterterrorism can backfire by recruiting and legitimizing the enemy (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorists must justify violence primarily to themselves, not just to win public support (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorists magnify harm while ordinary wrongdoers deny it (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorists claim responsibility where conventional wrongdoers deny it (similarity 0.81)
• Terrorists admit their harm because they compare it favorably against oppressors’ suffering. (similarity 0.80)
• Killing strangers needs intensive moral-disengagement training while targeting blamed officials requires less. (similarity 0.80)
• Terror groups must calibrate violence to retain sympathizer support (similarity 0.79)
• Moral authorities sanction effective violence even at the cost of theological contradiction (similarity 0.79)
• Terrorists use sacred, utilitarian, and personal grievance justifications to disengage morally. (similarity 0.79)