Diffuse, circuitous harm is harder for perpetrators to control than direct harm

Evidence

Additional unique features of electronic communication technologies make them perilous if used for harmful purposes. They are readily accessible, portable, easily implementable remotely by clicks, connected worldwide for far-reaching consequences, and exceedingly difficult to control as institutions. Transgressive actions that produce diffuse outcomes via circuitous paths are also less amenable to personal control than actions that beget direct, tightly contingent outcomes. Societal vulnerabilities are enormously magnified because virtually all of the systems on which people depend in their everyday life are interdependently run by computer network systems. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to vault claims on how policy harm gets rationalized when effects are distant and distributed; the structure of the mechanism (outcome displacement) matches Cooper-style arguments that harm flows through faceless systems. — connects to: Destructiveness rises with both damage salience and coordination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 726
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 477