Diffuse, slow, interconnected harm makes personal moral accountability hard to feel.

Evidence

When they shift the responsibility for the harm they cause to others or to external factors, they spare themselves self-reproach. It is easy to discern personal causation when one’s actions produce highly noticeable, local effects in the short term. It is difficult to do so when the relationship between action and outcome is too slow to be noticeable and is obscured by intertwined chains of causation that take a long time to produce widespread observable effects. As a result, either individuals see no relationship between what they do and its effect on the earth’s environment, or they view their contribution as too infinitesimal to make a difference in the global scheme of things. This sense of personal innocuousness is a form of self-exoneration for aggregate harm, but global effects are the cumulative products of just such local actions. The slogan “Think globally, act locally” is an effort to instill a sense of personal accountability for collective environmental harm. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2707

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault claims about how ordinary people rationalize supporting harmful policy — the mechanism here is temporal/spatial diffusion blunting guilt, parallel to Cooper’s social-conservatism argument and authoritarianism claims about diffusion of responsibility.
• DEFINE: Lays out why ‘displacement of responsibility’ succeeds: harm that is slow, spread-out, and causally tangled defeats moral self-appraisal even when the person is genuinely contributing.
• ADDENDUM: Supports ‘On Sacrifice’ and Cooper-adjacent vault material: aggregate ethical action ‘Think globally, act locally’ is constituted by micro-local choices, parallel to how ordinary compliance accumulates into systemic harm.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2707