Dispersed systems of many participants make moral self-exoneration nearly boundless

Evidence

In sum, given the multitude of players doing their bit in widely dispersed systems under veiled authorization, the capacity for self-exoneration by shifting blame elsewhere is almost boundless. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 868

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s law-merchant work on dispersed trading systems, and to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil — how distributed agency erodes individual moral accounting.

Related

• Diffuse responsibility across many players enables almost limitless blame-shifting. (similarity 0.91)
• Collective moral disengagement arises from members mutually exonerating each role in a shared system (similarity 0.86)
• Organized harm is enabled by deliberately diffuse chains of authority (similarity 0.79)
• Collective decision-making lets participants minimize personal responsibility for harm. (similarity 0.79)
• Diffused responsibility makes people act more cruelly than individual accountability (similarity 0.79)
• Large-scale harms depend on morally disengaged professionals across connected social systems. (similarity 0.78)
• Diffuse responsibility and insulated authority permit denial of collectively caused harm (similarity 0.78)