Distributed network causality blurs the agent’s link to harmful outcomes

Evidence

In personal transactions, there is a close connection between actions and outcomes. In the cyberworld, a hacker’s actions can affect a multitude of interconnected networks in diverse distant places that, in turn, determine the outcomes via their functional properties. The hacker is the initiator rather than the sole author of the outcomes. This complex mediation blurs the link between actions and outcomes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 475

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘The dispersal of causality’ — how complex systems let perpetrators feel like initiators, not authors, of harm, and what that means for moral accountability in tech.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism of moral disengagement via ‘euphemistic displacement’ — the initiator/author distinction is load-bearing.