Dividing lethal acts into small technical tasks diffuses agents’ moral responsibility

Evidence

Electrocution replaced hanging as supposedly more humane, although the sight of the condemned’s popped eyeballs, bloody vomit, and burning flesh is anything but humane. In electrocution, members of the execution team diffuse responsibility by each strapping different parts of the body to the electric chair. Lethal injection, in turn, replaced electrocution because it was perceived to be less gruesome. The execution process diffuses responsibility even more broadly with the addition of an intravenous team. The institutional arrangement diffuses the agentic subfunctions across a variety of individuals, each performing only a small task in the division of labor. … They approach their task with a strong sense of technical responsibility. As one team member put it, “We each have a small role on the team. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1934

Categorization

• XREF: Task fractionalization as moral numbing aligns with the reader’s existing claims about institutionalized harm and bureaucratic rationalization. — connects to: Responsibility arises only in undecidable space that calculable programs try to close — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 633
• SEED: Angle: how ‘professionalism’ and ‘doing one’s duty’ language converts killing into technical competence — a mechanism applicable to bureaucratic atrocity more broadly.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1934