Environmental harm is legitimized by framing it as serving national and economic goods
Evidence
Social and moral justifications in the environmental domain are designed to confer moral legitimacy on harmful practices by investing them with worthy purposes. These justifications take a variety of forms: gaining societal benefits or economic advantages in the competitive global marketplace, strengthening national security, protecting the free enterprise system, and curbing intrusive government. National, constitutional, and economic justifications also do heavy duty in promoting production processes that are hazardous to the environment and to human health (White, Bandura, & Bero, 2009). The benefits that industries depict usually are accompanied by dire warnings of the costs to society and human well-being were those practices subjected to governmental regulation or halted altogether. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2630
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Concrete illustration of moral justification applied to the environmental domain, named as a disengagement mechanism.
- XREF: Ties directly to the fossil-fuel industry’s climate denial framing and to ‘greenwashing’ scholarship.
Related
- Worthy-purpose framing legitimizes environmentally harmful practices (similarity 0.91)
- Mainstream environmental groups legitimize pollution by litigating marginal measures (similarity 0.84)
- Environmental harm is a product of human activity carrying a moral obligation (similarity 0.82)
- Moral self-evaluative incentives outweigh material ones in environmental change programs (similarity 0.78)
- Attributing environmental harm to nature absolves people of moral self-assessment. (similarity 0.78)