Execution staff displace moral responsibility onto judges and juries who decided the sentence
Evidence
“We have a job to do… . It is simply to carry out the order of the state.” Some responsibility is displaced to the judges and juries: “It’s not up to me to say yea or nay. That’s for the judges and juries. I’m not a part of the deal-making process. I’m here to do the job. I’m assigned to do it and have the job to do” (Osofsky et al. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1941
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly parallels Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ and the obedience-to-authority theme in Milgram’s experiments — and echoes the Eichmann defense ‘just following orders.‘
Related
- Execution team members displace responsibility onto the state and courts to disengage moral self-sanctions. (similarity 0.92)
- Moral disengagement operates through graded role specialization in executions (similarity 0.81)
- Those most directly involved in executions face the greatest self-justification pressure (similarity 0.81)
- Jurors’ distal role in executions weakens their moral self-sanctions (similarity 0.80)
- Executioners must suspend moral self-sanctions to do their job (similarity 0.80)