Executioners must suspend moral self-sanctions to do their job

Evidence

The gravest moral predicament is faced by executioners, whose job requires them to kill a human being up close and by their own hands. Unless they suspend moral self-sanctions against the intentional taking of a human life, they will have difficulty doing their job and will be burdened with a troublesome mental and social life. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2016

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ article — state-sanctioned killing personnel as another case of proximity forcing disengagement, complementing the ritual-sacrifice examples there.
• XREF: Connects to Milgram’s authority experiments and Zimbardo’s prison study on situational diffusion of responsibility.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2016