Executioners recruit moral, deterrence, and cost-efficiency rationales to justify killing.

Evidence

Executioners grounded their role in the death penalty in moral justifications: “We are taking a perfectly healthy human being and executing him. I had to make sure it was all right between me and God”. Virtually all of the members believe that executions save lives: “I believe in the death penalty. … There needs to be a death penalty to deter people from committing murder”. … However, members of the execution team also justify it on economic and security grounds: “I am for the death penalty. It is all in a day’s work. I’m not callous or hardened. Death Row inmates are here too long, it is wrong for the taxpayers, families, and us”. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2041

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely exemplifies Bandura’s moral justification mechanism: harmful acts reframed as serving worthy causes, from divine sanction to taxpayer savings.
• XREF: Supports the vault thesis that policy supporters rationalize harmful policy through layered justification — the same structure Cooper describes in social conservatism.¹
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2041