Global suffering is mostly inflicted indirectly, blunting moral self-sanctions

Evidence

Depersonalizing classes of people or treating them as lesser human beings can disengage or blunt moral self-sanctions. Human suffering at the global level is, in large part, indirectly rather than directly inflicted. We saw earlier that the world’s wealthiest countries produce most of the heat-trapping gas emissions that are raising global temperatures. The people who live in poor, developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia bear the brunt of the adverse climate shift. As the receding glaciers in mountain ranges are further melted by the earth’s rising temperature, the rivers they feed provide less water for personal, agricultural, and industrial use. Water shortages, crop failures, and expanding desertification are forcing mass migrations of people who lack the resources and means to protect themselves against the degradation of their environment. The displacement of millions of people is creating a growing humanitarian crisis. Their meager livelihoods contribute little to the temperature rise, but they suffer from its adverse consequences. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2787

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bandura applies his moral disengagement model to climate change: depersonalization of distant victims is a disengagement mechanism.
• SEED: Essay angle: indirect harm as moral anesthesia — how the architecture of modern harm (supply chains, emissions) structurally prevents empathy because there is no visible perpetrator.