Humanitarian constraints make democracies more vulnerable to terror than autocracies

Evidence

In contrast, fighting terrorism with military force involves two-sided moral disengagement. The use of physical force in self-defense is easy to justify morally. Counterterrorists bring moral disengagement into play in devising and executing their campaigns. However, such means pose more troublesome moral problems for democratic societies than for totalitarian ones. Totalitarian regimes have fewer constraints against using institutional power to crush internal dissent and to sacrifice individuals for the good of the state. They have few qualms about using unrestrained lethal force to combat terrorist threats. Terrorists can therefore wield greater power against nations that place a high value on human life and personal liberties. A commitment to humanitarian values limits the types of means that are morally acceptable and how they are used in self-defense. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2271

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault claims about how ordinary people rationalize supporting coercive policy — the moral costs democracies pay for restraint get reframed as naivete, which then feeds authoritarian solutions.
• QUESTION: Worth interrogating: is the terrorists-are-empowered-by-democratic-restraint claim an empirical one or a rhetorical justification that itself functions as moral redefinition?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2271