Indirect causation plus geographic distance lets wealthy nations escape moral self-sanctions for climate harms.

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

• XREF: The ‘indirect rather than directly inflicted’ harm mechanism extends the vault’s claims on how distance and rationalization let ordinary people support harmful policy; connects to Milgram-style diffusion and to authoritarism/Cooper argument. — connects to: Hydrocarbon wealth accrues to whites while climate risks fall on poor brown nations — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 811
• ADDENDUM: The disengagement-through-distance mechanism here parallels how moral disengagement enables class/identity-based indifference in the ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Immodesty’ pieces: suffering kept at geographic/cultural distance is easier to rationalize.
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry claim — those least responsible suffer most while wealthy perpetrate from a distance that structurally suppresses self-sanction — is the load-bearing mechanism for environmental injustice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2787