Killers displace causal agency onto a divine authority to escape guilt

Evidence

Similarly, Islamic extremists construe their jihad as an armed struggle in self-defense against tyrannical, decadent infidels who seek to enslave the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden claimed nobility for his global terrorism as serving a holy imperative (Borger, 2001; Ludlow, 2001). Because of the diverse ways in which bin Laden used morality to sanctify terrorism, his case provides an informative example of how the full set of moral disengagement mechanisms operate in concert. He justified killing in the name of Allah by making it honorable to kill without guilt: “We will continue this course because it is part of our religion and because Allah, praise and glory be to him, ordered us to carry out jihad so that the word of Allah may remain exalted to the heights” (Ludlow, 2001). Islamic extremists believe that they are carrying out Allah’s will as a religious duty. The prime agency for the holy terror is thus displaced to Allah. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 350

Zimmerman displaced the responsibility for killing to divine agency, expressing no regret over it because he was following “God’s plan.” “We must worship a different God,” replied the father of the slain teenager, “because there is no way my God would have wanted George Zimmerman to kill my son” (Robles, 2012). The teenager became a victim by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and because of the existence of a hazardous self-defense law. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1214

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely illustrates displacement of responsibility, one of the eight moral disengagement mechanisms, via divine mandate.
• XREF: Directly parallels the religious-nationalist rationalizations among Islamophobic and authoritarian political actors that the reader’s vault already tracks.
• SEED: The father’s reply — ‘we must worship a different God’ — is a potent counter-quote for an essay on contesting the moral-disengagement frame that perpetrators use to sanctify their acts.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 350; Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1214