Killing strangers needs intensive moral-disengagement training while targeting blamed officials requires less.

Evidence

Terrorists face an especially troublesome moral paradox: Because they take innocent lives indiscriminately as a means toward a sociopolitical end, their actions belie the very liberation values they espouse. From a psychological standpoint, seemingly random third-party violence is much more morally perturbing than violence directed against specific officials who are blamed for contributing, in one way or another, to people’s aversive life conditions. It is easier to persuade individuals who harbor strong grievances to kill officials they loath or to abduct advisors and consular personnel of foreign nations that support oppressive regimes. However, to slaughter ordinary men, women, and children going about their lives requires more powerful psychosocial machinations to neutralize moral conflict in ways that enable terrorists to live in peace with themselves. Intensive psychological training in moral disengagement is necessary to create the capacity to kill indiscriminately without self-condemnation. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2116

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Bandura’s core mechanism to the reader’s vault interest in how ordinary people rationalize harming out-groups; the gradient from blamed-official to innocent-victim is the mechanism’s escalation path.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2116