Large-scale harms depend on morally disengaged professionals across connected social systems.

Evidence

In collective agency in the service of detrimental pursuits, moral disengagement operates throughout a social system in ways designed to exonerate the system as a whole. Collective agency involves many participants doing their part as best they can in the larger scheme of things. Moreover, large-scale inhumanities require the contributions of different types of professionals in diverse social systems acting in concert in morally disengaged ways. For example, the tobacco industry, whose products kill almost half a million people annually in the United States alone, relies on a large network of collaborators who have no qualms about the production and sale of this toxic product. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 143

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Professionals carry cultural social-worth judgments into service unless organization blocks them. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 633