Legal sanction relieves executioners’ emotional distress and religious framing strengthens that disinhibition.

Evidence

Displacement of agency relieves emotional distress: “It don’t bother me at all. The law says this, and I follow it, and that’s it.” The dictate of law gains added disinhibitory force when it is grounded in religious imperative, as shown by a prison chaplain who found justifications for the death penalty in religious decree: “I believe that when the laws of men correspond with the laws of God, the laws of men become the laws of God. That enables me to support the death penalty” (Osofsky et al., 2005). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1942

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s mechanism claim that ordinary people rationalize supporting harmful policy by deferring to higher authority — religious imperative doubling the disinhibitory force is the added psychological step.
• ADDENDUM: Extends the sacrificial-death theme from ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — chaplains legitimizing state executions by fusing civil and divine law parallels sacral kingship.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1942