Lethal injection diffuses agency so completely that no one is the executioner

Evidence

Responding to these executions and to legal controversy over state secrecy laws about the drugs used, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court chief judge Alex Kozinski argued that states should cease trying to sanitize executions, which he called “brutal, savage events” and instead restore the firing squad, which is “messy but effective” (Dolan, 2014). However, this mode of execution makes the task more difficult for executioners because they become direct agents of death, whereas lethal injection provides an elaborately diffused system of intentionally killing a human being. No one is the executioner. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1910

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Bandura’s core theory of moral disengagement through displacement and diffusion of responsibility.
• DEFINE: Perfect concrete case of the “diffusion of responsibility” mechanism Bandura describes throughout the book.