Major moral failings develop through small offenses accumulating into self-justifying identity change.

Evidence

Criminal transformations usually begin with small offenses. As time goes on, larger infractions are justified by successive moral compromises. Eventually one becomes a different person, whose life is characterized by major moral failings. Some of these disastrous life courses are akin to a Shakespearean tragedy in which a character flaw drives one to self-destruction. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1482

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the slippery-slope mechanism of moral disengagement; corroborates the reader’s vault theme about how ordinary people rationalize harmful policy by degrees rather than leaps.
• DEFINE: Gives the stepwise, incremental mechanism by which self-sanctions get disengaged over time.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1482