Moral ambiguity enables perpetrators to shift blame and deny responsibility.

Evidence

In the perpetration of inhumanities, moral predicaments usually contain enough ambiguity to provide interpretive leeway for disavowing responsibility, attributing blame to victims, and marshaling extenuating circumstances. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 218

Situations with moral implications contain many judgmental ingredients that not only vary in importance but may be given lesser or greater weight, depending on the particular constellation of events in a given moral predicament. In the process of moral reasoning, individuals extract, weight, and integrate morally relevant information in the situations confronting them (Bandura, 1991b; Leon, 1980). Factors that are weighted heavily under some circumstances may be disregarded or considered less important under other circumstances. In the perpetration of inhumanities, moral predicaments usually contain enough ambiguity to provide interpretive leeway for disavowing responsibility, attributing blame to victims, and marshaling extenuating circumstances. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supplies the psychological mechanism behind the vault’s existing claims about how ordinary people rationalize support for Islamophobic or racist policy: ambiguous situations allow blame-shifting onto the victim group. — connects to: Data extraction costs fall hardest on the vulnerable under a moralistic blame frame. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 608
• QUESTION: Which features of a moral predicament make it ambiguous enough to permit disengagement? Could be worth chasing for the argument’s precision.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 218