Moral principles and elite virtue can be marshaled to justify disastrous wars

Evidence

Indeed, in moral disengagement, justice is often used righteously to justify harmful means. In his book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam (1972) reports how highly principled presidential advisors, schooled in cardinal values at elite universities, got the nation deeply entangled in the disastrous Vietnam War. The metaphoric domino theory, which predicted successive communist takeovers of neighboring weak countries, provided the justification for the ill-fated action. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader moral disengagement framework — virtuous motives enlisted for harmful ends — which recurs throughout the book. — connects to: Warmaking elites sell wars by claiming weapons are precise and humane — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1121
• CANDY: The Halberstam Vietnam point — elite-educated advisors committing the nation to war out of principle — makes a compressed, striking conversation opener.