Passive voice lets wrongdoers present acts as work of nameless forces

Evidence

The agentless passive form is a linguistic device for creating the appearance that harmful acts are the work of nameless forces rather than of individuals (Bolinger, 1980). It is as though people are moved mechanically but are not really the agents of their own acts. Gambino describes how the passive voice is used to “create an illusory animistic world where events have lives, wills, motives and actions of their own without any human being responsible for them” (Gambino, 1973). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral disengagement mechanisms and to Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ on euphemistic passive constructions.
• DEFINE: Introduces the agentless passive as a named linguistic device for moral disengagement.