People delegate action to proxies partly to escape moral responsibility for harm

Evidence

In many spheres of functioning, however, people do not have direct control over conditions that affect their lives. They rely on socially mediated proxy agency by influencing others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to gain the outcomes they desire. Children work through parents to get what they want, marital partners through spouses, employees through labor unions, companies through outsources, and the general public through elected officials. However, people often turn to proxy agents even in realms of life where they can exercise direct control. They choose not to for a number of reasons. Perhaps they have failed to develop the required competencies to manage certain activities on their own. They believe others can do it better. They do not want to saddle themselves with heavy task demands and stressors. Or they do not want to bear the moral responsibility for harmful activities they perform. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 127

Categorization

• XREF: This foreshadows Bandura’s core mechanism — the proxy delegation of harmful acts as a form of moral disengagement — and will connect to the vault’s claims about ordinary people deferring to authority rather than owning complicity in Islamophobic policy. — connects to: Protest organizers bear felt responsibility for the safety of strangers they cannot protect. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 390; Community belief in contaminated water attaches to whoever was responsible for it — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 2095; A series of individually innocent actions can combine into a morally outrageous act (+2 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 127