People justify harmful acts to themselves before committing them

Evidence

People do not usually engage in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions. Social and moral justifications sanctify harmful practices by investing them with honorable purposes. Righteous and worthy ends are used to justify harmful means. The moral imperative enables people to preserve their sense of self-worth even as they inflict harm on others. Sanctify is used as a generic term for diverse ways of justifying the rightness of harmful practices. It includes not only religious justifications but also ideological, social, economic, and constitutional forms. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 341

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘sanctify’ as a generic term covering religious, ideological, social, economic, and constitutional justifications — useful for precise terminology.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s vault claims about how ordinary people rationalize supporting Islamophobic/racist policy; the ‘sanctify harmful means by worthy ends’ logic is the same mechanism.
• SEED: The claim that justification precedes harm — ‘they don’t harm until they’ve justified it’ — is the load-bearing mechanism for an essay connecting moral disengagement to policy support.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 341