Perpetrators neutralize moral self-sanctions at three loci of harmful conduct.

Evidence

At the agency locus, people evade personal accountability for harmful conduct by displacing responsibility to others and by dispersing it widely so that no one bears responsibility. This absolves them of blame for the harm they cause. At the outcome locus, perpetrators disregard, minimize, distort, or even dispute the injurious effects of their actions. As long as harmful effects are out of sight and out of mind there is no moral issue to contend with because no perceived harm has been done. At the victim locus, perpetrators exclude those they maltreat from their category of humanity by divesting them of human qualities or attributing animalistic qualities to them. Rendering their victims subhuman weakens moral qualms over treating them harshly. The additional moral disengagement at the victim locus blames the victims for bringing the maltreatment on themselves or attributes it to compelling circumstances. In this mode of self-exoneration, perpetrators view themselves as victims forced to behave injuriously by wrongdoers’ offensive behavior or by force of circumstances. By viewing themselves as victims, they may feel self-righteous in their retaliatory actions. This set of mechanisms either weakens or eliminates the regulatory power of moral self-sanctions over harmful practices. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 62

Categorization

• XREF: The victim locus here is the precise mechanism corroborating vault claims about how Islamophobic policy supporters dehumanized refugees and Muslims as subhuman.
• DEFINE: Maps the three loci (agency, outcome, victim) onto the distinct disengagement mechanisms.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 62