Policymakers shift blame for escalation onto circumstances to shed responsibility

Evidence

Governments often attribute military escalation to compelling circumstances. Situational attribution reduces personal responsibility for choosing an escalative course. House Speaker John Boehner was highly skeptical that air strikes would defeat the militants, “At the end of the day somebody’s boots will have to be on the ground,” he explained (Frizell, 2014). When asked whether it would be American boots if other countries refused to commit ground troops he replied, “We have no choice” (Frizell, 2014). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2493

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the vault’s claims about how ordinary people, here policymakers, rationalize harmful policy through external attributions of blame. — connects to: Legislators chose disaster-relief over fault-based framing to set award ceilings — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 2138
• QUESTION: Is the situational-attribution mechanism Bandura describes here the same displacement-of-responsibility pathway at work in Cooper’s social-conservatism argument?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2493