Premeditated murderers morally disengage before they can kill.

Evidence

In intentional murders, the various methods of moral disengagement come strongly into play. Murderers have to strip the moral self-sanctions from taking a person’s life. When they kill in the name of religion and ideology, they persuade themselves of the morality of their homicidal actions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1962 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Adept moral disengagement removes both restraints on harmful conduct and condemnatory self-reactions to it. Harmful conduct can even be exhilarating when perpetrators invest it with high moral purpose, sanitize it, and strip humanity from it. When wrongdoing results in achieving a goal and morality is thoroughly disengaged from the means used to get it, individuals are not bothered about what they are doing. However, morality is not always so easily disengageable, and moral disengagement is not always sustainable. Someone once described a “scotch conscience” as one that is too weak to deter wrongdoing but strong enough to make one feel miserable about it. The tormented life of Emma O’Reilly, a soigneur for the famed but later discredited cyclist Lance Armstrong, illustrates the heavy social and personal costs of engaging in an illicit activity while acknowledging that it is shameful (Ranieri, 2012). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 228 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Premeditated homicide requires stripping moral self-sanctions first — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1962; Moral reconstrual, not personality change, converts civilians into killers — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 342; Executing a person requires stripping morality from each step of the process — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1868 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Premeditated homicide requires stripping moral self-sanctions first #corroborates (0.97) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1962
• People justify harmful acts to themselves before committing them #corroborates (0.92) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 341
• Moral disengagement can fail, leaving perpetrators tormented by guilt #complicates (0.87) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 228