Reframing health harms as social discomfort is a linguistic strategy of moral disengagement.

Evidence

Tobacco companies also negate adverse health effects by treating tobacco smoke as a source of “social discomfort” rather than a carcinogen. Linguistically cleansing tobacco smoke of its chemical properties made the problem psychosocial rather than one of physical health … This report describes studies supporting the hypothesis that it is the smoker, rather than the chemical status of cigarette smoke itself which plays the key role in determining the non-smoker’s psycho-physiological response to the passive smoking situation. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1679

Categorization

• XREF: This is a specific instance of Bandura’s euphemistic labeling mechanism of moral disengagement, the book’s core thesis. — connects to: Health-based ethics replace prohibition with harm-diagnosis — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 149
• DEFINE: Illustrates how ‘linguistic cleansing’ converts a physical-health risk into a psychosocial problem, a concrete example of euphemistic reframing.