Routinized lethal work shifts focus from morality to operational proficiency

Evidence

In their interviews, members of the execution team saw themselves as doing society’s work as in other jobs in an institutional service facility. I’m here to do the job.” Their focus is not so much on the morality of their activity, but on performing their role proficiently: “Our job was to execute this man and we were going to do it in a professional manner”. As these comments reveal, after lethal activities become routinized into separate subfunctions, participants shift their attention from the morality of their activity to the operational details and efficiency of their specific jobs. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2029

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the ‘Troubling Transparency’ and law-merchant passages where institutionalized procedure replaces moral or direct judgment
• SEED: Angle: how bureaucratic routinization launders moral responsibility in any institutional killing — execution teams, drone operators, factory slaughter
• CANDY: The detail about swabbing an inmate’s arm with alcohol before executing them is a funny-ironic fact worth retelling