Routinizing lethal tasks shifts attention 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: Directly parallels the vault claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy — the mechanism of moral disengagement via role routinization explains how Cooper’s social-conservatives and authoritarians normalize Islamophobic policy without guilt. — connects to: Destructiveness rises with both damage salience and coordination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 726
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2029