Social factors determine which harmful acts count as moral violations

Evidence

Conventions encompass social rules of acceptable conduct established by consensus in a given group. Conventional standards vary across time, place, and cultural milieu. Morality encompasses behavior that can be physically and psychologically injurious, behavior that inflicts harm on others, degrades them, and violates their human rights. However, a variety of social factors influence which harmful activities are assigned to the moral domain and which are excluded (Bandura, 1991b). In moral disengagement, self-monitoring is the locus for reconstrual of harmful behavior, minimizing its wrongfulness and disputing its harmfulness. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 214

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Turiel’s moral-conventional distinction in developmental psychology, and to the reader’s interest in how offending acts get reclassified.

Related

• Which harmful acts count as moral matters is socially negotiable, enabling exclusion. (similarity 0.91)
• Conventions are consensual and vary culturally, whereas morality concerns harm and rights (similarity 0.86)
• Disengaging self-sanctions requires contesting evidence of harm rather than denying the act (similarity 0.83)
• Moral self-censure strength depends on how perpetrators regard their victims. (similarity 0.82)
• People retain their moral standards while selectively suspending them for harm. (similarity 0.81)
• People can suspend moral standards only for specific harmful activities while keeping them elsewhere. (similarity 0.80)
• Acquired moral standards do not regulate conduct unceasingly (similarity 0.80)
• Moral self-sanctions regulate conduct before external sanctions do (similarity 0.80)
• Moral disengagement re-perceives immoral acts while morality shifting reframes them as moral (similarity 0.80)
• Moral standards form from the reactions of emotionally attached others (similarity 0.80)
• Moral principle activation only shapes behavior when linked to the active self-concept (similarity 0.79)
• People routinely compromise their moral standards when facing social predicaments. (similarity 0.79)
• Moral disengagement techniques can be explicitly unmasked and reversed (similarity 0.79)
• Moral disengagement causally drives delinquency through disinhibitory processes rather than my being its byproduct (similarity 0.79)
• Moral disengagement is common in ordinary daily life, not just atrocities (similarity 0.79)