Structural diffusion of responsibility in corporations shields executives and strips morality from harm

Evidence

In “deferred prosecution” and “nonprosecution” settlements corporations are treated as the agents of wrongdoing and fined for criminal behavior. High-echelon officials are granted immunity buttressed by diffused responsibility and deniability built into the corporate structure itself. With little chance of convicting high officials under these self-protective conditions, prosecutors opt for civil settlements of criminal conduct. … An agentless, corporate model has evolved in the banking industry. … Transgressing corporations shield their upper-echelon executives from accountability for their harmful practices and pay fines without having to admit wrongdoing. They receive taxpayer bailouts for financial losses and turn financial penalties into tax benefits by writing off fines as business expenses. … They do so with the tacit consent of lawmakers who depend heavily on corporate funding of their political campaigns. This set of exonerations makes it easy to strip morality from harmful practices. With faulty corporate practices disconnected from adverse consequences for wrongdoers, the free-market system loses its corrective influence. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1605

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘agentless corporate model’ as a structural arrangement that supports Bandura’s diffusion/displacement of responsibility mechanisms.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing vault claims about ordinary people rationalizing support for harmful policy; here the mechanism operates at institutional scale. — connects to: Capitalism abstracts in order to extract and distances harm to dodge accountability — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 111; Capitalism shifts blame between individuals and structure to deflect accountability — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 145; Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 142 (+3 more)
• SEED: The ‘agentless model’ — harm with no indictable agent — is a strong case study for an essay on how modern institutions enable moral disengagement through structured deniability.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1605