Structurally engineered ignorance diffuses moral responsibility for a product’s misuse

Evidence

Under a poorly monitored distribution system, manufacturers and wholesale distributors can shield themselves from knowledge of what happens to their guns in sales to the public. Unknowingness by design not only assuages moral concern, but permits deniability, nonresponsibility, and protection against legal liability. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1096

Categorization

• XREF: This is the moral disengagement mechanism of displacement/diffusion of responsibility via designed ignorance — connects to vault claims about how institutional actors rationalize harmful policy. — connects to: Corporate epistemic authority silences the people it constructs by branding them ignorant — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 221
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Unknowingness by design’ is a striking concept: institutions can structure operations so agents genuinely don’t know consequences, yet the ignorance is itself culpable and engineered — a dense mechanism worth sitting with.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1096