Tobacco executives deliberately avoided evidence of harm to sustain moral disengagement.

Evidence

The following incident illustrates how subsystems work in concert. As we have seen, for years, tobacco executives disputed evidence that nicotine is addictive and that smoking is a major contributor to lung cancer. Testifying in a state lawsuit, Geoffrey Bible, the chairman and chief executive of Philip Morris, stated that he would neither examine the company’s past research nor order any studies of the effects of smoking. He exonerated himself by shielding himself from evidence of the harmful effects of his product: … “I could spend the rest of my life looking backwards. I’m going to disengage for that debate” (Dedman, 1998). Tobacco executives enlist lawyers and paid consultants to challenge evidence of the harmful effects of smoking (White et al., 2009). When research in one of Philip Morris’s laboratories verified that nicotine is addictive, lawyers in a tobacco-law firm warned the company that such findings are “undesirable and dangerous” because they provide fodder for lawsuits: “This kind of research is a major tool of our adversaries on the addiction issue. The irony is that the industry-sponsored research is honing that tool” (Meier, 1998c). To avoid learning about the health effects of their product, the company closed the laboratory. … Company scientists found that ammonia speeds the body’s absorption of nicotine. This provided a means of increasing the nicotine “kick” without manipulating nicotine levels. Ammonia began to appear in cigarette products (Meier, 1998a). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1690

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘displacement of responsibility’ and evidence-shielding mechanism parallels the vault’s authoritarianism claims about willful ignorance rationalizing harmful policy.
• SEED: Angle: ‘strategic ignorance’ as a corporate moral technology — how executives engineer not-knowing to protect self-image.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1690