When change is impossible, people reframe harmful acts as serving moral purposes.

Evidence

In managing stressors, individuals can focus on changing the perturbing realities that cause them or on alleviating the emotional distress they cause (Bandura, 1997; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Executions leave little leeway for task-oriented coping strategies because the individual jobs cannot be restructured: nor do they allow alternative solutions. Therefore, executioners have to rely heavily on stress-reducing cognitive strategies so they can put a person to death without paying a heavy emotional toll. Positive reconstrual of the execution is one such strategy for mitigating its emotional aversiveness (Bandura, 1997; Gross, 1998). Construing executions as serving high moral and societal purposes changes the meaning of putting a person to death in ways that makes it less emotionally disturbing. For some, religious belief sanctifies executions: “I’d stop if I felt it were against my morals and the bible [ sic].” For others, the law legitimizes them: “It don’t bother me at all. The law says this and I follow it”. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2053

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism shown here — where structural constraints force moral agents toward cognitive rather than behavioral coping, and religion or law becomes the license — is the core rationalization pathway the reader wants to connect to Islamophobic policy support.
• XREF: This is the precise mechanism Bandura’s model offers for how policy enforcers legitimize harmful acts; directly corroborates vault authoritarianism claims.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2053