Moral disengagement is a term from developmental psychology, educational psychology and social psychology for the process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in a particular context. This is done by separating moral reactions from inhumane conduct and disabling the mechanism of self-condemnation. Thus, moral disengagement involves a process of cognitive re-construing or re-framing of destructive behavior as being morally acceptable without changing the behavior or the moral standards.
In social cognitive theory of morality, self-regulatory mechanisms embedded in moral standards and self-sanctions translate moral reasoning into actions, and, as a result, moral agency is exerted. Thus, the moral self is situated in a broader, socio-cognitive self-theory consisting of self-organizing, proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulative mechanisms. Three major sub-functions are operating in this self-regulatory system in which moral agency is grounded. The first sub-function is self-monitoring of one's conduct, which is the initial step of taking control over it. "Action gives rise to self-reactions through a judgmental function in which conduct is evaluated against internal standards and situational circumstances". Thus, moral judgments evoke self-reactive influence. The self-reactive and judgmental mechanisms constitute the second and third sub-function.
Generally, moral standards are adopted to serve as guides for good behavior and as deterrents for bad conduct. Once internalized control has developed, people regulate their actions by the standards they apply to themselves and this give them self-satisfaction and a sense of self-worth. Individuals refrain from behaving in ways that violate their moral standards in order to avoid self-condemnation. Therefore, self-sanctions play a significant role in keeping conduct in line with these internal moral standards and hence also in regulating inhumane conduct. However, moral standards only function as fixed internal regulators of conduct when self-regulatory mechanisms have been activated. Many different social and psychological processes prevent the activation of self-sanction. Selective activation of self-sanctions and internal moral control or disengagement allows for a wide range of behaviour, given the same moral standard.
Moral disengagement functions in the perpetration of inhumanities through moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparison, displacing or diffusing responsibility, disregarding or misrepresenting injurious consequences, and dehumanising the victim. Rather than operating independently, these cognitive mechanisms are interrelated within a sociostructural context to promote inhumane conduct in people's daily lives.
Several mechanisms of moral disengagement have been identified by professional psychologists.Hartman, L., & Hartman, B. (2024). "An ethical advantage of autistic employees in the workplace". Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1364691. 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1364691.
Detailed mechanisms
Moral justification One method of disengagement is portraying inhumane behavior as though it has a moral purpose in order to make it socially acceptable. Moral justification is the first of a series of mechanisms suggested by Bandura that can induce people to bypass self-sanction and violate personal standards. For example, torture, in order to obtain information necessary to protect the nation's citizens, may be seen as acceptable. This form of disengagement happens before the decision to engage in a behaviour, usually people only engage in reprehensible conduct after they have justified the actions on a moral ground. Through cognitive reconstrual, wrongful behaviours can be perceived as righteous.
Religious principles, nationalistic imperatives and righteous ideologies have long been used as means to justify reprehensible and destructive conducts. One example is the holy terror justified by religious principles documented by Rapport and Alexander.
Moral justifications can be highly effective in influencing public opinion, due to the difficulty in detecting deceptive moral claims. Literature review by Kathleen McGraw found that the difficulty arises from the following four sources. People are generally susceptible to deception. Political communication is usually in the form of media, which eliminates the nonverbal cues that can assist the detection of deception. People become overly focused on the individual due to social judgement biases. Politicians accusing each other of lying is not the norm of political culture, therefore it is not natural for the public to suspect moral claims.
McGraw also identified four variants of moral-claim justifications in politics. Personal ethical standards. Shared political values. Not commonly shared values for example religion-specific principles. A claim of collective benefits.
Among these variants, it is found that justifications which appeal to personal ethical standards and collective social benefits are the most effective in shaping public opinion.
People with high moral principles are not exempt from moral justification. They are less likely to conform to arbitrary social demands; however, when their principles are violated, they are also more likely to display aggressive behaviour towards violators.
Euphemistic labelling Using euphemistic language to describe reprehensible conduct is another way that individuals can morally disengage from their moral standards. Language shapes individual thought forms which constitute the basis for courses of action. Activities can take on different "appearances" depending on what names are given or attached them. Euphemistic language is a means to make injurious and harmful behavior respectable and reduce responsibility for it from the person. With the help of intricate rephrasing, detrimental behaviour is made innocuous and acceptable, and people who are part of it are liberated from feeling sense of guilty. Adults are more likely to engage in aggressive conduct when the detrimental act is sanitized than when it is labelled as an aggression.
There exists different varieties of euphemisms. One of them is dependent on sanitizing language. By disguising the deleterious with innocent wordings, the detrimental behaviour itself becomes more respectable. Soldiers "waste" people rather than kill them. Bombing missions are executed in the name of "servicing the target," and for the sake of public utility. Terrorists name themselves as "freedom fighters." The attacks are depicted as "clean, surgical strikes," and the victims are eloquently listed as "collateral damage." Sanitizing euphemism is also commonly used in less abominable daily activities that people perform every day. From the point of view of several government agencies, people are not laid off. Instead they are provided with a "career alternative enhancement", making it look like they are offered a job promotion. The lecturer may teach business students to rephrase lies in competitive business transactions for the sake of closing the deal as "strategic misrepresentation". The nuclear power industry has its own technical set of terms of euphemisms for the detrimental effects caused by nuclear mishaps to the public. An explosion is described as an "energetic dis-assembly," and a reactor accident is labeled as a "normal aberration". Last but not least, plutonium contamination is tagged as "infiltration". The acid rain which imposes destroying effects on lakes and forests has its own euphemistic label of "atmospheric deposition of anthropogenically derived acidic substances".
The agent-less passive style in presenting events is a second linguistic tool with the help of which people can establish the appearance that the blamable and pernicious acts stem from indescribable forces rather than people themselves. People removed themselves from being the agents of their own acts. When a driver explaining to police how he managed to demolish a telephone pole, he said "The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way, when it struck my front end." The specialized jargons of a legitimate enterprise can even be misused under an unlawful circumstance by the outlaw to beautify their harmful behaviours. In the Watergate vocabulary, criminal conspiracy was referred as a "game plan", and the conspirators were relabeled as "team players".
Advantageous comparison In addition to moral justification, another mechanism that individuals can deploy to make harmful behavior seem morally acceptable is termed advantageous comparison. This process exploits the contrast principle, which follows the assumption that the perception of human conduct is influenced by what it is compared against. That is, individuals contrast their conduct with other examples of more immoral behavior and in doing this comparison their own behavior is trivialized. The more immoral the contrasting behavior is, the more likely it is that one's destructive behavior will seem less bad. For example, "the massive destruction in Vietnam was minimized by portraying the American military intervention as saving the populace from Communist enslavement".Bandura (1999). p. 196.
These so-called exonerating comparisons rely on the moral justification by utilitarian standards. Two sets of judgements facilitate making destructive behavior morally acceptable. Firstly, non-violent alternatives are judged to be ineffective to achieve desired changes and consequently eliminated as options. "Secondly, utilitarian analyses affirm that one's injurious actions will prevent more human suffering than they cause." Albert Bandura suggested that applying the utilitarian calculus in specific situations is "quite slippery" because of the uncertainties that the future contains and the biases in human judgement. According to his belief, the calculation process of estimating the significance of potential threats is subjective.
Bandura also argues that moral justification and advantageous comparison are the most effective "self-disinhibitors" because they eliminate self-censure and change the appreciation of the self in the service of harmful activities. "What was once morally condemnable becomes a source of self-valuation".
Displacement of responsibility Another dissociative practice, known as displacement of responsibility, operates by distorting the relationship between actions and the effects they cause. People behave in ways they would normally oppose if a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the consequences of that behavior. Displacement of responsibility distorts facts. Under these conditions people view their actions as dictates of authorities rather than their own actions.
When people agree to being contributors to adverse results, it leads to strong operation of moral control involving themselves in harmful activity while trying to minimize the effect of that activity. They play the role of an agent of moral disengagement and start to behave in ways they ordinarily disavow if an appropriate authority accepts responsibility for their behavior. Personal liability for conduct drives people to view their actions as coming from authoritative figures under displaced responsibility. Not being the true agents of their actions, they are saved from self-condemnation. Displacement of responsibility revealed gruesome inhumanities through self-exemption in mass executions sanctioned socially. Self-exonerating deference to gruesome orders is evident in military atrocities, such as the My Lai massacre.