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Henry Imler September 18th, 2006
The following are my notes from a paper entitled: Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities (Link to PDF) by Albert Bandura.
Thesis:
“Moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by:”
- (false) moral justification
- sanitizing language
- advantageous comparision
- disavowal of a sense of personal agency by 1diffusion of responcibility or 2displacement of responcibility
- disreguarding or minimizing the injurous effects of one’s actions
- attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of those who were victimized.
The structure of inhumanites is a “supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people.”
Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to human personal standards, safeguards build into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renouce cruelty.
[...] This paper will seek to explore the relationship between those in power that abuse it, otherwise known as the oppressors, and those that were the recipients of that abuse of power, affectionately known as the oppressed. More specifically, this paper will look first at a particular case of this relationship, the case of the bombing of Hiroshima by the American military with an atomic bomb. Then it will look at a wide-scale nuclear war in general. Three main sources were used in this limited inquiry; John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, and lastly the academic paper Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. The grid of oppression will be looked at as it applies to the case, incorporating elements from Hiroshima and The Fate of the Earth. The grid of oppression is a collection of five ways that oppression can work according to Marion Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference. They include exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence, and environmental injustice. Finally, the cases will be examined in light of the social cognitive theory put forth by Bandura. While the bombing and aftermath of Hiroshima was not a clear-cut example of postcolonial strife, there are elements that pervade the reading. The Fate of the Earth details the consequences would be if the powers left over from the postcolonial world ever took the step and started a nuclear holocaust. [...]