https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv6LXpkbTQ0&feature=player_detailpage
In legal terms, criminal negligence is “recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences).”
Members of families, communities of color, and indeed the whole planet can be and have been subjected to criminal negligence: children become throwaways, people of color are denied basic human rights, and runaway destruction of the planet proceeds at breakneck speed.
Albert Bandura, whom we often cite, has described how individual mechanisms of moral disengagement enable people to engage in or tolerate various forms of atrocities and still feel like moral human beings.
Bandura also confronts us with the ways in which collective moral disengagement operates to cause immense human harm and degradation of the environment.
Bandura lays some of the blame for the destruction of natural resources and countless species on the tendency of conservatives and mega-corporations to treat nature as a commodity to be ruthlessly mined, harvested, and exploited for profit.
Bandura also places blame on highly consumptive life styles, consumerism, and unfettered self-interest—and the capacity of people to find justifications for harmful ways of living and even make detrimental behaviors seem righteous.
Check out the climate change deniers and you will find countless examples of the ways criminal neglect of the well-being of our globe is distorted and denied, and justifications are advanced for destructive practices enriching the rich and powerful while raping the land, poisoning air and water, and destroying lives and livelihoods.
Then listen to the climate change activists, and consider the ways in which you can help our planet survive for your children and grandchildren. Without moral engagement on behalf of the earth and its inhabitants, they won’t have much of a future.