advantageous comparison – Engaging Peace

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 1.

Posted on February 12, 2016March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

In his new book, Moral Disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves, psychologist Albert Bandura does a masterful job of showing how, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) promotes moral disengagement to promote arms sales at all costs.

For example, leaders of the NRA have offered moral justifications (or at least pseudo-moral justifications) for unlimited arms sales, asserting, for example, that if the German people had been armed during the Holocaust, “we wouldn’t have had the tragedy we had there.”

NRA spokespeople also make generous use of euphemistic labeling to sanitize the activities of the gun industry—essentially equating guns with free speech, and portraying gun laws as a form of governmental gag order.

The NRA leadership also make ample use of the moral disengagement process of advantageous comparison, suggesting that if it was not immoral for people at Honeywell to make nuclear weapons components, then there certainly can’t be anything wrong with making and selling guns. Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA, invoked the Nazi persecution of Jews as a rationale for buying arms.

Another moral disengagement mechanism that Bandura identifies in the NRA arsenal is diffusion and displacement of responsibility. How could it be the fault of the gun industry, NRA proponents ask, if guns fall into the wrong hands and good people don’t have the guns they need to protect themselves from the bad guys?

In our next post, we will consider additional mechanisms of moral disengagement used by the arms industry to get people to arm to kill, and ways to combat their tactics.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Clever devils: getting good people to act bad

Posted on January 28, 2016 by kathiemm

“In Self-Defense”. 1876 editorial cartoon by A. B. Frost. Depicts a caricatured former Confederates in the U.S. South with a knife and smoking gun in his hands standing over the corpse of an African-American toddler.
Image is in the public domain.

Moral disengagement involves a set of unconscious psychological processes allowing individuals to engage in or support or tolerate inhumane treatment of others while still thinking of themselves as good people. Common examples include using euphemistic language to make bad things sound less bad (“collateral damage”), pseudo-moral justifications (“the war to end all wars”), displacement or diffusion of responsibility (“I was just following orders”), advantageous comparison (“killing a couple of terrorists is a lot better than letting them kill thousands”), and attribution of blame/dehumanization (“axis of evil threatening the peace of the world”).

Unscrupulous power-hungry political leaders throughout history have often successfully promoted moral disengagement in those whom they want to dominate for their own purposes. Unfortunately, in regard to the burgeoning global refugee crisis, expressions of moral disengagement in the home of the “tired and the poor” are rife.

Consider the following comments. What forms of moral disengagement, as listed above, do you see?

“When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse….it could be the great Trojan horse of all time…”
“some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy….things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
“One of the problems that we have and one of the reasons we’re so ineffective is they [terrorists] are using them (civilians, family members) as shields….It’s a horrible thing, but we’re fighting a very politically correct war.”
“I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us….They don’t use waterboarding over there….They use chopping off people’s heads.”
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems… they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 5. The slippery slope to moral disengagement

Posted on September 29, 2015September 29, 2015 by kathiemm

Lethal injection room at San Quentin, built in 2010
Image is in the public domain.

Moral disengagement, as discussed frequently on this blog, allows individuals to participate in or at least tolerate inhuman behaviors such as homicide and torture. Major forms of moral disengagement include misrepresenting, minimizing, or denying the consequences of one’s violence; making advantageous comparisons between one’s own violence and other forms of violence that are made to seem more frightening or odious; and displacing or diffusing responsibility for inhumane behavior—e.g., by “blaming the victim.”

Unlike members of that notorious group, the military-industrial complex, Steven Pinker does not explicitly endorse violence and other forms of inhumane behavior; as far as I know he is not encouraging the United States corporate power structure to become involved in yet another war. However, he appears to relish the details he provides on the horrors of human violence in the past and to be wearing extremely effective blinders relating to the often deadly exploitation of poorer nations by the West. Moreover, in lauding the peacefulness he attributes to the West, he uses processes identified by Albert Bandura as forms of moral disengagement.

Consider, for example, his assertion that “daily existence is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped or killed”—a state of anxiety that he views as gone from today’s enlightened democratic societies. Is he right or is he minimizing the dangers facing many immigrants and people of color in the nation in which he has become a highly paid celebrity?

And how about his claim that “by standards of the mass atrocities in human history, the lethal injection of a murderer in Texas, or an occasional hate crime in which a member of an ethnic minority group is intimidated by hooligans is pretty mild stuff”? Does that assertion smack of both minimization and advantageous comparison?

Also, in discussing the aberrant period of increased violence in the 1960s and 1970s, which he views as hitting the African American community particularly hard, Pinker suggests, “widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence” because “all those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead.” Can we see an element of displacement of responsibility here?

What do you think?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Russian war fever: Will it spread? (Part 2)

Posted on March 13, 2014March 12, 2014 by kathiemm

By guest author Alfred L. McAlister, Ph.D.

Part 1 of this series addressed the current crisis in Crimea from the perspective of the ploys used to gain popular support for military aggression. These include:

Map of Ukraine with Crimea highlighted. Image (map) by Sven Teschke, from Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Invocation of a moral obligation
Advantageous comparisons with worse actions by other nations, and
The demonization of enemies.

Let’s hope that history does not repeat itself now–that Western leaders don’t invoke debatable moral justifications for a military response to the crisis in Crimea, such as the need to preserve national reputation, prove the strength of our resolution to defend freedom abroad, or to punish Russian misdeeds to make an example that will deter acts of aggression elsewhere.

Let’s hope we don’t hear palliative contrasts between Western-led multilateral military action and Russia’s unilateral move, or portrayals of Russians as bestial characters only able to understand force as a means of negotiation.

If we do hear those kinds of arguments for an aggressive response to the conflict in Crimea, let’s be prepared to reject them. Let’s make peaceful negotiation backed by economic sanctions, no matter how long it takes or imperfect the results, the only option we accept for resolving international conflict unless our national interests are gravely and immediately threatened.

By anticipating the ways of thinking that spread war fever, we can “inoculate” ourselves against them and begin to make popular support for offensive warfare by democratic nations–like ancient plagues–a part of our past and not our future.

Dr. Alfred McAlister’s essay, “War Fever: How Can We Resist?” will be published this spring in the International Handbook of Negotiation and Mediation, edited by Mauro Gallucio (Berlin: Springer).