Moral Disengagement

In the 1980s, psychologist Albert Bandura asked a deeper question:

How do people disconnect their actions from their moral standards without feeling like bad people?

His answer became known as “moral disengagement.”

Bandura argued that people don’t abandon their morals. They temporarily deactivate them.

Using subtle psychological mechanisms, they make harmful behavior feel acceptable, even justified.

These mechanisms don’t feel sinister; they feel reasonable. They sound like maturity, professionalism, or realism.

Once you understand them, you begin to see them everywhere.

Here are the most important ones:

1. Framing Harm as Serving a Good Purpose

One of the most powerful forms of moral disengagement is moral justification. It’s the process of reframing harmful behavior as something noble or necessary.

People rarely say, “I’m hurting someone because I want to.” They say, “I’m doing this for the greater good.”

Soldiers convince themselves they’re defending freedom.

Executives justify layoffs as “protecting the company.”

Parents justify cruelty as “discipline.”

Bandura demonstrated this effect in controlled studies where participants were asked to administer punishment to others.

When the same action was framed as serving a worthy cause, people were willing to inflict significantly more harm than when it was presented neutrally.

Nothing about the behavior changed. Only the story did, and that made all the difference.

Humans don’t need permission to do bad things. They only need a reason that sounds good.

Remember what happened during COVID? Lockdown was framed as the greater good, while people's rights were trampled upon by those given the authority to do so

Freedom of speech was suspended as anyone with a contrary opinion was censored and fined, and sometimes their contents were yanked offline, and they were cancelled on social media.

Yes, you participated in that. Yes, You

Moral Disengagement II

Use of Euphemistic Language

Pay attention to how people talk about harmful acts.

Civilians aren’t killed; they become “collateral damage.”

Workers aren’t exploited; labor is “optimized.”

Surveillance isn’t invasive; it’s “data collection.”

This isn’t just wordplay.

Language shapes emotional response. It creates distance between what is done and what it means.

When actions are wrapped in sanitized language, people feel less personal responsibility and less empathy for those affected.

Not because they were monsters, but because the language allowed them to avoid confronting the human cost of what they had done.

When a terrible act is made to sound technical, it feels less real. And when it feels less real, it becomes easier to repeat.

Moral Disengagement III

“I Was Just Following Orders.”

This may be the most dangerous mechanism of all.

During the famous Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission, popularly called the Oputa Panel, sittings in Lagos

Hamza Al-Mustapha and Sergeant Rogers consistently claimed that as soldiers they were trained to obey the last command, and as a result of this, all the assassinations credited to them were orders that they were just following.

They argued that they had no fault and could not be judged as regards motives and morals because they were simply carrying out instructions given to them by a superior officer.

They believed the authority figure bore the moral weight of their actions, not them.

That same logic appears everywhere: in corporate scandals, bureaucratic failures, and institutional abuse.

People reassure themselves by saying things like, “I was just doing my job,” or “I didn’t make the rules.”

But systems don’t act — people do.

Joab got a letter from David that he should place Uriah at the forefront of the battle, knowing full well the young man would most likely die as a result of this instruction.

He obeyed it because he was just following orders.

Every harmful system depends on countless small acts of compliance.

No one wakes up intending to cause harm. They choose not to question, not to resist, and not to take responsibility for what their obedience enables.

Moral Disengagement IV

When Everyone Is Responsible, No One Is

Moral disengagement becomes even more powerful in groups.

Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane demonstrated this in their famous bystander experiments: participants were far less likely to help someone in distress when others were present.

Why?

Because responsibility spreads thin.

Each person assumes someone else will act, speak up, or intervene.

The result: inaction becomes contagious.

This is how toxic cultures persist — not through overt villains, but through ordinary people staying silent.

Bureaucracies, workplaces, and institutions often rely on this diffusion of responsibility.

When everyone assumes someone else will take charge, accountability disappears.

Silence, compliance, and small acts of omission become the mechanisms through which harm continues, quietly, without anyone feeling personally responsible.

I remember being told about a young man whose parents owned an eatery in Ikeja, Lagos.

He was the manager, and he insisted on sleeping with any lady who would work in the eatery before giving the person a job.

It started with one person until it became the norm. Nobody stood up to him, nobody corrected him, nobody reported him. His friends stayed quiet. His parents looked away. Staff members swallowed it.

People knew, but they said nothing. It persisted for a long time until someone mentioned it to a Christian brother whose fellowship one of his would be victims was attending at the time

She went to interview for a job at the eatery, and he stated his conditions clearly. She needed the job and desired that she wouldn't have to pay such a price to get it.

The brother prayed with her on Friday.

The interview was to happen at a hotel on Monday Morning.

The young man died the next day in his sleep.

His death could have been prevented if everybody hadn't kept quiet.

The supernatural would not have been invoked.

He could have changed, repented, or gotten disgraced and embarrassed in such a manner that he would stop and reflect.

Moral Disengagement V

Making People Easier to Hurt

It’s difficult to harm someone you truly see as human. So the mind finds shortcuts.

People become categories.

Groups become stereotypes.

Individuals become abstractions.

When others are reduced this way, moral restraint weakens.

Research in neuroscience shows that when people perceive others as outsiders, activity decreases in brain regions associated with empathy.

In effect, the brain stops responding to them as fully human.

A well-known study by Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske at Princeton showed that when people looked at members of stigmatized groups, their brains reacted differently than when they looked at others.

Instead of activating areas linked to empathy and understanding, their brains showed patterns associated with disgust.

In other words, the normal emotional response that helps us recognize someone else’s humanity didn’t activate. Empathy wasn’t just reduced — it was largely absent.

There was an accident in Lagos. A truck bringing cattle from the North turned over, and it caused a lot of traffic along that corridor.

A driver asked a street trader what caused the traffic.

The street Trader explained what had happened. The driver asked the street trader if nobody had died.

She said nobody died.

Another passerby said, "According to reports, eleven Abokis died."

The street trader replied, "Are Abokis people?"

Gbenga Samuel-Wemimo

@GbengaWemimo

·

9h

Moral Disengagement VI

Blaming the Victim

When all else fails, people turn blame outward.

“They deserved it.”

“They should have known better.”

“They brought it on themselves.”

This response protects the self-image.

If the victim is at fault, the world feels fair, and we remain innocent.

In their classic 1966 study, psychologists Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons observed that when participants witnessed someone suffering and were powerless to intervene, they began to devalue the victim.

They concluded that this wasn’t cruelty; it was a psychological defense.

Accepting that someone could suffer randomly or through circumstances beyond our control threatens our sense of order and fairness.

Blaming the victim restores that sense of control, allowing people to look away without confronting their own helplessness or complicity.

It enables silence, avoidance, and moral disengagement, and lets people maintain a positive self-image even in the presence of injustice.

The federal government approved staggering infrastructural projects in the South West and the North.

Some Southeasterners saw it and asked why they were not getting metro rails, light rail, or road infrastructure projects, too.

There may be many answers that speak to the fact of the matter, but the wrong answer is "Who did you vote for?"

People should not be punished for picking a losing side in an election, and people should not be rewarded for picking a winning side in an election.

Fairness dictates that the winner of an election is fair to all.

Moral Disengagement on Social Media

If moral disengagement had a modern amplifier, it would be the internet.

People on X would latch on to other people and insult them, curse them, "drag them", say all sorts of things to them that they could never dare say or do if they are looking at the person face to face.

In 2004, psychologist John Suler described what he called the online disinhibition effect — the tendency for people to say and do things online they would never consider face-to-face.

Anonymity removes accountability.

Physical distance dulls empathy. The absence of immediate social feedback eliminates emotional consequences.

You don’t see the hurt in someone’s eyes. You don’t feel the tension in the room. There is no pause for reflection.

As a result, moral brakes weaken. Cruelty escalates faster. Judgment becomes effortless. Responsibility dissolves into the crowd.

The psychological mechanisms Bandura identified didn’t change — only the environment did.

The internet didn’t make people worse. It simply removed the friction that once kept their better instincts engaged.

What Makes Moral Disengagement Dangerous is that it rarely feels like wrongdoing. It doesn’t scream immorality.

It feels reasonable.

It feels justified.

It feels normal.

You see it when you scroll past suffering because you’re tired. When you stay silent to avoid conflict. When you profit, even passively, from systems you know are unjust.

In these moments, nothing feels wrong. No alarm goes off in your conscience. The actions, or inactions, are small, subtle, and justified.

That’s why people are often shocked in hindsight when they look back and realize the harm they enabled.

The danger isn’t that humans have no morals. It’s how easily and quietly we learn to put them aside, while still convincing ourselves we are good people.

Dear CHRISTIAN,

Instead of asking, “Am I a good person?” try asking something more difficult:

Where AM I justifying actions, words, or inactions that I would have judged harshly five years ago?

Is it at work, where compromises seem unavoidable? In relationships, where staying silent feels easier than conflict?

In the words I use about others, or in the things I choose to overlook?

The difference between good and bad people isn’t about groups or beliefs. It exists in every human heart, changing with circumstances, pressure, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Awareness of that shift is the first step toward responsibility.

No one is completely immune to justifying harmful behavior, but there are ways to protect yourself.

Slow down moral decisions.

Speed favors justification, and reflection restores agency.

Use concrete language.

Say what’s actually happening, not the sanitized version.

Personalize consequences. Ask who bears the cost of your choices.

Question authority. Respect it, but never outsource your conscience.

Notice discomfort. Guilt is often a signal, not an enemy.

Stay close to people different from you. Distance breeds distortion.

Most importantly, remember this:

The goal isn’t to prove you’re a good person. The goal is to stay awake to the ways you might not be.

The most unsettling realization isn’t that humans are capable of terrible things; it’s that we can do them without noticing.

Moral failure often operates quietly, wrapped in reasons, wearing the mask of normality.

The moment you believe you’re immune is when you become most vulnerable.

Awareness doesn’t make you perfect; it makes you responsible.