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ALBERT BANDURA: Currently, I'm studying moral agency because this is really fundamental to the quality of life we have in a society, namely what kind of world do we want to live in?

Most of the moral theories were centered around adoption of moral principles and moral reasoning, but divorced from behavior because they assumed that if you adopt moral principles, that automatically produces moral behavior. And I was saying, you know, it'll be a good idea to hook on behavior on each of these theories. So here are two even and moral disengagement. I think I was going against the prevailing theories of morality.

Our problem is not that people lack moral stance. Our problem is that people who do harm and they live in peace with themselves. Most of our large-scale humanities are perpetrated by decent people. So then, what are the mechanisms by which you disengage? My theory is that people encounter moral predicaments in which the things they really desire they can get by violating their moral standards. They strip morality from their behavior and they don't have to pay the costs of self-contempt. And so then, in this theory, I outline a whole set of mechanisms at which that disengagement occurs.

The first is moral justification by using worthy ends to justify harmful means. You have justifications in terms of ideology and political systems. We're killing for communism. We're killing for a democracy.

We have economic justifications. So you have tobacco products are killing half a million people annually, and farmers are growing tobacco plants. They don't see this as a moral issue. This is a legitimate business. So that's disengaging morality by stripping morality from the activity.

Voltaire put it well when he said, those who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you to commit atrocities.

Then another one is you, as sanitizing a comparison, namely that the harm you save is much greater than any harm you might cause. So you know we could be bombing places, with a lot of civilian casualties, but that's a small price for promoting freedom.

And the third one is we use euphemistic language. We don't bomb people, we use collateral damage. So that's another way of stripping humanity from your behavior.

So those three are especially powerful because they serve a dual function. Namely they invest morality in the mission but disengage morality in those who have to do the fighting and the killing.

The other way in which you reduce your sense of responsibility is by diffusion responsibility. And you do that in a variety of ways. You have a group decision making, so no one's personally responsible for it. You fractionate the tasks into smaller bits so that no one feels responsible for the final activity.

For example, in the death penalty where you have to be able to kill a human being, there is a member of an execution team at San Quentin, at that time they were using the electric chair, he participated in 126 executions. His job was to strap the left leg to the chair. So he said, I was never the executioner. So if you fractionate it in enough little parts, no one feels responsible. So that's the way of eliminating responsibility for the harm.

The next mechanism is at the level of the effects— to what extent can you prove that that behavior is harmful. So you have tobacco executives claiming there's no evidence that smoking produces health problems or cancer. So there you see there are big fights and then they use freedom as the justification.

And then, at the final level, is where you're focusing on the victims. This is where you demonize the victims. Once you reduce people to subhuman levels, then you dissociate that people from a sense of common humanity, and it makes it easy to tell them because they are reduced to somewhat less than human.

And then the other mechanism is to attribute blame for it. All you need to do is pick a response from your opponents and treat that as the instigating cause. And you're simply responding to witless behavior. And you're forced into aggressing toward them. And so you can be doing a lot of harm and still retaining your positive self-regard.

What I do in this book on moral disengagement is now analyze all the leading social systems and how they use this set of mechanisms of moral disengagement to do harm and still feel good about themselves. In the book, I also commented on the fantastic power of humanisation in curbing human cruelty. I use a number of examples that demonstrate that power.

In Vietnam, when the Khaled battalion was carrying on a campaign in Mi Ly, they killed about 500 people. Thompson was the lead helicopter pilot in the gunship. His mission was to try to smoke out the Viet Cong so they could wipe them out. So he's flying over Mi Ly and he sees a little girl who seems to be hurt, so he calls down to the battalion commander and tells the commander to help her. And he sees the soldier kick her over and spray her with bullets.

He sees a mother at a hut there and she's terrified with a little child clinging to her. And he calls down to save the family, and the battalion commander says the only thing she's going to get is a hand grenade. And so he lowers his helicopter in the line of the advance and tells his gunner to turn his guns on the US soldiers if they approaching on this family, which is a fantastic act of moral courage. I mean he's going to turn his guns on his own soldiers. And he says, when I saw the terror in her eyes, I could not have done otherwise.

So here you have the sense of common humanity. This was an example of the fantastic power of humanism. If you want to create a humane society, it has to be done through a sense of common humanity. And you build that through a connection in which you see that your well-being is connected to the well-being by others. You commit yourself to higher purposes, some issue that's greater than yourself. And that also builds commonalities. And so the issue of morality is central because that decides what kind of world we're be living in.

See, all my work was positive. Namely, how do you enable people to exercise better control? So all the stuff I'm modeling, this is all used positively. The former therapists that I was promoting, this is how to bring out the best in people. And when I get into moral disengagement, you've got to be able to find out what are the impediments to change.

My final message is one of promoting a sense of common humanity.

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