Moral Disengagement and the Destruction of the Environment
Please visit the Growth is Madness blog, to read an absolutely brilliant paper by psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement
It’s a long read, but well worth the time investment. Description from the blog:
In the article below, Bandura details an array of mechanisms used by those engaged in environmentally destructive practices to avoid the moral self-censure which would otherwise govern their behavior. From considerations of social and moral justification to our uses of euphemistic language to disguise the truth of our actions, it is a remarkably insightful examination of many facets of environmental politics including the games played by climate change and population deniers. Regarding the latter, Bandura writes, “High consumption lifestyles wreaking havoc on the environment and harming other people’s lives is a moral issue of commission. Evasion of the influential role of population growth in environmental degradation is a moral issue of omission.”
Paper Abstract: The present paper documents the influential role played by selective moral disengagement for social practices that cause widespread human harm and degrade the environment. Disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables people to pursue detrimental practices freed from the restraint of self-censure. This is achieved by investing ecologically harmful practices with worthy purposes through social, national, and economic justifications; enlisting exonerative comparisons that render the practices righteous; use of sanitising and convoluting language that disguises what is being done; reducing accountability by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; ignoring, minimising, and disputing harmful effects; and dehumanising and blaming the victims and derogating the messengers of ecologically bad news. These psychosocial mechanisms operate at both the individual and social systems levels.
Source: Growth is Madness blog
February 25th, 2008 at 2:46 am
I’m glad to see Bandura’s article linked to here. It’s a great one.
One reason I posted it was that he minces no words about population growth. And perhaps my greatest concern about population involves its close connection to today’s extinction rates.
For anyone unfamiliar with it, the book Sparing Nature, by anthropologist Jeffrey McKee is eye opening in that regard. He shows how the “human wedge” has increasingly driven one species after another to extinction.
It’s appalling that orangutans (and all the other great apes) are endangered as a result of human numbers and activities. I just hope more people can come to appreciate both the ecological gravity and moral weight of the mass extinction we’re seeing. I struggle on my blog with even informed environmentalists who seem to shrug it off as just one in a list of problems but not nearly as important as climate change (which does of course contribute to it, but no more so than population/land use issues).