Does Church hierarchy engage in ‘moral disengagement?’

How do good people end up doing bad things? How do sincere and committed persons engage in crimes normally not associated with them? Social psychology explains it in terms of moral disconnect or disengagement.

Moral disengagement is the process by which an individual convinces himself that ethical standards do not apply to him within a particular situation or context.

When athletes excuse harmful behavior like intentionally hurting or fouling opponents, they are exhibiting moral disengagement, which is the conditional endorsement of transgressive behavior using one of the eight psychosocial mechanisms or practicing them in combination.

Mechanisms for Moral Disengagement

Albert Bandura (1925-2021), a famous American-Canadian psychologist, identified eight pathways of moral disengagement in his social cognitive theory (SCT) of moral cognition and conduct. 

The eight mechanisms include moral justification, euphemism labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. 

These mechanisms of moral disengagement function by reducing or eliminating unpleasant emotional responses (such as guilt and shame) that are typically connected to immoral behavior. So indirectly they encourage immoral behavior.

Behavioral ethics has provided evidence for every mechanism along with definitions and instances that can be found in day-to-day life.

Combining the Mechanisms

All eight processes are interconnected; therefore they can be used in combination to put moral disengagement into practice.  It's important to note that when processes are utilized in combination, the cumulative effect can be greater than the sum of the individual effects. This shows that integrating many systems may be the most efficient way to mask emotional self-regulation.

For instance, the attribution of guilt and moral justification are two procedures that can be combined. This can be seen in sports, for instance, when a player fouls an opponent and claims to have done so in retribution for the opponent's previous foul on one of their teammates.

In this case, the offender could place the responsibility on their victim by claiming that the offense was in retaliation to an earlier transgression committed by the victim. They may also claim that they did it to protect their teammate's honor, thus fulfilling a valuable social need to ethically justify the action.

Progressive Moral Disengagement

Normally moral degradation or disengagement does not begin abruptly. Moral detachment in a person develops gradually in people, causing a shift in its dangerous trends. At first, people commit relatively minor offenses that are simple to justify by using one or more of the eight methods.

As a person becomes more skilled at exploiting the eight processes, more destructive activities are conditionally approved. If the damaging actions suit one's self-interests or are regarded as profitable, moral engagement is seen to gradually wane.

This process, which eventually leads to people engaging in morally repulsive behavior, which they would have once found repugnant, is subtle in a way that people may not be aware of the changes happening to their moral cognition and behavior.

For example, cyclists often join a riding group to foster their athletic interests, but soon discover that their integration into the group involves participation in a doping program. This kind of practice has been observed in many doping scandals in professional cycling.

These athletes frequently recall at first refusing or agreeing to use only particular substances, also too in little amounts. But as time goes by, individuals gradually gain the capacity to defend their participation in the entire doping program, ultimately consuming chemicals in dosages that they had never considered before.

Athletes involved in such practices continue the usage of performance-enhancing drugs, without feeling emotions like guilt or shame that may deter progressive engagement, due to the gradual development of moral disengagement in parallel with the level of engagement in the transgressive act.

Conclusion

When one of the eight psychosocial mechanisms is used to conditionally condone immoral behavior, moral disengagement has occurred. It is crucial to comprehend the aetiology and definitions of the eight mechanisms to recognize and actively oppose their use because the social nature of sports and other common activities creates the required conditions for all eight mechanisms to function.

Understanding the characteristics of the eight processes is crucial, and it's also important to know that using them all at once could be very detrimental and that over time, moral decline could result in more heinous behavior.

We can understand the moral conflicts in powerful institutions like the Church, which strives to be morally good, by referring to these moral disengagement pathways. Understanding them is the first step to preventing moral disengagement or disconnect.

*Jesuit Father Kuruvilla Pandikattu is a theologian and Chair Professor of JRD Tata Foundation for Business Ethics at XLRI-Xavier School of Management in Jamshedpur, India. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.