Moral disengagement

 

If you hurt someone unjustly, you will feel it yourself and a sense of regret will arise in your mind. But if you hurt someone and then prove that that person was a bad person or that you hurt him on behalf of Allah, then that regret will not arise in your mind. You will be happy. This is called moral disengagement.

Throughout history, individuals, organizations, institutions or states that have done evil have always been half evil and half saintly. Every psychopath or sociopath has a charming side. Every dictator, every drug lord, every godfather's party has a gentle, humane, emotional, charitable social or religious contribution. Evil is never separate from good.

The contribution of an individual to an organization depends entirely on the institutional culture. If the culture of that organization is positive, humane, moral and transparent, then even if there is a lot of corruption or inefficiency, they come out of it and become a positive organization. And if the culture of that institution is negative, looting and unclear in its goals, then even if ninety-nine percent of people think of themselves as honest and good people, it turns into a harmful and cruel evil institution.

Institutional culture determines why people work. In institutions with negative institutional culture, people work for personal gain and as a result, the injustices and violations of rules that occur on the majority or society, the 'good people' are busy painting them white. The bad guys control it by stepping on their necks. If it were not for those good people, this fortress of the bad guys would have collapsed long ago.

In August 1975, 'a few deviant soldiers' killed a pure positive culture of this country, were they really a few deviant soldiers? That they were not, is proven by what their institution did in the next twenty years. But were all of the large Bangladesh Army bad people? Certainly not. But how does this happen?

A few days ago, I wrote about Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory. One part of Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory is moral disengagement theory. In this theory, he showed how people contribute to evil and harmful actions as a group and in what process they absolve themselves of responsibility and live happily and peacefully with an innocent mind, considering themselves honest, considerate and good people.

How do normally considerate people do cruel and harmful actions and still live happily and peacefully with an innocent mind in their minds? Based on his agentic theory, Dr. Bandura provides a specific explanation of that psychosocial system.

Through moral disengagement, people remove their moral self-sanctions from their harmful behavior. Agentic theory is a social cognitive theory that deals with the conflict between the individual motivations and values ​​of a member of a group or organization and the motivations and values ​​of his or her group or organization.

Moral self-sanctions are the mental restrictions or prohibitions of individuals against doing something wrong. They justify their harmful behavior by presenting it as a necessary part of positive action. They justify their wrongdoing by deflecting blame and spreading responsibility. They minimize or deny the harmful effects of their actions. To do this, they dehumanize the victims and blame them for their own suffering and misery.

Dr. Bandura's theory of moral disengagement is a broad one. Conventional theories of morality focus almost exclusively on the individual level. He extended his insight into moral disengagement to the level of social systems through which large-scale institutional inhumanity is perpetrated.

In 2016, Albert Bandura's book on moral disengagement theory, 'Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live With Themselves', was published. It contains an analysis of the theory and recent events regarding the moral disengagement that is extremely prevalent in modern society and the American government and its institutions.

 Sirajul Hossain