Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement

Albert Bandura

International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2007, vol. 2, issue 1, 8-35

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.

Keywords: consumptive lifestyles; collective efficacy; environmental ethics; moral agency; moral disengagement; moral self-sanctions; population growth; psychosocial change; self-efficacy; token gestures; ecological sustainability; sustainable development; environmental degradation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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