Title: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement

Authors: Albert Bandura

Addresses: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2130, USA

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.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISD.2007.016056

International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2007 Vol.2 No.1, pp.8 - 35

Published online: 03 Dec 2007 *

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