sibility follows the trend of the above-mentioned mechanism by allowing the individuals to displace blame. In this method, the individual decreases his or her amount of responsibility by obscuring the link between conduct and its consequences. For example, someone who works on the assemble line of a large machine gun manufacturer is not directly responsible for any inhumane acts committed with one of the weapons the individual helped to assemble, but as the individual had a hand in the creation of the device used to carry out the heinous act, they are responsible, albeit indirectly, to a certain extent. There are several forms of this type of mechanism, such as division of labor, turning decisions made by individuals into group decisions, etc. Disregard or distortion of harmful consequences is another one of the many mechanisms for moral disengagement. This simply means that people who are committing inhumane acts either ignore or purposely distort the consequences their actions have so that they might morally disengage from the self-sanctioning that is as result of their actions. The best example I could come up with for this mechanism is a bomber pilot. He knows that what he or she is doing is resulting in the deaths of many people, but because he or she is so far removed from the suffering, they have a tendency to take their actions more lightly. When people act alone when committing inhumane acts, they are more likely to minimize the injurious acts, as they are more accountable for their actions. “It is relatively easy to hurt others when their suffering is not visible…” (Bandura, 1990).Blaming and dehumanizing victims is one of the main reasons hate crimes are so prevalent. These mechanisms base the moral disengagement on beliefs that the victim is “subhuman” or at fault for a plight that the aggressor feels is hindering him or her. These two go hand in hand, as they both are based on the ag...
