e intended victim. The article states that it takes the right social conditions to produce heinous situations, as opposed to monstrous people producing the situations. “[If] the appropriate social conditions are in place, normal, decent people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things” (Bandura, 1990).The problems that this theory as it relates to explaining why people commit hate crimes is that it states that people commit hate crimes based on the right social conditions, not because of the moral disengagement alone. Without the right social conditions, moral disengagement could not result in the creation of people who commit hate crimes. While the article does define what the social conditions are and how they are created, it does not impart solutions to the problems. It proposes solutions to the problems of moral disengagement, but that is all. The article also states that, based on the vast number of psychological means of circumventing self-regulating behavior, societies cannot rely on individuals to refrain from committing heinous acts. This, obviously, raises the question of whose rights should be squelched by society. The Constitution guarantees us the right to free speech, but the article states that simply by changing the way something is referred to is a means of inciting inhumane actions without the hindrance of self-regulating or self-sanctioning behavior. Therefore, who has the right or power to decide what constitutes someone’s thoughts, and when the thoughts have crossed the line and become hate crimes? In conclusion, moral disengagement is a means by which people can more easily commit inhumane acts, and is a theory as to why people commit these acts. However, the article that defines moral disengagement and its mechanisms so well fails to propose any fixes for the social conditions that it claims are the most likely to cause outbursts of heinous behavior. ...
