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In Reply to: Moral Disengagement posted by moonshiner on February 08, 2006 at 22:04:16:
Albert Bandura is a Canadian scholar of world-class stature (imo), and undoubtedly one of the brightest stars in the field of social psychology.
Not too long ago I took a workshop in ethics for people in helping professions where we were asked to do some moral reasoning based on hypothetical scenarios. One of the scenarios had to do with the decision to use or not use torture as a means of potentially saving a life. You'd think that most people in helping professions (social work, nursing, ministry, etc.) would be adverse to the use of torture as a matter of humanitarian principle, but when we worked through the moral dilemmas posed by a hypothetical situation, it turned out that the majority of people at the workshop rationalized the use of torture by reasoning that the ends justify the means! (As is often the case, I was in the minority on this one.)
Regarding working in the service of an organization and shifts in moral judgement: My dissertation research looked at (among other things) whether the organization that employed a social worker affected the worker's perception of an ambiguous sexualized scenario involving children and adults as sexual abuse. School social workers were much more likely to define an ambiguous scenario as sexual abuse than were the hospital social workers. In general, school social workers were more socially conservative and tended to narrowly define sexualized behavior in black-and-white terms. The hospital social workers were more liberal in their definitions of the sexualized behavior depicted in the scenarios, and they were less inclined to define ambiguous behavior involving children and adults as sexually exploitative.
This makes sense: Schools (the teaching profession) tend to define sexual behavior in moral terms, while hospitals (the medical profession) tend to define sexual behavior in terms of its implications for health.
Not surprisingly, Bandura was cited in my dissertation bibliography.
