Quote of note:
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
and
Participants in executions, like ones carried out by lethal injection in San Quentin, traditionally divide the responsibilities among workers so that no one person is entirely responsible for the death.
...and a little more at Intrapolitics.org.
When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
By BENEDICT CAREY
Burl Cain is a religious man who believes it is only for God to say when a person's number is up. But in his job as warden and chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Mr. Cain is the one who gives the order to start a lethal injection, and he has held condemned inmates' hands as they died.
He does it, he said in an interview, because capital punishment "is the law of the land."
"It's something we do whether we're for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible," he said, referring to himself and others on the execution team.
But he concedes, "The issue is coping, how we cope with it."
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.
In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously.
Moral disengagement "is where all the action is," said Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford and an expert on the psychology of moral behavior. "It's in our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards, and it helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next."
