Responsibility Shielding: When Causally Proximate Agents Deflect Blame for Distal Enablers

When a doxer leaks someone's address and a harasser shows up at their door, who is really to blame? I propose that third-party moral judgment systematically underweights upstream enablers through a process I call responsibility shielding: observers assign less blame to a distal actor whose choice made harm possible when a morally responsible agent stands between that choice and the harm, compared to an otherwise identical situation in which the intermediate link is not a suitable target of moral responsibility. In this preregistered vignette study, participants judged an upstream enabler as less blameworthy when a responsible human agent intervened between his decision and the harmful outcome than when that intermediate link lacked moral responsibility, holding the upstream actor's expected contribution to harm constant across conditions. A third condition, where two agents chose simultaneously rather than sequentially, also increased blame towards the upstream actor, although more modestly, suggesting that shielding is not simply a consequence of blame being divided across multiple people. These findings suggest that when harm flows through a series of choices, blame tends to concentrate on the last responsible actor, shielding the person who made that harm possible in the first place.