Moral Licensing
What it is
Using past good behavior as permission to act badly in the present.
How it works
Real-world examples
- •A company touting its charity work while engaging in exploitative labor practices.
- •Someone who donated to an environmental cause feeling justified in taking a gas-guzzling road trip.
- •A manager who hired diversely feeling entitled to make an insensitive comment.
Ethical guidelines
Recognizing real good work is fine. It becomes manipulation when a person's past virtue is invoked to license a harmful act, or when a small token of goodness is engineered so that the person feels free to do something they otherwise would not.
- ●Good deeds do not create a moral surplus that offsets harmful actions.
- ●Evaluate each action on its own ethical merits.
- ●Organizations should not use CSR initiatives as shields for bad practices.
How to defend against it
- ►Judge each action independently rather than in the context of past virtue.
- ►Be suspicious when good deeds are prominently advertised alongside questionable behavior.
- ►Watch for the internal feeling of "I've been good enough, so this is fine."
From the Defense Playbook
List every persuasive element in a campaign, tag each one as neutral craft, dual-use, or manipulative by design, and for each dual-use element write down where the line is and which side of it you are on.
Before launch, give people who did not build the campaign the explicit job of attacking it as a skeptical journalist, a regulator, a competitor, a harmed customer, and a bad actor would, and fix what they find while it is still cheap to fix.
Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.
References
- Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43 · linkFoundational moral-licensing experiments: prior non-prejudiced behavior increased subsequent willingness to express potentially prejudiced views.