In a mild form, moral licensing is an issue for all of us. Anyone who exercises hard and then feels that they “deserve” a high-calorie treat knows the feeling. At an extreme form, it is manifest when some of those who claim to be leaders in family values or social justice or religious/spiritual leadership are found to be acting in ways that counter to the values they claim to profess. Such cases may just be hypocrisy, but I suspect there is often an element of moral licensing as well: that is, being identified with doing good can free someone up to do bad, as well.
Read the whole post, which covers research on the topic.
I wonder whether there’s an alternative explanation for the outcome of some of the moral-licensing studies, viz., that people resent being compelled to do something virtuous, and respond by doing something that they think will seem vicious in the experimenter’s eyes.
In the German-transcription task described by Taylor, for instance, some subjects only received pay for the task; others were told that the experimenter will also make a contribution to UNICEF based on their work. As far as I know, the subjects were assigned randomly.
In such a situation, a subject might feel that since she’s done the work, she should get to decide how the pay is spent. She might wish to spend the money on herself, or to contribute it to a different charity, and resent the fact that the experimenter’s essentially taxing her pay to support his own pet cause. That feeling that she’s being cheated might well make her less willing to give her all to the task—”If they want this tedious work done well, then they should pay us what we deserve.”
Or consider the tale that a friend told me of his first days in grad school. As part of his T.A. orientation and training, he had to go through something called “Diversity Exploration”—essentially, a dozen people sitting around a room exchanging platitudes about the wickedness of racism and sexism. My friend told me that in the course of this ordeal, he resolved to spend a chunk of his first paycheck on pornography and heroin, just to get a kind of revenge on the people who’d forced him to squander two hours of his life on this mindless display of faux virtue.
There is a good point here. It’s worth asking if the experiment is actually ‘normalized’ in an important sense.
If I pay you ten dollars to perform a task, and tell you nothing more about it, there is some intuitive sense of the task you’ve performed being “worth” ten dollars, equivalent marginal productivities and all that.
If I pay you ten dollars, and say that, in addition, five additional dollars are being allocated to some other recipient whether you like it or not, then one feels the task is “worth” fifteen dollars, but one is being involuntarily taxes at a high rate, (and in a way that is hard to confirm and verify) with the proceeds going to someone else’s pet project, instead of one’s own (with the added factor that every organization has its history of scandal and controversy which researchers may not be aware of or sensitive to, but which study participants may not admit for reasons of social desirability bias).
It’s not hard to come up with more salient example which could cause individuals to feel entitled to engage in some hard-to-detect shirking. Think about if a company told workers it was donating to a pro-life or pro-choice advocacy organization instead of using those profits to raise their wages.
So, the above two examples are pretty different situations psychologically, and it should be no surprise that people behave with different levels of conscientiousness and scrupulousness, but it’s not totally clear whether it’s appropriate to attribute that to “moral license” deriving from perceptions of having some “karma capital” surplus to spend.
Most prevalent among politicians is the virtue signaling of forcing others to behave in what you claim is a moral way. Then you can do anything you want personally. https://youtu.be/zDKWRRnS-BQ
It seems that Occam’s Razor would stick with mere hypocrisy as the simplest explanation. Greedy, unscrupulous people will say anything to get what they want, whether it’s money, power, votes, influence, or sex.