Moral Licensing: Doing Good Makes Us Feel Free to Do Bad

Suppose you donate to a charity in the morning. In the afternoon, you face a decision that involves some ethical dimension — helping a colleague, being honest in an uncomfortable situation, making the sustainable choice rather than the convenient one. Research suggests you are less likely to make the ethical choice in the afternoon than you would have been if you had not donated in the morning.

This is moral licensing: the implicit sense that past virtuous behaviour has banked credit that can be spent on future moral laxity. The mind keeps a rough running balance of moral credits and debits, and a positive balance produces a sense of permission to be a little less virtuous than usual.

The effect was first described by Christopher Bryan and Benoit Monin in the early 2000s and has since been replicated in numerous forms. In one study, participants who recalled an ethical thing they had done were more likely to agree to discriminatory hiring decisions in a subsequent task than those who had not recalled a virtue. The mechanism appears to involve the threat to self-image that would come from a purely negative record — a good deed provides cover.

Moral licensing interacts with identity in interesting ways. When virtuous behaviour is framed as expressing who you are as a person, it tends to produce more virtuous subsequent behaviour — the behaviour reinforces an identity that motivates consistency. When virtuous behaviour is framed as something you did — an action with a beginning and end — it tends to produce licensing. The framing changes whether past virtue is taken as evidence of good character or as a completed deposit.

The practical implication is somewhat uncomfortable. Your good deeds may not compound in the way you hope. If you ate well at breakfast, that is not a bank account that funds a more indulgent lunch. If you were kind and patient this morning, that is not a credit that makes you more patient this afternoon. Virtue needs to be sustained moment to moment, and relying on past virtue as permission for present indulgence is a reliable route to erosion of whatever gains you made.