Difference between revisions of "Moral Licensing"

Latest revision as of 01:15, 7 December 2025

In the world of charity and altruism, two things that are already vulnerable to misuse and counter-productiveness, one of the most pernicious issues is the one of Moral Licensing. Moral Licensing refers to the phenomenon when an individual does some sort of ethical action, such as donating to a charity, or buying a more eco-friendly product, then feeling either justified or not guilty in engaging in other unethical behavior, effectively offsetting the good done. It's a very effective way of making us feel less bad about things we know we ought to not do, to fight the resulting cognitive dissonance.

In other words, it's the issue of treating morality like a currency; Keeping track of how many "ethical points" you have and using them to spend on unethical actions, sort of like the idea of karma. For example, someone who donates to a tree planting charity will feel justified in taking a 500 mile road trip in a gas guzzler since they (believe they) have helped reduce CO2, or a person volunteering at a local pet shelter won't feel the need to do anything about their meat consumption since they already have helped animals.

Besides the obvious issues with how this negates any potential good, human beings are exceptional at overestimating and underestimating respectively the effects of their actions both positive and negative when there is no direct evidence of the good or bad they've done, meaning that when they partake in the unethical behavior afterwards, it often does much more harm which not only negates the good they've done, but is often destructive enough to add additional harm. This makes them not even at absolute zero, but in the red.

High effort put into the good actions, even if the good actions are low-impact, often helps cloud this judgement. Spending a lot of time volunteering, or donating a relatively large sum to charity, feels like you have done so much, that driving more or eating steak and eggs seems like it barely, if at all, negates the good you did. Given how the vast majority of ethical actions are very low impact or worse, such as emotional actions undertaken under the veil of altruism (like giving a homeless person money, or giving video games to sick kids), this makes the near-zero positive impact very easily overturned by everyday actions (excessive driving, meat-eating). But even low-effort actions like signing an online petition or using a browser extension that raises a few cents for charity tends to give people significantly more mental leeway than is warranted.

This sort of thing of course is not always a guarantee. Some people recognize that doing good doesn't make it permissible to engage in harmful behavior, and the whole point should be minimizing harm while maximizing good. But given human beings irrationality and constant self-serving bias, this is comparatively rare.

It's not charities in and of themselves that are a problem, it's people's relationship with them.

Within Veganism

In terms of effort to reward ratio, Veganism is by far the most effective action that can be taken to reduce one's harm footprint. Thousands of animal lives spared from months to years of suffering, tons of greenhouse gases not emitted, and some bonus such as reduced waste and costs to healthcare infrastructure.

It's nice to think that Vegans on average are more conscientious of the consequences of their actions. They've made the effort to do the ethical thing of not harming animals, so they would probably be more introspective and want to reduce their harm overall, not use the harm they've avoided to justify other questionable actions. But at the end of it all, Vegans are still human beings, prone to biases and errors in judgement.

While effective animal charities can be a great way to increase your positive impact for the animals, given the huge environmental footprint of animal products, donating to for example a charity that focuses on outreach and replaces non-Vegan meals, that can serve as a great way to help offset the harm of your overall carbon footprint that is necessary to maintain a decent quality of life (though you don't necessarily get all the credit for it; See Virtue Theft).

How to Reduce it

Moral Licensing is a psychological phenomenon, therefore eliminating it entirely would require altering the brain chemistry of every human being. But, as mentioned earlier, this sort of thing is not an inevitability, and there are ways of minimizing it. We might not be immune to how our brains work, but we can do something about how we react to these biases.