Someone may volunteer to finish a colleague’s work, then feel that passing an unpleasant task to somebody else is “not such a big deal”. This can involve moral licensing: a past good deed raises one’s current moral self-regard, making a later questionable choice easier to reinterpret, offset or excuse. It need not be a conscious calculation that one good act purchases one bad act. The shift often lies in how the next choice is understood.
One account treats the good deed as credit in a psychological ledger: I have already shown that I am generous, so a little selfishness need not threaten my overall image. Another treats it as a moral credential: because my earlier action shows that I am not selfish, the same act of passing off work can seem less suspect. Both accounts suggest that self-evaluation enters the judgement, rather than merely supplying an excuse afterwards.
A 2015 meta-analysis of 91 studies with 7,397 participants estimated a small average licensing effect, but also found larger effects in published than unpublished studies. A 2019 reanalysis concluded that publication bias probably inflated both the evidence and the estimated size. Moral licensing is therefore not a label for diagnosing an individual’s motive whenever a good deed is followed by a lapse. Good behaviour can also strengthen consistency and make people continue acting by the same standard.
A more useful check is to examine each choice through its present consequences: does this decision shift costs onto somebody else, and would I still accept the same rule? A past good deed can deserve recognition without granting automatic exemption for current conduct.
Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25716992/
https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/article/view/878
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