A little good is good enough: Ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing

Jannis Engel and Nora Szech

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: This paper explores the role of cheap excuses in product choice. If agents feel that they fulfill one ethical aspect, they may care less about other independent ethical facets within product choice. Choosing a product that fulfills one ethical aspect may then suffice for maintaining a high moral self-image in agents and render it easier to ignore other ethically relevant aspects they would otherwise care about more. The use of such cheap excuses could thus lead to a “static moral self-licensing” effect, and this would extend the logic of the well-known dynamic moral self-licensing. Our experimental study provides empirical evidence that the static counterpart of moral self-licensing exists. Furthermore, effects spill over to unrelated, ethically relevant contexts later in time. Thus, static moral self-licensing and dynamic moral self-licensing can exist next to each other. However, it is critical that agents do not feel that they fulfilled an ethical criterion out of sheer luck, that is, agents need some room so that they can attribute the ethical improvement at least partly to themselves. Outsiders, although monetarily incentivized for correct estimates, are completely oblivious to the effects of moral self-licensing, both static and dynamic.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227036 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 27036&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: A Little Good is Good Enough: Ethical Consumption, Cheap Excuses, and Moral Self-Licensing (2017)
Working Paper: A Little Good is Good Enough: Ethical Consumption, Cheap Excuses, and Moral Self-Licensing (2017)
Working Paper: A little good is good enough: Ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing (2017)
Working Paper: A little good is good enough: Ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0227036

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227036

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().