We shouldn’t make every decision about how to use our time, or spend our money, on ethical grounds alone
In 2000, in his book Bobos In Paradise, the US commentator David Brooks noticed that the emerging class he called “bourgeois bohemians” had a particular fondness for rough textures: slate kitchen counters, coarse rugs, stone fireplaces, and so on. Where their parents prized smooth surfaces, these countercultural capitalists (and not to be rude, but I suspect the Guardian’s readership contains a few) yearned to go back to the land. Brooks grasped, too, that they saw something moral in their choices. Their rough-hewn chopping boards didn’t merely signify that they led better lives, but that they were better people.
This came to mind the other day when I read a new study on the psychological phenomenon of “moral licensing”. It’s been known for a while, now, that we’re prone to using our ethical acts as an excuse for our less ethical acts – so that, for example, the person who religiously eliminates single-use plastic from their life feels entitled to take a couple of extra long-haul flights per year, even though the harm of the latter might outweigh the benefits of the former. But a new German study, by researchers Jannis Engel and Nora Szech, provides an alarming glimpse of just how ready we are to let ourselves off the hook.
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