Revisionist History Ep.1 - The Lady Vanishes

In the podcast 'Revisionist History Episode 1: The Lady Vanishes', Malcolm Gladwell talks about ‘moral licensing’.  Moral licensing, what I've never heard of before listening to this podcast, is the phrase explaining the phenomenon that the good deed is always followed by the misdeed, because people use their good behavior as a permission to do something wrong.

During the talk, he mentioned 19th-century female painter Elizabeth Thompson and 21st-century Australian PM Julia Gillard to demonstrate the moral licensing. Though they were renowned for their work at first, they got to encounter the contempt and fierce attack of misogyny. He also mentioned Barack Obama and Donald Trump (though their name was not directly mentioned, everyone can easily infer that) as an example of moral licensing, saying their good deed -that they’ve voted for the first US black president- was followed by their misdeed –voting for the president with extreme nationalism.

The first impression I had after listening to this podcast was that the podcast tends to be a bit biased. Though I do agree that moral licensing prevails in our society even if the effects are trivial at most time, I thought that the examples used to explain the moral licensing in the podcast are not proper. I thought that the examples of Elizabeth Thompson and Julia Gillard are more related to sexual discrimination than to moral licensing. I also thought that the example of the ‘nationalist’ president elected after the first ‘black’ US president is not related to the moral licensing but related to their (so called) ‘rational’ (which I personally think is radical and quite insane) thoughts.

Rather, I thought that such example like the person on a diet thinks that he or she deserves a cup of juice (which is obviously not good for a diet) because he or she worked out is more proper to explain moral licensing. A person who thinks ‘It’s okay to buy this fancy dress because I saved a lot through frugal living for months’ or a CEO who thinks ‘It’s okay to exploit the foreign worker’s labor force illegally because I offer them food and place to live’ could be some other examples, too. I thought that it might be better if the concept of moral licensing was illustrated by practical and relevant examples to our life.

After listening to the podcast, the excerpt from ‘Blink’ written by Malcolm Gladwell struck my head. The excerpt was about the blind audition of an orchestra and female brass player: the competent female who was highly praised in the blind audition, playing the ‘male instrument’ of orchestra such as trombone, but had hard time until being engaged in real orchestra, being highly recognized as a skillful brass player. I could not clarify the reason why this story came across my mind, but I did think that the topics of two stories are somewhat related to each other. Though I think this example is another case of gender discrimination, I thought that it could be interpreted as a moral licensing if we think that the attempt to select a player through blind audition was a good deed, while reluctance in determining her as a new player was a misdeed.

         In addition, I wondered if people who do the moral licensing are aware of what they're doing, because I thought that moral licensing might be related to psychological mechanism. I personally believe that most of them are unware of the fact that they’re doing moral licensing and it is usually happened unconsciously. And I wanted to study whether there is any psychological influence in people’s justifying their misdeed with antecedent virtue. However, I also believe that even if people are aware of moral licensing, they will keep doing it for their own sake or benefit and to justify their means.