I had two main questions after listening to the podcast:
(1)Why does moral licensing happen and when are we susceptible to fall into licensing?
(2)Are we forever doomed to just continue on opening and closing doors with racism still in the house?
(1) Why does moral licensing happen? I thought that Malcolm Gladwell gives a very interesting framework from which to examine the bigotry of our current society and an explanation as to why racism and sexism has been able to persist for so long. But, he doesn't really explain why moral licensing occurs and why we are so vulnerable to it. Is it just human nature?
I thought of instances in which people are motivated to continue to do good work in order to maintain their good grades and thought that there are also many cases in which we continue to do morally good behavior. One difference between grades and morality is objectivity. We may be vulnerable to moral licensing because morality can't be objectively measured. It is up to the individual to grade his own racism/sexism test sheet, and he may be cheating himself. This is perhaps what differs racism from diets and tests because when you indulge you'll know sooner or later by the number on your weight scale that eating that hamburger after exercising wasn't the best idea. But when we moral license our prejudices we may never have a number on ascale warning us that something went wrong somewhere. Those who moral license may even go so far as to aggrandize their previous good behavior to make the license more legitimate. This distorted idea of the progress allows a little show of morality to become more than enough to justify disproportionately immoral actions. Perhaps another reason why moral licensing happens is because there is less linkage between moral behavior and morality then we think. External factors like the fear of your peers thinking you indulge in racism can make you conform to moral behavior, but this doesn't necessarily mean you've become a more moral person.
perhaps we feel now that having such values aren't important as jobs seem to go down
So, (2) how can we motivate people to do moral behavior consistently?
I think it all seems to come down to being sincerely awareness of our biases and having a clear committed goal. People have to be sincerely aware that the biases they harbor can be wrong and dangerous, not just because society frowns at those who aren't tolerant of different people.
Perhaps the problem is that people don't "know" that being misoginist is really wrong. Even though America considers itself more open, considering how there were so many "shy trump" voters fooled the polls seems to suggest that perhaps we only flout the values that bring us vanity. Perhaps these values are only things that are said to be important, but not truly understood.
Perhaps we should stop frowning as much at those we think are intolerant and immoral and pursue a different approach to cultivating morality.
