Moral Licensing

The psychological tendency to use a sense of one’s own goodness or prior virtue as permission to act badly. Kyle tags it in Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, connecting it to Raskolnikov’s belief in his “moral right to kill” in Crime & Punishment.

Context: Moral licensing is a documented effect in social psychology in which past good behavior (or even the feeling of being a moral person) loosens self-restraint and makes subsequent ethically questionable behavior feel justified.

Where this appears

• Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — Kyle annotates a passage with this tag, linking it to the protagonist’s self-justified “moral right to kill” in Crime & Punishment.