How do consumers self-license themselves in the context of ethical consumption?: a qualitative approach to moral self-licensing

Abstract

Ethical decision making processes of people have been a locus of research across disciplines because morality is considered as an important yet complex tenet of social life. The research to date has aimed at exploring the inconsistency in ethical decision-making processes of individuals to comprehensively apprehend the issue. A research stream on moral self-licensing (ML) effect has revealed that individuals are more likely to follow an amoral behavior if they established moral behaviors earlier. Since the ML phenomenon has been investigated mainly via the experimental approaches, the nature of ML has been almost exclusively explained by a single empirical model, called moral credits model, and therefore, the ML effect has remained rather underexplored. As such, the main objective of this thesis is to explore ML in the context of ethical consumption in which the ethical decision-making processes are at the forefront. With a methodological shift from the dominant research stream on the ML effect, this thesis embraces interpretivist approaches based on consumers lived experiences and accounts about moral dilemmas during the ethical consumption behaviors by interviews and projective methods. The findings of the thesis suggest that there are alternative models of moral self-licensing: reversed moral credentials, moral supplement, moral societal position, and moral systemic position. These findings not only expand the definition of ML but also inform some neglected aspects of the attitude behavior gap in ethical consumption. The findings of the thesis are expected to set a scholarly dialogue to enhance the growth and expansion of ethical markets.