Moral Equivalence Through Benevolence, Licensing, and Cleansing

Abstract

In the past six years, the relationship between virtue and vice has aroused extensive attention from organizational ethics scholars, and research within this area of inquiry generally supports a view of moral equivalence: that an invisible mental scale plays a role in people’s moral judgements and decisions in the workplace (Klotz & Bolino, 2013). On the one hand, virtue that are prosocial or pro-organizational are argued to license vice such as unethical behavior (Monin & Miller, 2001) and counterproductive work behavior (Klotz & Bolino, 2013). On the other hand, vice is often deemed compensable or justifiable through moral cleansing (i.e., engaging in subsequent good deeds; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000), literal cleansing (i.e., hygiene; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), or having good and prosocial intentions (Umphress & Bingham, 2011). Although the moral equivalence view has received both theoretical and empirical support, our understanding about it is still relatively nascent. At present,...