Dangerous Morality. How Moral Licensing Undermines the Fight against Administrative Corruption, and How to Fix it

Corruption remains a persistent issue in public bureaucracies worldwide. Administrative behavior results from the complex interplay of motivational and contextual factors that lead to individual corruptibility. Current anti-corruption strategies often combine compliance and integrity-based approaches but fail to fully integrate behavioral insights on the biases and social psychology that influence moral justification for unethical actions. This conceptual study addresses this gap by focusing on moral licensing, a psychological bias in which individuals justify corrupt actions based on prior moral behavior (real or imagined). The study explores how past moral behavior can paradoxically lead to either consistent ethical conduct or subsequent unethical behavior, and emphasizes the need for anti-corruption strategies to account for these self-serving biases. By connecting previously separate debates on the micro-foundations of corruptibility, this study provides essential behavioral insights for designing effective anti-corruption measures, synthesized into six propositions to inform and motivate future research and reform in public sector ethics management. This novel contribution advances the theoretical understanding of the socio-psychological dynamics of corruptibility, informing both theory and practice in combating administrative corruption.