The Vatican report provides the most heinous example of moral self-licensing

Last week’s Vatican report into how the Catholic Church repeatedly failed to deal with allegations of sexual abuse evokes a heavy sense of déjà-vu. This is not just because the church has sinned in similar ways so many times before, but that numerous other organisations that exist to do good have also been shown to tolerate exceptional wickedness.

In this case, Father Theodore McCarrick faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, but Pope John Paul II not only ignored them, he actually promoted him, first to archbishop of Washington DC and then to cardinal. John Paul’s successor Pope Benedict XVI also knew about the alleged misconduct and although he accepted McCarrick’s resignation, he too failed to deal adequately with the allegations and new ones that came to light.

The Catholic Church is not unique in harbouring vice behind a veil of virtue. Time and again we see organisations committed to making the world a better place becoming home to those making it worse.

Take Oxfam, which has been engulfed in scandals around staff misconduct, including paid sex with potentially underage children, in Haiti and the Philippines. The Charity Commission report into the allegations was damning, saying that the incidents and problems identified were not isolated one-offs.

Or consider Jimmy Savile’s repeated abuse of children at Stoke Mandeville hospital. Staff had their concerns but they let him get away with it because, as the hospital’s former director of nursing put it, “people were afraid of Jimmy stopping raising money for the hospital.” At another hospital where Savile was given free licence, a former nurse said: “A lot of the staff said he should be behind bars. We used to laugh about it in those days.”

I’m also reminded of a major trade union where a good friend of mine worked in the early 2000s. All the while the union was promoting workers’ rights its own staff were often overworked, burning out and even bullied in an aggressive, male-dominated environment.

When such problems are investigated, the conclusions are all remarkably similar. Time and again what is uncovered is a culture of denial and tolerance. The Charity Commission report into Oxfam identified  “A culture of tolerating poor behaviour.” Pope Francis pointed the finger at a “culture of clericalism” in the church, whereby it had “tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites” leaving senior figures “above reproach.”

What allows such a toxic culture to grow and thrive? One vital factor is what psychologists call “moral self-licensing.” When we believe we are generally doing good we tend to give ourselves a pass on other, immoral behaviours. For instance, many people who recycle religiously think they have “earned” and “deserve” their much worse polluting flights.

Such self-licensing also occurs at an organisational level. We easily overlook wrongdoing in our ranks because we believe we are all working on the side of the angels. If we do see something suspicious it immediately creates dissonance: a contradiction between the observed behaviour and our perceived virtuousness. The way we tend to deal with dissonance is by rationalisation, which in this case means dismissing the signs of vice. We’re helped in this by confirmation bias: if we think we are doing good, every good thing we do confirms this belief and every bad thing is ignored, as it doesn’t fit our expectations.

Perhaps the clearest recent example of all these factors at work is with antisemitism in the Labour Party. Once again, a core problem identified by the Equality and Human Rights Commission report was with the culture, one it found to be “at odds with the Labour Party’s commitment to zero tolerance of antisemitism.”

At first sight it seems paradoxical that a party committed to ending all forms of racism could harbour it. But far from being a paradox, its self-proclaimed righteousness is precisely what enabled the problem to take root. First, the self-licensing: if you believe you do not have a racist bone in your body then you are free to be critical of any group in society, confident that whatever you say cannot be racist. Then the dissonance: antisemitism is reported but if you take as your premise that this is an anti-racist party, it follows that the antisemitism must be unreal. Finally, the confirmation bias: if you believe people are confusing antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel, you notice the plentiful examples of this and ignore the many counterexamples.

For organisations that do good, all these scandals serve as a serious warning. Too often the response to such failures is a review of procedures. While this may be necessary, tackling the deeper cultural roots of the problem is more important and also more difficult.

But the dynamics of these scandals concern us all. In an increasingly polarised world, we become more vulnerable to making the same kind of errors in our personal lives. The more we think of our opponents as evil, as “deplorables,” the more we feel we are on the side of virtue and the blinder we become to our own shortcomings.

Of course, this is unlikely to lead us to commit anything so serious as sexual abuse. But that should not reassure us too much. Being against prejudice, we can become blind to our own prejudices against, say, Conservatives, Israelis or the white working classes. Being in favour of equality, we may turn a blind eye to our own manipulation of privilege, such as by securing sought-after school places or internships for our children.

In small ways, each such step entrenches division and blinds us to the good in others and the failings in ourselves. It’s easy to dismiss this because individually such transgressions seem minor. But when small steps add up, they can take us on a long journey, sometimes, as we have seen again and again, to very dark places.

Julian Baggini’s latest book is The Godless Gospel (Granta)