Moral Licensing: When Feeling Good
A more nuanced perspective can now be introduced in opposition to imposing an ethics onto comedy: that offensive comedy makes us think about hard topics and restricting humor can mean these topics are not brought to surface, but these issues are still there. This argument is often joined with a distain for political correctness. In ‘Moral Licensing: When Feeling Good Frees Us to do Bad’, Merritt, Efron, and Benoit through a series of studies found that being political correct removed moral inhibitions for individuals because of the illusion of goodness it created. It is perhaps the case that we must be presented with the ugly aspects of the world in order to dismantle them. This view further affirmed by Jennifer Littlewood and Michael Pickering