Should people be assigned moral credits?

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Do people who do good deeds, always do good deeds? We often tend to categorize people into inherently good or inherently bad. However, most people often mix good and bad deeds such that they would profit from doing the bad deed and yet be able to see themselves as a good person [1].

The "Moral Credits" theory can explain why people who do good deeds need not necessarily always do good deeds. Studies have found that when a person does a moral deed, he has collected moral credits in his mind which entitles him to commit immoral deeds. In a study conducted at the University of Toronto, 156 participants were asked to shop at either a green online-store or at a conventional online-store [2]. The green store had a majority of green products. After they shopped, they were given $6 and were told that they could split this money with a randomly assigned participant and take home the proportion of the $6 that they choose to keep for themselves. The researchers found that those who bought a product at the green store gave a significantly lower amount  ($1.76)  than those who bought a product in the conventional store ($2.18). People who bought at the green store felt like they had accumulated moral credits and this led them to be less moral in the subsequent task. Other studies have shown that merely thinking about a future moral act makes people more likely to commit an immoral act in a subsequent task as compared to those who were asked to think about a neutral act [3].

Given that people accumulate moral credits in their mind, can the government set up an electronic system to record moral credits? Such as system would account for moral and immoral acts that each have a pre-defined weight. For example, volunteering would add a certain number of credits to a person's moral account while crimes would deduct a certain number of moral credits from the person's account. If such a system were put in place, a person would be punished only if the balance in his moral credits account is negative.

Consider a philanthropist who donates money to causes that save a hundred lives a year. Suppose he or she met with a traffic accident that leads to a punishment of one year in prison. Should he/she go to prison? Under the existing judicial procedures, he would go to prison. This would also mean that he would not be able to save the lives of the hundred people. The moral credits procedure would not sentence him to a prison term since the good he does for the society exceeds the bad.  In such cases, the moral credits procedure would lead to a higher number of moral acts at the cost of a higher number of immoral acts.

The moral credits procedure raises several questions. How does one decide the degree of morality or immorality of an act? How can acts be recorded? Can moral credits be transferred? However, the moral credits judicial system is a more natural judicial system given that we already have a mental moral credits system.

References

[1] Ariely, R. B. S. A. D. (2015). Ethical dissonance, justifications, and moral behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 63-79.
[2] Mazar, N., & Zhong, C. B. (2010). Do green products make us better people?. Psychological science, 21(4), 494-498.
[3] Cascio, J., & Plant, E. A. (2015). Prospective moral licensing: Does anticipating doing good later allow you to be bad now?. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 56, 110-116.
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