Effect of moral license: if they tell us that we are good, we will be less good

It seems, from social psychology, that people want to be respected and that they consider us good people, not bad.

However, we also have a minimum of functional moral aspiration: that is, if it seems that others already consider us morally unimpeachable, then we will strive a little less to be so.

Minimum of kindness
It abounds in this concept of the social psychology Simone Schnall, in the book the good ideas:

In other words, when I have convinced myself that I am a good person, I am satisfied and leave it there, whereas if I feel inferior on the moral plane I will want to help others and do good. The idea that people want to achieve this moral balance and stay together in it, neither above nor below, has very important implications and can explain why people do good things, why they do not do them, why they do bad things , etc. As I said before, this starts from the idea that although we think that our acts and thoughts have a rational origin, in the end they are due to factors of which we are not even aware.

Julian Baggini abounds in it in his book The Complaint:

Empathy, for example, is sufficiently finite in human beings that we can predict with a certain degree of certainty that, on average, people will tend to watch more for themselves and their loved ones than for strangers. But the existence of that empathy also means that eradicating all feelings towards strangers, although feasible in the short term, will never be universal or permanent. They believe in the infinite malleability of human nature and can imagine a future community utopia, but that will also leave the doors open to the possibility of a fascist and racist future.

(I will not dwell on the issue of describing what selfish behavior is and what altruistic or collaborative behavior is, because by ignoring the ultimate intentions of such behavior we can not assert with certainty which is which: it would give for another article).