The Morality of Music

The aim of this master thesis was to learn about the concept of moral self-licensing in the domain of arts and culture. Therefore, this thesis looked at both, in-domain as well as cross-domain moral licensing and compared high and low culture in the domain of music. The research question this thesis tried to answer was thus to what extent moral self-licensing occurs in the domain of classical and popular music. In order for a moral licensing action to happen, the preceding action has to be evaluated as morally good. As no other research on moral licensing has been conducted yet in the cultural field, first it had to be determined what general reasons there are to evaluate an action as moral. A literature review of previous research on the topic revealed that there are three main reasons as to when an action is evaluated as being moral: the action is perceived to have beneficial effects for one’s health or physique in general, the action improves one’s selfesteem, or the action is believed to enhance how one is perceived by others. If an action is perceived as fulfilling one or more of these criteria, then it is possible that it will evoke a moral licensing action. For this thesis it was assumed that music could be ascribed with all three of those triggering reasons. Therefore this thesis conducted a laboratory experiment in order to find out if whether listening to music would indeed trigger a licensing effect and if this effect differed in its extent for classical and popular music. The data was then analysed by means of various statistical tools. It was found that the consumption of popular music does not trigger a moral licensing effect, neither indomain nor cross-domain. Listening to classical music as well did not result in indomain moral licensing; it did however evoke cross-domain moral licensing. This thesis therefore found statistical evidence that the consumption of classical music triggers a moral self-licensing effect. With its findings and by adding a new field to the scientific discourse, this thesis might contribute to the research on the concept of moral selflicensing which is conducted in various fields.