There's a piece in the Guardian on hipster racism - the "domain of white, often progressive people who think they are hip to racism, which they mistakenly believe gives them permission to say and do racist things without actually being racist".

This, I suspect, highlights an under-appreciated change in popular attitudes to ethics.

In principle, moral thinking could be a form of self-doubt: "am I doing the right thing?", "What is the right thing to do?" How can we tell?"

But it isn't. Instead, morality serves as a form of self-licensing. Our belief in our own righteousness permits us to behave badly whilst condemning others. As Tim Farron says:

Five minutes on social media will give you a window into a society that condemns and judges, that leaps to take offence and pounces to cause it - liberals condemning those who don't conform as nasty and hateful, the right condemning liberals as fragile snowflakes.

I think we see this in whites' attitudes to racism. They attribute this to others ("the white working class") whilst overlooking their own racism. Bosses in creative industries no doubt pride themselves on not being racist. But they don't bother to employ black people. And don't get me started on men who claim to be feminists.

Not that moral self-licensing is confined to the left. On the right, pride in their own patriotism has self-licensed them to weaken the country by pursuing Brexit. And in the centre, Blair has justified the invasion of Iraq by saying "I thought it was right", thereby missing the fact that what matters is not whether you believe you are right, but whether you in fact are right.

More troublingly still, Paul Bloom describes how morality has licensed some of the very worst of crimes:

In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn't entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force.

We have, then, a curious paradox. Everybody is certain they are morally right but very few, I suspect, are capable of rigorous ethical reasoning. Self-righteousness is all they have. How many, for example, could give a coherent answer to the question: are moral judgments questions of fact, or emotion, or what? And few seem exercised by genuine moral dilemmas: personally, I believe Brexit to be one of these.

Which poses the question: why is this?

It would be wrong to say it's a wholly recent development. We see moral self-licensing in Howards End, where the Schlegels' belief in their self-righteousness costs Leonard Bast a loss of wages and then his job. And Alasdair Macintyre complained back in 1981 that "we have - very largely if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality." (After Virtue, p 2)

I suspect, though, that three things have compounded the problem; these are tentative suggestions - feel free to correct them.

One is the decline of religion. Yes, religion has licensed some of the worst crimes, and still does. On the other hand, though, it also preaches humility and urges us not to judge others: "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Of course, this lesson was often ignored - but it is more so now.

A second factor might be the rise of homogenous communities - especially, but not perhaps solely, on-line. When you are surrounded by people of different views, you naturally ask: am I right? Why do reasonable people disagree? When you're with like-minded people, though, you fall into groupthink and asymmetric Bayesianism.

Thirdly, there is the decline of the public intellectual. Back in the 70s and 80s the BBC broadcast a series of interviews by Bryan Magee with leading philosophers. Such programmes today are pretty much unthinkable. What we have instead is the Moral Maze, which comprises nothing more than shouty egomaniac gobshites.

What I'm pleading for here is less self-righteousness and more self-doubt. This plea will, I am sure, be ignored.