moral reckoning
Conscience settling accounts
A moral reckoning is a moment of accounting for past actions, when consequences come due or judgment is rendered.
It implies that wrongs have accumulated and must finally be confronted: The scandal forced a moral reckoning within the organization.
The phrase often appears in discussions of historical injustice, suggesting debts that remain unpaid: The nation faces a moral reckoning over slavery.
- judgmentReasoned decision-making capacity
- conscienceInternal moral sense
- guilty conscienceSelf-blame for wrongdoing
- atonementCompensation for wrongdoing
- guiltMoral self-reproach
redemption · accountability · coming to terms · confession · repentance · sin · penance · moment of truth · soul-searching · justice · retribution · shame · remorse · karma · scales · debt · transgression · comeuppance
- Afterlife Judgmentscales of justice, judgment day, final judgment, Book of the Dead, Osiris
- Egyptian AfterlifeBook of the Dead, Pyramid Texts, Osiris, ba, Anubis
- poetic justicepoetic justice, just desserts, comeuppance, karmic retribution, justice served
- guiltguilty, guilt trip, guilty conscience, remorseful, contrition
- redemptionredemption arc, redeemed, forgiven, saved, pardoned
moral reckoningimpunity
Freedom from consequences
blanket pardon · getting away with it · blanket amnesty · looking the other way · sweeping under the rug
moral reckoningwillful ignorance
Purposely remaining uninformed
denial · avoidance · suppression · cover-up · moral blindness
moral reckoninghistorical revisionism
Reinterpreting accepted past narratives
cover-up · forgetting · memory hole · suppression · erasure
moral, morals, morality, moralism, moralist, moralistic, morally, immoral, immorally