White collar criminal investigations and prosecutions have declined as counter-terrorism, drug, counter-espionage and politically motivated investigations have (greatly) increased. Is it reasonable to expect the majority of people to act virtuously when doing so puts them at great disadvantage in an effectively unregulated environment? This is what Liv Boree might call a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish.
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
Most people put their grocery carts back, stop at stop signs and lights at the middle of night on a lone road, and there's plenty of examples where people go out of their way to do the right thing. There's this common misconception that most people are act immorally but in reality the law is only written for the few. For a very clear example, I doubt murder rates would change were it not illegal. Most people don't want to kill and recognize it as intrinsically immoral. The problem is that we ignore normal behavior and this makes us overestimate abnormal behavior.
If murdering was legal, most people still wouldn’t murder. If murdering reliably earned 1 million dollars, then most _people_ still wouldn’t murder but most _money_ would be in the hands of killers
You're making me think what the price-demand elasticity curve for murder might look like ("Would you off someone for $100K? What if we told you they were a bad person"). Kind of like Bridget cold-calling in "The Last Seduction", making outrageous propositions in calm language.
Jumping from returning shopping carts to murder is a bit of a leap though. Sure most people wouldn't commit murder.
However, its much much easier for things like returning shopping carts become less common. How many stores have left San Francisco and Portland downtowns due to unabashed theft?
I agree that much of it also starts with leaders. If the top eschelon is busy with NIMBYism and gaming share prices to get theirs, it won't be long before normal folk start questioning doing the moral thing in order to get ahead.
I would wager most killings are retribution for some kind of wrong, simply by people who don’t believe in the justice system or whose rage overwhelms their fear of consequences. If murder were legal then that would be a blow to state legitimacy and also remove much of the reason not to take matters into your own hands.
The problem is that in this case there's an extraordinarily lucrative opportunity for anyone willing to take it, meaning even if most people would see this and think "I don't want to be that person" there'll still be people who will do this line of work, regardless how immoral it might be
Your point is parallel to the ideas surrounding the realism of altruism.
People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost. As the cost ramps up the calculation for a 'selfless' act is effectively inverted to bias self interest instead.
This is how you get the current state of the financial sector. Ironically altruism is so cynically dismissed that its actually used as a marketing strategy to pursue self interest, with no one bothering to disassemble it because no one believes thats the motivation anyway (see: subsidizing homeowners with bad credit using homeowners with good credit). Leaving the only people who do believe it functioning out of partisanship and lack of curiosity.
'Abnormal' behavior is exponential in its effects. Much like a fire, it only stops if contained. Thats why total laissez faire deregulation is naïve. Even if most people do the right thing, society is not silo'd from the minority who does the bad things.
> People return their shopping carts because its the right thing to do, but also there is minimal cost.
Apparently in some communities (such as Germany) it is believed that people cannot be counted on to return the shopping cart properly unless the cart holds a small value coin hostage. So the tolerated cost of selfless acts isn't some human constant, even in developed societies like Germany where people have their basic needs met.
In fact it's even more complicated than that, because specific kinds of selfless acts have different degrees of perceived importance in different cultures. In some cultures, it's considered very important to feed your guests, even if that means the host has to go hungry. In other cultures, feeding your guests isn't important or expected, even from hosts with comfortable abundance.
This is one of the root problems of Western society today and I think it has its origin in the financial crisis. The perpetrators got off scott free everywhere (except Iceland) and everyone who wasn’t a banker ended up paying the price.
The other core component is economies completely dependent on house price rises rather than productive work.
The result is a break down of trust, community and decent behaviour.
...a Moloch trap - a game theoretic perspective on the common good eroded as competing individual actors seek to survive and/or flourish
It's either amusing or annoying that scenes like Effective Altruism may rediscover Karl Marx' analysis of capitalism in a partial, broken form but will never investigate progressive ideas as they stand.
Will they also redo the massive horrors relewsed on the world that Marxists did? Wait, FTX seems like a prime example.
Capitalism in itself is incomplete, I believe it requires a strong moral principle in a populous to work well. Trying to shoehorn that moral basis into capitalism as Marx did just results in a very destructive system.
Sure capitalism kills people, but not nearly the same order of magnitude. The worse cases of unbridled capitlaism killed far less than any one of worse cases of communism where we're talking to the tune of hundreds of millions. Then capitalism helped spawned things like the "green revolution" that prevented mass starvation across the globe since then.
The scientific consensus is that within a century unbridled capitalism will end up killing an order of magnitude more people than any other system ever did.
It’s like saying that Math kills people because Math is used to build bombs. Capitalism is an economic system, not a social system. There are human beings in charge of corporations doing the killing, polluting, and so on. Those individuals are responsible.
Except that fossil fuels aren't limited to capitalist countries. Even then accounting future potential deaths to an economic system is a bit meaningless compared to prior concrete and repeated history.
Much less there's no way we can accurately predict the death toll of something a century out -- in the 1960-70's it was "obvious" there would be billions dying of starvation. We could crack fusion power in a decade and use direct CO2 capture to reverse CO2 levels to pre-1850's level.
<< has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article
I can understand why. There is a lot of innocence that has been largely taken away from Americans. I want to say that prior to 1950 -- maybe even prior to 90s if you want to feel particularly charitable, there is a reasonable argument to be made, that an average American simply had no way of knowing a lot of the machinations behind the scenes. Things were largely under wraps, but between internet, 9/11 and resulting massive expansion of information sharing, IC size alone in terms of absolute numbers increased drastically.
It is like being a teen and experiencing with your own eyes what 'adulting' is all about. Your perspective changes.
<< We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.
I agree. I am becoming increasingly concerned we don't really talk to one another. You can't solve anything if you don't talk to one another; not for long anyway.
I like US. I want it to stay semi-nice place to live for my kids.
The private sector attempts to control its own. SCIP, the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals, has a code of ethics that wouldn't approve of this article. How many SCIP members adhere to that code is a separate question, one I'd rather not know the real answer to. Similarly, hiring managers and recruiters will sometimes interview for phantom job descriptions, the real goal being eliciting competitor information.
Patriotism, religion, legalism, altruistic idealism... there's no shortage of things we can cling to when doing the right thing is difficult. But without accountability & enforcement, unrestrained competition makes unethical behavior almost appear to be a necessity. We really must do better, but we are now so far removed from the collective consequences of our individual misbehavior, the road to ruin might be unavoidable.