The good the bad and the incentives

We like to think goodness just happens. Clear away superstition and fear, and surely people will arrange themselves into something fair and kind.
That story is comforting, and it is wrong.

What we reward, we repeat. What we punish, we avoid. Between the two, a culture is engineered, deliberately or by drift.
Or take The Milgram experiment: ordinary people, following calm instructions, delivered what they thought were deadly shocks just because someone in authority told them to. That’s the part of the mechanism behind moral drift: not necessarily evil intent, but compliance disguised as decency.

This is a story about the gravity you don’t see. The quiet forces that shape who we become when no one is watching and what we perform when everyone is. Moral behavior isn’t an inner sparkle that emerges whenever we feel inspired. It is rather scaffolded by incentives, rehearsed in habits, narrated by our myths, and enforced, gently or not, by the groups we belong to.
When the scaffolding rots, the building starts to lean. People still want to look upright. So they hold the right signs, say the right words, and hope no one checks the foundations. That is the age we’re living in: an age of moral posture without the beams that carry weight.
I’m not nostalgic, friends. I’m interested in function. What worked, why it worked, and how we can build on purpose instead of drifting into the theater of virtue.

Scene one. It’s a winter morning, the kind that turns your breath into a visible promise. A man walks into a shelter carrying a box of coats. He hands the receipt to the woman at the desk, nods, and leaves. No selfie, no speech, no gentle announcement about generosity. A week later the gala reads donor names, and his isn’t there. He never expected to hear it anyway.

Scene two. At a busy intersection a car stalls in the right lane. A stranger pulls over, hazards blinking, and waves traffic while he leans into the bumper to push the car to safety. A passerby records the scene and the comments roll in—“faith in humanity restored.” What the video never captures is the delivery van that, a minute later, clips a bicyclist forced to merge. The stranger doesn’t learn about the collarbone. The algorithm learns about the engagement.

Scene three. Two siblings, consenting adults, make a choice that most people recoil from. There’s no harm that follows, no child, no disease. The reaction is immediate and visceral. The explanations arrive late and shaky, drafted on the back of a verdict that was already rendered.

We know these feelings: respect, admiration, disgust. They arrive ahead of the arguments because that is how we are built. Intuition is not the enemy of reason; it’s a library of compressed experience filled by parents, peers, punishments, and the stories we were given. The library is useful, and in some places it is out of date.

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” — Jonathan Haidt
Here is the hinge of this episode: if our sense of the good can be trained—and clearly it can—then it can be mis-trained. If applause can be gamed, ethics can be gamed. And if we refuse to design incentives, the loudest crowd and the cleverest algorithm will do it for us.

Origins: How Morality Learned to Walk
Start small, truly small. A handful of humans facing too many predators and too few calories. Their survival depends on cooperation, not strength. If they cannot coordinate, they will not see spring. Cheating might pay today, but shared rules pay next year, and so rituals emerge. Taboos take shape. Stories with teeth appear—gods who watch, ancestors who judge, elders who remember. A child doesn’t need a lecture in game theory; she needs to see a face hardened when she lies and brighten when she tells the truth. The feedback is immediate, embodied, and unforgettable.
Over time, those reactions become institutions. Religions, laws, and customs function as operating systems, compressing centuries of trial and error into rules a teenager can actually follow. Wash this way. Keep that promise. Tell the truth unless a tyrant asks. Protect the weak within the circle and stand firm at its edge. The rules are not always right, nor always kind, but they are legible, and they carry a shared scoreboard: praise and honor, marriageability and inclusion—and, when you fail, shame and exile.
Two hard facts sit at the root of this structure. “Good” and “bad” are not decorative labels hanging on reality, but they describe the patterns that either keep a community capable or grind it down. Heaven and hell are not distant realms but places you have walked through. Neighborhoods sorted by the incentives people respect when it costs them something.

“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely… He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness.” - Adam Smith
That is the foundation, not the whole house. From here we can say that virtue is not a costume. It is competence at living together without destroying one another.

The Modern Shift: Freedom’s Bill Comes Due
Let’s fast forward here. The Enlightenment cracks open the old containers. Some deserve cracking; others are collateral. Authority is pressed to justify itself. Custom faces cross-examination. Science insists that claims answer to evidence rather than to elders. Individual conscience receives a microphone.
We gain things I would not return: the right to dissent, the right to doubt, the right to cross old boundaries when those boundaries were nothing but fear in ceremonial clothing. We also lose something the old world supplied without negotiation: a shared script that disciplined desire into duty and did so with a minimum of daily debate.
Markets and laws step in to shoulder more of the load. They are powerful instruments, but their scope is narrow. Markets can coordinate strangers, but they cannot make you honorable. Law can prevent the worst, but it cannot teach you to want the best. The space between those two, once filled by custom, begins to empty, and into that open volume attention rushes.
We then build platforms that confuse attention with importance. The price of praise drops to zero and the speed of signaling becomes instantaneous. You can perform a virtue in under ten seconds to an audience of ten thousand people, and the only cost is your thumb. These systems learn whatever we feed them, and we feed them outrage and pity, novelty and purity, simple villains and simple saints. They learned quickly. So did we.
What many describe as a “moral vacuum” is not the absence of values so much as a change in gravity. The pull used to come from rituals and reputations that were hard to counterfeit. Now the pull comes from optics—what reads, what trends, what your tribe is ready to cheer.

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ ” — Max Weber

The Moral Vacuum: When Meaning Goes On Sale
Remove the external spine that used to hold people upright and most do not grow a new one overnight. They fold themselves into a brand because the temptation is obvious: belonging nourishes, and applause is a warm room. If you lack both, a ready-made ideology offers an instant family, laminated beliefs, and a dependable target. A performance offers a dopamine drip and a defense - “look, I care.”
We didn’t abandon cathedral architecture; we refitted it. Incense and robes gave way to hashtags and merch. The sacred words stayed—justice, safety, love—but the altar became a front camera. The old systems were often wrong about metaphysics, and yet many were right about psychology. People need scripts and sanctions. Remove them and status takes the throne, issuing the new coin of the realm.
Status is not evil, it is blind. It rewards what an audience can easily read. Legibility is not truth and not kindness; it is speed and symmetry and the shape of a meme. Real good is usually slow, asymmetric, and uninteresting to watch.

“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise… We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” — C. S. Lewis

Performative Virtue: Theater With Real Consequences
Examples are everywhere once you tune your ear.
A streamer films himself handing cash to a homeless woman, part pity, part audition tape. Comments crown him a saint. Two days later she is robbed for the cash and for the attention. He posts a follow‑up: “We must do better.” He means you.
A company declares a world‑saving mission neatly aligned with quarterly goals and a mood board. Posters bloom, a cinematic manifesto drops, a Chief Purpose Officer arrives. The janitors’ wages do not move. The supply chain doesn’t either. Inside Slack the slogans multiply; outside the walls little changes beyond the brand equity.
An activist becomes allergic to nuance because nuance is a poor thumbnail. Complexity does not travel, so every opponent becomes a monster, every ally a saint, every policy a lever that flips the world from doom to deliverance. Raise a question and you are accused of treason against empathy.
Two losses hide in this theater. First, the decline of ostracism used well—the capacity to say, “No, that is beneath you,” without being accused of cruelty. Healthy communities have boundaries. Without them, predators prosper and cynics learn that words are for power rather than for truth. Second, the severing of prestige from outcomes. We stop asking what changed for those who needed help, and we start asking what changed for those on camera. The answer is monotonous: followers.
Pay people in applause and you will buy choreography. Pay them in responsibility and you might get a culture.

Naive Empathy: When Kindness Forgets Tomorrow
Empathy is a light. It shows you where the pain is; it does not tell you what to do next. That requires judgment, standards, memory, and the willingness to be briefly disliked in service of a longer good.
Naive empathy solves today’s visible hurt by creating tomorrow’s invisible harm. It feels generous because the reward is immediate—the cry stops, the praise starts, the room relaxes. The bill arrives later, in a different room, paid by people who were never at the table.
You forgive without consequence because punishment feels mean, and you teach everyone watching that boundaries bend under public tears. You give in ways that trade dignity for dependence, and people learn to signal need, rather than build capacity because signaling pays faster. You confuse tolerance with an inability to discriminate between the decent and the dangerous. Predators applaud. The vulnerable go quiet.
Structured empathy is different. It couples care with discipline and asks boring questions that save lives: What happens next? Who pays later? How do we build strength, not only relief? The parent who says “no” is not less loving than the one who always says “yes.” Often, they are the only adult in the room.
Here is the line worth drawing clearly: compassion without strength collapses into theater, and strength without compassion hardens into brutality. Civilization requires the marriage, the tenderness to see pain and the spine to do the right thing when the right thing is not the easiest.

Deliberate Moral Design: Building the Beams Back In
We are not going to resurrect a single myth and declare it home. We can study why the old scaffolds worked and rebuild their functions intentionally. The aim is simple: make responsibility cheaper than performance, and make outcomes more prestigious than optics.
Make results visible, not the performance of effort, but the trail of change. Put prestige on the scoreboard of lives improved, harms prevented, and promises kept across time. Reward the quiet builders; they are the oxygen.
Raise the cost of theater. Do not ban signaling. Make it expensive in the right ways: time, skin in the game, open books. If you claim to care, adopt a measurable slice of the problem and report back on the boring parts.
Restore standards with teeth. Judgment is not cruelty, and boundaries are not bigotry. Communities that never say “no” become rituals of avoidance where the worst people learn that they are safe.
Teach incentives literacy. Show children and adults, how rewards tilt behavior. Train the reflex to ask, “What will this encourage next month?” Then train it again when the crowd makes that question feel rude.
Prefer institutional memory over novelty worship. Write down what worked and what failed. Refuse to reboot the same dysfunction every five years because the folder with the lessons learned felt uncool. Treat discipline as compassion: rites of passage, earned responsibilities, duties that grow with capacity. Comfort is a tool, not a purpose. Suffering is information, not identity.
Let me be frank about our rapid abandonment: some of it was genuine progress—perhaps ten percent. The rest was convenience in a tuxedo. Discipline is heavy. When a culture offers a noble excuse to drop it, many will. We did. And the invoices arrived as fragility dressed as virtue, as outrage standing in for action, as institutions that fall when pushed.
The way back is not romance. It is work. Set the incentives so the easiest path and the right path share a roadbed. Put the spotlight on people who carry weight, not those who pose near it. Keep the moral words, and insist they pull a measurable load.
The good life is not a mood. It is architecture. Build with materials that last: truth tested in public, strength that serves, empathy that plans, and incentives that reward what actually heals. Everything else is wardrobe.

These are weird times, and I fully reserved the right to be wrong, but everything I said here was wholehearted.
Godspeed and thank you for listening.

References / Further Reading

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”
• C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man