“whether you will be caught abusing it” not “whether you will abuse it”. For certain kinds of actions it is possible to reliably evade detection and factor in the fact that you can reliably evade detection.
I don’t know who you have in your life, but in my life there is a marked difference between the people who clearly care about integrity, who clearly care about following the wishes of others when they have power over resources that they in some way owe to others, and those who do not (e.g. spending an hour thinking through the question “Hm, now that John let me stay at his house while he’s away, how would he want me to treat it?”). The cognition such people run would be quite costly to run differently at the specific time to notice that it’s worth it to take adversarial action, and they pay a heavy cost doing it in all the times I end up being able to check. The people whose word means something are clear to me, and my agreements with them are more forthcoming and simple than with others.
If an organisation reliably accepts certains forms of corruption, the current leadership may want people who engage in those forms of corruption to be given power and brought into leadership.
It is my experience that those with integrity are indeed not the sorts of people that people in corrupt organizations want to employ, they do not perform as the employers wish, and get caught up in internal conflicts.
And it is possible if you create a landscape with different incentives people won’t fall back to their old behaviours but show new ones instead.
I do have a difference in my mind between “People who I trust to be honest and follow through on commitments in the current, specific incentive landscape” and “People who I trust to be honest and follow through on commitments in a wide variety of incentive landscapes”.
I don’t know who you have in your life, but in my life there is a marked difference between the people who clearly care about integrity, who clearly care about following the wishes of others when they have power over resources that they in some way owe to others, and those who do not (e.g. spending an hour thinking through the question “Hm, now that John let me stay at his house while he’s away, how would he want me to treat it?”). The cognition such people run would be quite costly to run differently at the specific time to notice that it’s worth it to take adversarial action, and they pay a heavy cost doing it in all the times I end up being able to check. The people whose word means something are clear to me, and my agreements with them are more forthcoming and simple than with others.
It is my experience that those with integrity are indeed not the sorts of people that people in corrupt organizations want to employ, they do not perform as the employers wish, and get caught up in internal conflicts.
I do have a difference in my mind between “People who I trust to be honest and follow through on commitments in the current, specific incentive landscape” and “People who I trust to be honest and follow through on commitments in a wide variety of incentive landscapes”.