I think one of the foremost questions I and many people ask when deciding who to allocate political power to is “will this person abuse their position” (or relatedly “will the person follow-through on their stated principles when I cannot see their behavior”), and only secondarily “is this person the most competent for it or the most intelligent person with it”. Insofar as this is typical, in an iterated game you should act as someone who can be given political power without concern about whether you will abuse it, if you would like to be given it at all.
I tend to believe that, if I’m ever in a situation where I feel that I might want to trade ethics/integrity to get what I want, instead, if I am smarter or work harder for a few more months, I will be able to get it without making any such sacrifices, and this is better because ethical people with integrity will continue to trust and work with me.
A related way I think about this is that ethical people with integrity work together, but don’t want to work with people who don’t have ethics or integrity. For example I know someone who once deceived their manager, to get their job done (cf. Moral Mazes). Until I see this person repent or produce credible costly signals to the contrary, I will not give this person much resources or work with them.
That said ‘conventional’ ethics, i.e. the current conventions, include things like recycling and not asking people out on dates in the same company, and I already don’t think these are actually involved in ethical behavior, so I’ve no truck with dismissing those.
“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”.
A few quick thoughts:
I think one of the foremost questions I and many people ask when deciding who to allocate political power to is “will this person abuse their position” (or relatedly “will the person follow-through on their stated principles when I cannot see their behavior”), and only secondarily “is this person the most competent for it or the most intelligent person with it”. Insofar as this is typical, in an iterated game you should act as someone who can be given political power without concern about whether you will abuse it, if you would like to be given it at all.
I tend to believe that, if I’m ever in a situation where I feel that I might want to trade ethics/integrity to get what I want, instead, if I am smarter or work harder for a few more months, I will be able to get it without making any such sacrifices, and this is better because ethical people with integrity will continue to trust and work with me.
A related way I think about this is that ethical people with integrity work together, but don’t want to work with people who don’t have ethics or integrity. For example I know someone who once deceived their manager, to get their job done (cf. Moral Mazes). Until I see this person repent or produce credible costly signals to the contrary, I will not give this person much resources or work with them.
That said ‘conventional’ ethics, i.e. the current conventions, include things like recycling and not asking people out on dates in the same company, and I already don’t think these are actually involved in ethical behavior, so I’ve no truck with dismissing those.
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”.