This area (or perhaps just the example?) is complicated somewhat because for authority-based moral systems (parental, religious, legal, professional...) directly ignoring a command/ruling is in itself considered to be an immoral act: on top of whatever the content of said act was. And even if the immorality of the act is constant, most of those systems seem to recognise in principle and/or in practice that acting when you suspect you’d get a different order is different to direct breaking of orders.
This makes sense for all sorts of practical reasons: caution around uncertainty, the clearer Schelling point of ‘you directly disobeyed’, and, cynically, the fact that it can allow those higher in the authority chain plausible deniability (the old “I’m going to pay you based on your sales. Obviously I won’t tell you to use unscrupulous methods. If you ask me directly about any I will explicitly ban them. But I might not ask you in too much detail what you did to achieve those sales: that’s up to you”)
This area (or perhaps just the example?) is complicated somewhat because for authority-based moral systems (parental, religious, legal, professional...) directly ignoring a command/ruling is in itself considered to be an immoral act: on top of whatever the content of said act was. And even if the immorality of the act is constant, most of those systems seem to recognise in principle and/or in practice that acting when you suspect you’d get a different order is different to direct breaking of orders.
This makes sense for all sorts of practical reasons: caution around uncertainty, the clearer Schelling point of ‘you directly disobeyed’, and, cynically, the fact that it can allow those higher in the authority chain plausible deniability (the old “I’m going to pay you based on your sales. Obviously I won’t tell you to use unscrupulous methods. If you ask me directly about any I will explicitly ban them. But I might not ask you in too much detail what you did to achieve those sales: that’s up to you”)
Yep, the example isn’t perfect—but it is easy to grasp, and it’s obviously not an ideal behaviour.