Nice Things
I thought this was particularly well stated by Matt Yglesias (the context is that LL Bean has updated its famously generous return policy because a bunch of shitty people were abusing it):
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/962364433019256832
It’s sad that it’s come to this.
Unscrupulous people ruin a generous policy for everyone.
This LL Bean situation is the problem with Milton Friedman’s views on the social responsibility of business btw.
No system of laws and contracts can substitute for the benefits of a healthy climate of ethical conduct and a society that cares about shame & honor.
“That makes me smart” as an all purpose rationale for shady-but-legal behavior is acid that’s destroying our society.
I used to play a video game, Puzzle Pirates, that was like a puzzle based MMORPG, but instead of powering up your character, you just got better at the puzzles. You could organize Crews, which were basically Clans in other games, and Flags, which were like Crew alliances, and they had these big events where you and your Flag could blockade an island to take it over from whatever Flag controlled it. These could be clashes of hundreds of players.
To do that, you had to drop a warchest, and that started a 24 hour countdown for the blockade to commence, to give the defenders time to move their fleets around and prepare manpower.
There was this one guy, RobertDonald, who was like your classic play to win kind of guy, and he would learn about an island's defending Flag, and where the players were based, and he would drop his warchest in the middle of the week, in the middle of the night for them, so they wouldn't find out for a while, they'd lose some prep time, and they'd have a hard time fielding players to properly defend.
It was a scummy move, but I generally don't fault anyone for playing within the rules to win. It's a game. A bunch of players got mad and protested to the game developers, and they made some changes to blockades so they'd only happen on weekends. RobertDonald was an arguably good guy, playing a villain, who exposed loopholes and his actions ultimately led to a better game with better rules.
Society isn't a video game. When you skirt around what's legal to personally profit, and other people get mad, it's not because they're losing some video game island. They're losing their jobs. They're losing their homes. They're getting injured. They're suffering from disease. People die.
Enough jerks abuse a generous return policy because they want a free new backpack, that kills company profits and drives them to lay people off. Not because there was something bad about their company, but because there was something bad about their customers.
Enough jerk companies abuse a generous environmental policy because they don't want to spend a few more bucks to be responsible about polluting and protecting their workers, it ruins the air and water for everyone. It's 2018 and people are still getting black lung.
A society creates laws to encode ethics. People acting in bad faith will always be able to find holes, and an individual exploiting those holes may not do any significant harm on his own, but a culture of people who don't care about acting in bad faith will destroy itself. If we respect laws, but don't respect the underlying ethics they're meant to reflect, no one ends up better off.
Democracies will usually course correct, and make legally explicit what had been implicit norms, but it doesn't undo the harm done getting there. Financial ruin is hard to dig out of, but easy to fall into. Poor health is a slippery slope as well. The dead stay dead.