You would also need to control for the degree to which people had a stake in the outcome (ie., virtue signalling).
Since executives have to make decisions where choosing the moral option may impose an economic (or operational) cost, this requires thinking through the actual choice.
Morality for the "rank and file" is just a signalling issue: there's nothing to think through, the answer they are "supposed to choose" is the one they do so, at no cost to them.
This study showed executives spent relatively more time on questions with moral/ethical concerns. Perhaps the control questions were more similar daily work and hence familiar, while there were fewer encounters with questions having moral/ethical concerns. Perhaps executives decided more care was required for these questions to ensure people were not hurt.
Getting back to the grandparent post, executives are certainly aware of situations with moral/ethical concerns and need not consult their barber to answer them.
"Rank and file" employees choosing to prioritize morality very, very frequently pay real costs for doing so - with a much larger personal impact than executives feel.
Only in very rare circumstances where the obvious answer and their procedural work dont align.
When making an operational decision that affects the direction of the business, morality is almost always a concern -- even at the level of "do our customers benefit from this vs., do we?" etc.
Where do you get the idea that those circumstances are "very rare"? Workers are being asked to break rules and do unethical things all the time, and you're pretty much guaranteed to pay a personal cost if you refuse.
Meanwhile morality is almost always one of least important factors when making operational decisions.
Iran's principle strategy is to impose severe economic consequences on the US and its allies, to tip the balance of resolve in their favour. This is easy for them to do, because closing vital shipping lanes and attacking energy infrastructure in the region is done at only the cost of a few drones -- whilst defending this is incredibly expensive. This asymmetry is the only one which is profoundly in Iran's favour, and their best strategy for forcing a diplomatic resolution. This is why they are attacking multiple US allies in the region.
Or not. Or what is in the flourishing of all living things, and especially in our species of ape, is evil. That only what is called "good" is the accident of there being a boundary up against you to stop you; or the imposition of a boundary which will destroy or constrain your living too much.
Perhaps morality is just the playpen boundaries of enfeebled apes, playing amongst themselves in luxury, thinking they've overcome some aspect of their nature since they barely need to move around at all.
Meh to this misanthropic disregard for other's experience. If you need external alignment to prevent you being evil your internal alignment is f'ed. Considering morality an arbitrary boundary is a major red flag for antisocial behaviors.
Structured interactions lead to better results, chaotic actions lead to chaos. Ethics/morality is part of that structure that lets us achieve more together than individually.
if you think living in that structure is enfeebling: I highly question what you desire to do that results in that feeling.
The existence of "experiments" to choose from in the first place is already theory-given. As soon as you've formulated a space of such experiments to explore, almost all your theory work is done.
Children are pensions, that's why poorer nations have lots of children because lots are needed to look after people in their old age. Thus, many of these comments on HN and elsewhere, "make the nation better", only have led -- and will lead -- to fewer children.
When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any.
But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity etc. are the barrier --- this isnt some "indictment of our culture" -- a sentiment no better than "we're being punished by god"-thinking which turns every weather event into a didactic lesson on people's pet peeves.
You're implying that people incapable of planning next Thursday are thinking about their pensions. Poor countries reproduce a lot because they still have a lot of people functioning on the level of biological impulses rather than rational thought.
That...may be pushing it a lot. People in poorer countries are just as capable of rational thought as anyone else. The difference is in the education they've received, the resources they have access to, and the rights individuals have. Mentally, there's little difference - minus effects of things like malnutrition in severe cases.
I grew up in the rural South (America's Third World) (N. GA) in the late 80s / early 90s and tons of children were born out of wedlock because kids were bored and fooling around. Bored, horny kids like to have sex. Now there are so many way to occupy yourself digitally that I think these is happening less. It's not that poorer areas are dumber, it's that they had less access to entertainment and sex is free.
A switch statement is how you do ad-hoc polymorphism in C -- i dont thinks an own against C developers to point that out. If they wanted to adopt the C++ style that immediately requires the entire machinery of OOP, which is an incredibly heavy price to avoid a few switch statements in the tiny number of places ad-hoc poly is actually needed
You don't usually do C++ subsets if you want the full shebang.
I have a "mini-std" headerfile that's about 500 LoC implementing lightweight variants of std::vector, std::function, a stack-local std::function (unsafe as hell and useful as hell to avoid allocations), a shared-ptr, qsort and some other nifty stuff.
That does a lot of things, but even then I use other patterns that brings a lot of bang for the buck without having to go full C (hint: the stack-local function equivalent gets a lot of mileage).
I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger.
This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction.
I think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc.
The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.
You are probably at least 30 years old and you have forgotten how disruptive social media is for young people. We are not talking about a degradation of a high trust society here.
With social media, we are talking about kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster. We are talking about large swaths of the population preferring to be entertained by social media then to engage in activities that would promote their success. We are talking about the same symptoms as addiction manifesting in kids because they are exposed to too much social media.
Your litmus test for generational effect is also flawed. Let's assume an inverse test as a mental exercise, where we introduce social media to a young population previously unexposed. Kids who are able to reject the pull of social media will replace the ones who cannot, the numbers will shuffle. After such a test is concluded, you will tell yourself you're right because on a macro-economic scale everything looks the same, but to an individual prone to social media overuse, his or her life will be different (likely worse).
That said, the issues you bring up are more important, and no one seems willing to tackle them. Perhaps a middle ground here is that the problems you listed are masking the problem of social media overuse, but that social media overuse is still a problem. It is not an innocent messenger.
> A dangerous disease appeared to afflict the young, which some diagnosed as reading addiction and others as reading rage, reading fever, reading mania or reading lust. Throughout Europe reports circulated about the outbreak of what was described as an epidemic of reading. The behaviours associated with this supposedly insidious contagion were sensation-seeking and morally dissolute and promiscuous behaviour. Even acts of self-destruction were associated with this new craze for the reading of novels.
> What some described as a craze was actually a rise in the 18th century of an ideal: the ‘love of reading’. The emergence of this new phenomenon was largely due to the growing popularity of a new literary genre: the novel. The emergence of commercial publishing in the 18th century and the growth of an ever-widening constituency of readers was not welcomed by everyone. Many cultural commentators were apprehensive about the impact of this new medium on individual behaviour and on society’s moral order.
> kids doing the bare minimum on homework in order to get back on social media faster
This was me for much of high school, but with Team Fortress 2 or Dota instead of social media.
Comic books, video games, television, skateboarding, fidget spinning - the list of things kids would rather do than homework is endless. I think a kid spending 4h+ on one activity is unhealthy either way, and it really comes back to the parents to be the arbiters. Speaking from experience, children (generally) aren't very good at predicting how best to spend their time, which is why involved parents are so important.
> Speaking from experience, children (generally) aren't very good at predicting how best to spend their time, which is why involved parents are so important.
I don't disagree, but adults aren't either, they just have clearer incentives. Disconnect the incentives from the desired behaviour, or make the reward any more ambiguous than not being rained on, getting more currency, or preventing their kid from being deceased, and adults are just as lost much of the time.
Case in point, the tendency for people to consider skateboarding an unoptimal use of time, but (often) simultaneously be confused about why they're lonely and fat in midlife. Kids look to their parents as models for success, but haven't yet had their judgement manipulated, and can see right through all the bullshit while they watch them rot away commuting by car and sitting in front of the TV. There's no convincing argument these people have against social media, because they're telling their kids not to poison themselves with degenerate laziness and addiction while engaging in degenerate laziness and addiction, in addition to not being able to offer the incentives otherwise that they'd have had not to do that.
"Don't play videogames, you'll get bad grades"
"What do grades mean?"
"They'll let you get into a good school"
"What will a good school do for me?"
"It'll help you get a good job"
"What does it mean to get a good job?"
"Well, back in my day, you'd eventually get a house and maybe have some kids"
"Ya but what about now or 10 years from now?"
"I guess... you'll be able to rent more videogames.. run along then"
The question is whether social media is closer to candy or cocaine.
You are right that kids will chose anything other than homework but how do you explain adults spending 8 hours a day on short form platforms? Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people. Some gamers did tend to develop obsessive tendencies over gaming but now that seems much more widespread with social media
> Don't think TV had this kind of a hold on people.
Tvs in the bedroom, living rooms, kitchens, they're centerpieces of rooms. Sports on all day on weekends. They got put into cars. I get together with older family and they'll put the TV on and we sit around it.
They only thing with TV is it wasn't convenient enough to be in our pockets all day.
That implies that the A/B testing will lead to a new version that is substantially more engaging. Maybe so, but it seems that the most successful social media platforms arrived at their optimal version more or less immediately.
For instance, I (naively?) doubt that much A/B testing went into designing HN. Yet, no other site holds as much of a grip on me.
Facebook seems to think it will, since they employ A/B testing across pretty much much every facet of the company. Check out Airlock for just one example:
I was also one who spent their time playing dota in high school. In my experience one can learn more from playing dota than the average social media experience. Understanding team dynamics and emotional regulation to negative experiences outside your control. If you take the game seriously even prioritization and deliberate practice.
Of course not everyone learns from playing dota but at least it's a focused experience that doesn't steal focus away like short form videos.
I think your second paragraph is too broad. The same could be said for kids doing the bare minimum to play video games, or even go outside to play with their friends all prior to social media. Many people long spent too much time watching tv, and still do, instead of pursuing what you think success is. Also, let people be content, we don't always need to engaging in activities for success
I think that on the whole, you're right in that these issues, where social media can provide support to young people, are not often addressed, but I also think that the larger framing that seems to pop up in these threads, where we assume social media is a negative influence that might sometimes facilitate a positive interaction, is backwards, and not really supported by evidence. Far more research, especially research that actually talks to kids about their social media use seems to indicate that, on the whole, kids experience social media as a largely neutral thing that sometimes has good or bad outcomes. Importantly, I think talking to kids reveals that they're usually aware of the harms of social media and they work to mitigate those influences in their lives.
I really blame "The Anxious Generation" for somehow successfully setting the tone of conversation around social media by feeding into the larger moral panic despite being a poorly researched pile of dreck.
I think most of what you said is incorrect.
You need to chat about this with high school teachers. From my personal experience and that of my friends who have teen kids right now --
Talking to kids about these issues is useless; they will say anything to keep the opium coming. They might be aware that spending a lot of time on social media and cell phones might result in slipping grades and homework not done, but they will spend hours on both, regardless of consequences. A lot of emotional anguish will come from social media, and kids on social media are generally a lot more nasty to each other than in person. There are so many tears because of what he/she said on discord... especially girls, being more emotional, cannot mitigate anything at all. These things suck them in like a drug, and parents' action is often the only way out.
A blocked social media and kids' cell phones on my desk until homework and chores are done was the most important factor that helped to turn their grades around, and I know a lot of other parents who gravitated towards the same thing.
I'm well older than 30 and couldn't disagree with GP more. I think social media has been an absolute disaster not just for young people, but for society at large.
And, importantly, I don't think it needs to be this way, but is designed to be this way to increase engagement. I remember when I first got on Facebook in the mid 00s and I loved it, and I was able to meaningfully connect with old friends. I also remember when the enshittification began, at least for me, when there was a distinct change in the feed algorithm that made it much more like twitter, designed for right hand thumb scrolling exercises and little actual positive interactions with friends.
Social media is not the problem here. It is a problem, but it's not the cause for what you're describing.
I got my career (programming) from social media and online social interaction in general. Sure, I did the bare minimum on homework for efficiency, because I disliked the extra steps and writing that teachers wanted of me (I probably have dysgraphia and can't write well), and preferred just to get the answer. It was never explained that they weren't scoring or teaching the answer, and that they were instead measuring the method. (That was a failure of the school system. Big problem in general. I digress.)
Social media allowed me to meet others like me I otherwise never would've met. Allowed me to learn things from others like me I otherwise may never have learned. Allowed me to find the people that I could get along with rather than trying to make do only with the people physically close to me.
Sure, TikTok and whatever didn't exist back then. They're terrible, even if they manage to deliver some goods. I don't have a TikTok account, don't have a Facebook account, etc.
I do have a Discord account. I did have a Cohost account, before they shut down. I have Reddit and Hacker News. Those are where I feel I spend most of my non-work, non-hobby time. I use Discord almost entirely for private communications. I used Cohost almost entirely for making connections on Discord. I use Reddit to offer advice to and receive advice from others. I use Hacker News for some sample of current events and to offer my thoughts and discussion on them.
I do have some bad habits. I scroll Twitter every once in a while, though I do find many memes and other posts to share with friends and relate over.
And social media has done some bad for me. I won't elaborate on this but I had a few very major traumas through social media when I was 12-14, and some lesser ones more recently.
But it's been a major driver of good in my life for a long time; fulfillment and connection I never could have had otherwise; and of course hard lessons I would've eventually needed anyway.
There's an argument to be made that I just wasn't the type of young person that social media is particularly harmful to, but it's done me some major harms, some exactly the type of harm that's used to protest against it, and yet none of the harm was social media's fault. All of it was interpersonal interaction. All social media did was reduce the friction to that interpersonal interaction.
Maybe? When I see people talking about social media, they say stuff like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc. It's not hard to extend that to say, Tumblr, which Cohost borrowed a lot from, for example. Though I will admit, I've never really heard of a Discord or Reddit "influencer"...
So that would make Reddit social media, if I'm understanding correctly. I think not HN because everybody sees the same front page. I don't know if Discord is pushing personalized server suggestions yet.
HN is somewhere in the middle because the feed is shared instead of personalized, but it's still algorithmic and with global reach so I place it close to other social media.
We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.
>dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision;
These two feel interrelated :)
> I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces.
Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)
This can be proven. Simply measure a population of typical social media users for relative measures of neuroticism. Then have an experiment population of healthy military leaders and police officers that have low social media use. The assumption is that the second population would score dramatically lower in neuroticism than the population average.
That establishes a of divergent populations baseline. The change their, such as deny, social media access or content. Measure the change to those two populations.
Assumed facts:
* social media access dramatically increases prevalence of anxiety and a state of dependency/addition. When true, removal of social media triggers addiction withdrawal that displays as emotional health illnesses.
* Populations that do not frequently make use of social media are not at risk of withdrawal.
* persons in high risk professions are typically conditioned into states of substantially lower neuroticism that population averages are not exposed to
It's hard to control for mere provision of social media access. Eg., if you're supposed to be out in the field all day, when are you mean to access social media?
Social media is, in that case, a replacement activity.
The question, which is i think unanswered, is whether and what its replacing in the lives of children. It may turn out to be: not much. That when taken away, children don't suddenly get more time, attention, socialisation, etc. instead, they just get less. Or that the kinds of tech hellholes theyre dumped in have purely passive interaction, eg., ipad kids.
Actually, there is historical precedent for that: Gen X.
The defining feature of Generation X is the latch-key kid population. Children arriving home to empty houses for hours after school without any kind of social interaction whether in person or online. This would be before the internet, so there was no online social activity. This behavior may have applied to as many as 30-35 million US households where for the first time in US history both parents were expected to work full time outside the house. These children had to learn to entertain themselves, do their own chores, and possibly prepare their own meals. Imagine an entire massive population learning to become largely fully self-sufficient, from an emotional development perspective, as children. They had no substitute solution or alternative activity.
There is a contradiction here which commonly underlies 'problems in modern parenting' discussions and creates a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" situation. It is always possible to criticize any parent for being uninvolved or too involved.
I've often wondered why 'soccer mom' became a negative term as though 'supporting your child in healthy outdoor recreational activities' was considered a bad thing. I know it implied a log of other behaviors, but still was anchored in the idea that there is a microscopic line between an involved parent and an over-involved parent.
Then we still assured that two working parents brings neglect - despite the pride many Gen Xers take in being a 'latch key kid' and being sent out until the street lights went dark.
> This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction.
You're speculation here could be a counterargument to Jonathan Haidt's meta studies on the effects of social media on teenage girls, if you can supplement your speculation with a better explanation for the increase in major depressive episodes in the time range he cites than the correlation with Instagram use.
For this article, however, all the participants are aged 18-30. Using it as a jumping off point to paint all concern over social media as a "moral panic" is reductive and unhelpful.
Granting to you for the moment that the issue is with technology -- if instagram is removed, what is it replaced with? Presumably youtube? Or more passive kinds of tech?
Is the issue social media, or mass media? Who knows.
If we don't grant that, then the rise of instagram correlates heavily with everything i've mentioned. I'd suppose if you look at the physical places of social interaction for teenagers, where they'd have to move around and meet people -- these have all disappeared, and extremely, with the rise of instagram.
Removing the gramme hardly brings them back. Maybe, maybe not.
A sibling comment with a bunch of ostensible counterarguments to Haidt appeared earlier, with at least seven annotated footnotes. I was about to dig into it, but they deleted it!
In an attempt to summon the comment back, I'll just close by saying the negative effects are significant and there is no good reason to doubt Haidt's research. :)
Nothing is black and white and therefore you may be somewhat correct. Society and the world is a complex beast with many drivers and gears, however it would be silly to think it isn't also a big driver and is just boiled down to moral panic, especially for our younger cohort.
Even by my own personal account social media is addictive especially short form video content.
Just the addictive components alone and the type of content that is constantly served to young adults is a concern, not withstanding other issues with social media.
Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
2. The better a platform is at delivering ads, the worse it is for your mental well-being.
Point (2) is not just because of the ads themselves, but also all the incentives created by ad-monetized platforms. So much slop, misinformation, clickbait, and ragebait is caused by people fighting for attention to get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
There's a reason "peak TV" happened after TV shows were freed from the need to bend their structure around several ad breaks. This stuff is not just a "monetization strategy", it infects the surrounding (non-ad) media and fundamentally changes it for the worse.
Edit: One last point - ad delivery requires taking control away from the viewer/user. A platform that's good at delivering ads is necessarily one that makes it hard to block/skip/remove the ads because most users would if they could. This same mentality of control then informs the rest of the design. So you have endless A/B tests you can't opt out of and "I'll enable it later" dialog boxes instead of allowing the user to control their experience.
Maybe 'social media bad' is just the new 'video games bad' or 'watching TV bad', but the sheer scale and intrusiveness is completely different imo.
I couldn't carry my gaming PC with me as a Team Fortress 2 addicted kid, my Gameboy was too basic to keep me compulsively glued to its screen for 8 hours, it couldn't constantly send me notifications, it didn't have some hyperoptimized billion dollar algorithm meticulously designed to exploit human psychology.
There were friction and physical boundaries, now there aren't. That's a problem.
Just ask most primary school teachers how their students are doing.
There's hard research to support the idea that it is not a moral panic and that there are serious long-term effects for both individuals and societies. That can be true at the same time as the "think of the children" people weaponize that rhetoric for their own ends, as well as the long term trends you point to. I don't think it serves anyone to turn your argument FOR those points down into an argument that these "moral panic" concerns are probably made up.
It literally came to light in court filings that Meta has specific prompt guidelines for how AI bots on its networks should go about having sexual encounters with minors, with documentation for cases as young as 8 years old.
The same billionaire who pushes this shit is in league with the most-documented child sex trafficker in the history of the world. Where there's smoke, there's fire. There is absolutely no reason to give the social media companies benefit of the doubt.
There's serious issues with heritability research in general, it's observability stuff -- not experimentation, so imv, its at best proto-science, and in many cases plainly pseudoscience. "Heritability" itself has little to do with whether something is inherited, and speaks only to correlation with genes. Since we have a vast amount of genes which are shared for all sorts of reasons (ie., mating is based on shared culture, wealth, geography, etc.) -- the metric is mostly useless.
Accents are highly heritable, since they always correlated with location which is always correlated with genes.
Even if you do these twin studies, you have to assume a model of how genes and the environment interact, and all such models are obviously false.
Thus even if you grant that heritability measures on high quality twin studies are 'sign correct', in the sense that they show P(genetic effect) > P(no genetic effect) -- any magnitude of this effect, or any theory of is, is more or less pseudoscience (unless there are experimental studies showing gene-trait mechanism).
For example, it is "obvious" that P(genetic effect) > P(none) for intelligence, since genes control the structure of the brain and body. But there is no evidence (I'm aware of...) that beyond provision of a functioning brain, our genetics play any role in intelligence stratification. ie., all correlation with task performance and IQ can be explained by correlations in the metal retardation / mental deficiency range.
This doesn't mean intelligence is very malleable beyond a certain age. My own views is that genes are basically providing functioning hardware to the womb, and after that point its early development (both pre-birth and probs up to at most 3yo) which locks in a lot of the observed intelligence stratification. This is a very different story than popularisers of IQ research communicate though, but be aware, none are very good scientists and most of this research is methodologically unfit
Any articles where newspapers are the main source are basically just propaganda. An encyclopaedia should not be in the business of laundering yellow journalism into what is supposed to be a tertiary resource. If they banned this practice, that would immediately deal with this issue.
A blanket dimsissal is a simple way to avoid dealing with complexity, here both in understanding the problem and forming solutions. Obviously not all newspapers are propaganda and at the same time not all can be trusted; not everything in the same newspaper or any other news source is of the same accuracy; nothing is completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy.
I think accepting that gets us to the starting line. Then we need to apply a lot of critical thought to sometimes difficult judgments.
IMHO quality newspapers do an excellent job - generally better than any other category of source on current affairs, but far from perfect. I remember a recent article for which they intervied over 100 people, got ahold of secret documents, read thousands of pages, consulted experts .... That's not a blog post or Twitter take, or even a HN comment :), but we still need to examine it critically to find the value and the flaws.
Since executives have to make decisions where choosing the moral option may impose an economic (or operational) cost, this requires thinking through the actual choice.
Morality for the "rank and file" is just a signalling issue: there's nothing to think through, the answer they are "supposed to choose" is the one they do so, at no cost to them.
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