| >"When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist." —Barry Schwartz Quite so. And things may be worse than that. It may be that both incentives and virtues are unreliable. For example, the famous day care study mentioned in Freakonomics casts doubt on the utility of incentives when it comes to social problem-solving: https://sites.google.com/site/cvhsbahm/economics/econ_calend... Moreover, my guess is that virtues themselves may also be unreliable because they're are about outward behaviour, which is often inherited and not explicitly understood, and which may not be passed on. Jacob Bronowski, scientist and author of The Ascent of Man, identified the primary scientific virtue as what he called the habit of truth. This is to rigidly tell the truth about all things, both in private and in print, including about the minutest details, in one's scientific work. It is a matter of opinion, but it seems that the habit of truth no longer pervades the scientific enterprise, now fully professionalized and bureaucratised. Perhaps it was lost because it was only a habit. Whereas the love of truth, beauty, and so on, are spiritual values: modes of being rather than habitual outward behaviours. Which may explain why (according to Ed Dutton and Bruce Charlton), many 20th century scientific geniuses were first generation atheists. They inherited a reverence for truth and reality; they were able to make important scientific progress, but their ardour could not be sustained beyond a generation or two. https://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/ |