How Understanding Morality Is More Complex Than We Think
Industrial Abandonment
Under capitalism, if you were to lose your job, no one would feel any responsibility towards you. Your coworkers, your boss, the government - everyone would shrug and say, that's how having a job works, find another one. Perhaps if you were truly destitute you could attempt to apply for benefits, but that in and of itself would be a job-like endeavor and many people who end up on benefits are accepting that they will never reenter the work force. You could also just end up on the street and perhaps, even die. That happens a lot, too.
I say all of this because I want to discuss incentive.
Under capitalism, there is no guarantee of your safety, there is almost no one you can count on when you have nothing else. You are a citizen, but that doesn't really mean all that much. Society birthed you without caring and it will leave you to die without caring, the only thing that gives you value under capitalism is how much money you have. Money is the only thing that keeps you alive, it is the only thing that indicates you have any right to live, it is the only reason anyone cares about you at all. Loyalty, skill, etc, none of that matters excepting in how it can betranslated into money. Thus, if you want to be happy — for that matter if you want to survive AT ALL — you are incentivized to always be thinking about making as much money as possible. It pushes everyone to do what's the most monetarily effective strategy available to them, because it's in their best interest to be selfish and always looking out for oneself.
Some people have a very simplistic view of the world — they think every moment is about making moral decisions between good or bad choices, and good people make good choices, and bad people make bad choices. I know bad choices are bad. I don't need to hear people talk about how bad bad things are because I know bad things are bad. I am a good person who would never do a bad thing, so I don't need to hear anyone talk about how bad things are bad. It's unfair to waste me, a good person's time, by talking about bad things I would never do. But the truth is, the world is full of choices between doing what society incentivizes us to do and doing what we think is good or bad. Sometimes a person with a lot of control over your life is demanding that you do something that will kind of hurt people, but only indirectly. Sometimes saying no to someone has a possibility of being physically dangerous for you. This doesn't mean you aren't responsible for going along with what you were induced to do. But it does remind us that context is responsible for everything - all the effort in the world to say This Is A Bad Thing and This Is A Good Thing can be quite pointless versus "I need to keep my job or I or my family may starve." People will do basically anything to be part of something and feel safe, and indeed, people don't make many friends or succeed by being rigidly dogmatic about everything and refusing to budge on anything, so only a very small number of people will truly be so dogmatic that they never do anything "bad" ever.
The truth is, sometimes the system itself is cruel - it creates perverse and harmful incentives, it offloads the responsibility across everyone so everyone feels bad but doesn't feel like it's their individual fault. And often times it really isn't fully anyone's fault, it's not like the system was created by a single person, designing a plan exactly to force moral difficulties upon people. That's where people often make mistakes - they want to go looking for the single evil person who made this system for some evil purpose, they want to find the CEO of Bad Decisions and kill him and thus make everything good again. But they don't want to take the step past that to examining how the incentive makes people end up making bad decisions over and over, they ultimately feel that the world is full of good people and bad people and that can never be changed so the only answer is to destroy bad people. Thus this refusal to even consider the idea of perhaps being a bad person depending on the situation, or how some decisions are a bit bad and a bit good and basically just what makes sense at the time, is quite immature and keeps people from trying to change incentives.
Instead, we just keep on talking about how if everyone just did the right thing, the world would be perfect. But when you make people choose between security and morality, it's a simple fact that most people will choose security, not just for themselves, but for the people they care about. Because there is nothing humans fear more than death, and if you want to find the real incentive in a system, try looking through it to see where people are willing to condemn others to it. Both real and direct death like that of a homeless man in the sun or an executioner's axe, and the slow and empty death of being a pariah living in a cage for the majority of your life.