Bad money drives out good money, bad species drive out good species, and bad behavior drives out good behavior. In any situation where cheap, spamlike, or exploitative behavior goes unpunished, it spreads and eventually drives out its better counterpart.

In this article we will investigate the mechanism behind this phenomenon, and we will explain why every social system, be it a company, a club, a platform, or a society, must have efficient and effective countermeasures against all forms of abuse and exploitation, if it wishes to persist over time.

Note: The species example is more of an interesting parallel, and maybe also an apt metaphor, than a true example. It naturally relies on another mechanism, namely natural selection, and not human choices.

Introduction

This morning I came across a piece about how editors on Medium can now mass-ban low-effort writers. In the comment section an editor said that she herself literally gets flooded with weak submissions. She expressed her frustration about reading countless low-quality articles, and then, when she sometimes sent them a polite refusal or detailed corrections, she literally never heard back from them.

She suspected that they were just spamming low-quality articles to hundreds of publications, no matter if the topic truly fit or not. This misbehavior on Medium is one trivial example of a very deep problem that affects every social system: People can often get a competitive advantage by violating ethical norms and behavioral expectations.

The Mechanism

The phenomenon we are talking about here is known to economists as the tragedy of the commons. It originally got its name from the commons, meaning the shared pasture lands that all members of a community used collectively to graze their cattle. In this setting, each individual member has a rational incentive to graze as many animals as possible, but if all together graze too many animals, they destroy the commons, thus leaving everyone poorer.

The problem is not that the farmers are evil or psychopathic. The problem is simply that each individual farmer benefits directly from grazing one animal more, while the cost of this behavior is shared across everyone and only arrives later.

The incentives therefore drive individuals to overuse the commons, leading to its eventual destruction. And even if the pasture is actively being ruined at that very moment, the incentives still push each farmer towards overgrazing it further, because like this he will still get the most out of what remains before the commons are entirely ruined.

Some Examples

Once you have understood this dynamic, you cannot help but see it everywhere, such as in the monetary system, in biology, and naturally also in ethics.

“Bad money drives out good money”, say the economists. Bad currency (like paper money, debt notes, or treasury bills) is cheaper to produce and less worth holding on to than good money (like Gold, Bitcoin, etc.). So more and more bad currency gets created and circulated, and in the end the bad currency drives the good currency out of use and thus becomes the standard of payment.

Next, consider Biology: Species that reproduce quickly and cheaply can crowd out more advanced and complex ones. Higher species often breed more slowly and each individual requires more upfront investment. Thus, if they cannot fight back against the smaller pests, the latter will eat away all the food from under their noses, and the more complex species will die out.

Third, consider sexual behavior. Both men and women have a societally desirable and a societally destructive mating strategy.

The desirable strategy is to form stable, mutually beneficial long-term relationships, as these are most conducive to productive work, raising children, and perhaps even leaving some time and energy for participation in civic life.

The destructive strategy is to trade money, power, or feigned interest for sex, or to trade sex for money, power, or attention, depending on which side one comes from. Both behaviors are destructive because they incentivize members of the opposite sex to abandon the stable and long-term beneficial pattern.

They also both undermine their positive counterpart. If enough women give men sex too easily, then good women are pressed to follow suit, and if enough men shower women with unearned attention and money in order to get sex quickly, then this too comes to be expected by all women. In both cases, the bad behavior of some makes life harder for the remaining good actors.

Other examples come from the professional life. Manipulation, dishonesty, self-aggrandizement, and the willingness to take false credit and deflect blame all benefit the individual. Thus if bad actors are left unchecked, they advance faster and earn more, and acting ethically becomes a fool’s errand. Because the rewards for ethical behavior only ever materialize, when enough other people exhibit it too, and this is now no longer the case.

The more ambitious people thus copy the unethical behavior, even if they personally dislike it, and others disengage, stop trying, stop trusting. Again, the bad behavior drives out the good one, and in the end all members of society are worse off for it.

The Necessity of Correction

We see from all of these examples that values too are a common good. As long as enough people maintain them, everyone benefits. Relationships are stable and mutually beneficial, there is less internal strife, things work better, and more goods and services are being produced. But each individual actor is incentivized to violate them, and the cost of doing so is spread across all others and only ever materializes in the future.

Thus good values are very similar to the common pastures, in that everyone has an individual incentive to cut some corners, but as soon as enough people cut enough corners, the whole structure collapses and everyone is worse off for it.

It thus does not matter if even the majority of a group does not wish for this development, as long as bad behavior is not checked, the values of a society will still degenerate, because each individual actor adapts to his environment. The only way a group can protect its values is thus to punish misbehavior and to ban bad actors, i.e. to render bad behavior unprofitable.

It is important to note, that the above described mechanism of deterioration shows a strong threshold effect. When all behave well, one bad actor is easily spotted and punished or removed. But once a certain bad behavior has become common enough, it becomes almost impossible to eradicate. People now simply expect it, and even though they may lament this fact, no one quite knows how to get rid of it again.

Thus once the quality of a social group has deteriorated enough, it is oftentimes easier to just start anew, rather than trying to turn the ship around and starting to create incentives for long-term, mutually beneficial behavior in an environment full of predators, freeloaders, and parasites. The good actors thus quietly leave, and the system deteriorates until it is finally no longer worth participating in for anyone. This is why bad companies go bankrupt, bad platforms lose their users, bad clubs dissolve, and bad societies collapse.

Thus every social system must actively maintain certain standards of behavior if it wishes to persist, and for this it needs mechanisms to punish bad behavior and exclude bad actors. This is true for societies, companies, marketplaces, and also for platforms such as Medium.

The Triumph of Badness was originally published in Infinite Within on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

When it comes to values, everyone has something to say. Some people for example call freedom or diversity values. Others name honesty, tolerance, or respect for others as important values. Again others call belief in the bible or the prophet Mohmmed values.

But one of these is a state of the world / society, one is a prescription for human behavior, and the third is a matter of religious belief and collective tradition (again a state of the world, in a very specific sense). Calling all three “values” without distinction is a bit like mixing apples, oranges, and bananas — and then wondering why the fruit salad is confusing.

This confusion is what I want to fix in this article. I will introduce a clear definition of what a value is and categorize its different variants. This will take much of the confusion out of ‘value-talk’ and let us address political and societal differences much more clearly and directly.

A Working Definition

Considering the above mentioned confusion, I came to call some of these values state-values and others behavior-values. This distinction immediately wiped away most of the reigning confusion.

Of course it also immediately prompted the question: what other categories of values exist? Object-values were an easy next find (things like a tasty meal, clothes, a house, money, and gold).

Soon after I realized that virtues are also a form of values. Virtues are just behavioral patterns or characteristics that are individually valuable or useful, i.e. conducive to a good life.

From this initial overview a general definition began to take shape:

A value is anything that is conducive or beneficial to a good life.

This definition has respectable philosophical backing. Aristotle held that the purpose or goal of life is eudaimonia — living and faring well. If we accept that a good life is the implicit goal of all human action, then a value is simply anything that contributes to it. Thus, to find out what a value is in the broadest sense, we can simply ask: “What does a good life require?”

A Note on Circularity

This definition of ‘value’ can be criticized as circular: values are defined as what makes life good — but a good life is then identified as one that contains many of these very same ‘values’. This objection, while worth taking seriously, is not a problem when it comes to definitions.

Consider a tree: asked “what is a tree?”, we say: “it is a living thing with roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves.” And asked “how do you know that x is a tree?”, we say: “because it has roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves.”

This is not a flaw — it has to be so. All definitions describe what we observe in reality, and all identifications check whether x fulfills the criteria to fit into category X. In the end, a definition just matches a word with something observed in reality. There is no Archimedean point outside of reality from which to define things.

A Categorization of Values

With this definition in hand, we can now map the territory. Values — understood as “things conducive to a good life” — fall into several distinct categories. For each, it is worth distinguishing between its individual dimension (dependent only on the individual) and its collective dimension (dependent on one’s fellow human beings).

1. States

These are conditions, properties, or circumstances — of a person, a society, or the world — that are broadly beneficial for the individual.

Individual: Personal freedom, health, wealth, inner peace

Collective: National autonomy, national security, national abundance, justice, peace, social trust, unity, a functional political organization

2. Behavior Patterns

Ways of acting — of a person or the group — that are valuable to the individual.

Individual: Courage, temperance, prudence, perseverance, self-discipline, integrity

Collective: Honesty, tolerance, fairness, a sense of duty, respect, civic responsibility

The individual dimension of behavior-values is what classical philosophy calls virtues — behavioral patterns conducive to personal flourishing. The collective dimension describes conduct of which it is beneficial to the individual if all other members of society show it.

3. Material Things

Physical things whose possession or use contributes to a good life.

Individual: Food, shelter, clothing, personal tools, savings, valuables

Collective: Public infrastructure, common resources, common goods, the treasury

The necessity of these material goods is so self-evident that we often simply forget them and fail to include them when speaking of values.

4. Relationships

Other people — and the quality of our connections with them.

Individual: Friends, family, a partner, mentors, teachers, colleagues

Collective: Community, social cohesion, a sense of belonging

Relationships are similar to material goods in this regard. They are so obviously important for our wellbeing that we often forget to include them when speaking of values.

5. Knowledge

Knowledge is also definitely necessary for a good life.

Individual: Professional expertise, self-knowledge, practical skills, understanding of the world

Collective: Libraries, universities, a skilled pool of workers and crafters

6. Habits

Certain habits or automated routines are also definitely conducive to a good life.

Individual: Brushing your teeth before going to bed, jogging every Friday morning, etc.

Collective: Voting every four years, diverse political institutions and processes

7. Experience

Certain experiences are widely regarded as important parts of a full human life.

Individual: Travel, creative expression, challenge, adventure, spiritual practice, personal milestones

Collective: Cultural traditions, shared rituals, communal celebrations, religious practice

8. Further Categories?

This list may not be conclusive — there may be additional categories of values that have yet to be identified.

Meaning and Purpose, for example, might be another category, though it could also be included under Experience: an individual sense of meaning or purpose is an experience, and a collective sense of direction or significance could be seen as part of the culture.

Beauty and free time are further values that I could not easily place in the framework presented above.

In the introduction we also mentioned religion. Religion, however, does not require a separate category. In my view it partly belongs to Experience, partly to Meaning, and partly also to collective state-values. At the individual level, religious practice provides certain experiences and a sense of meaning and purpose. At the collective level it is part of the state of society, provides shared experiences such as common rituals and celebrations, and can also give a sense of a common goal, vision, or narrative.

Cross-Influences, Tensions, and Category Overlap

Values do not exist in isolation. They influence, reinforce, and sometimes constrain each other. Honesty (a collective behavior-value) and social trust (a collective state-value), for example, are mutually reinforcing: widespread honesty produces a high-trust society, which in turn makes honesty easier and more rewarding.

Individual freedom and individual security, on the other hand, exist in genuine tension — more of one often means less of the other. Many more such cross-influences and tensions exist between different values and categories. Mapping, analyzing, and understanding all of them belongs to this field that I have termed value theory, but it goes beyond the scope of this article.

Also, some words are used identically across multiple categories. Honesty, for example, can be both a virtue and a collective behavior-value. An honest individual benefits himself through gaining a good reputation, self-respect, and clear relationships — and at the same time contributes to the collective good. But the emphasis between a virtue and a collective behavior-value differs, and the distinction is worth keeping.

Conclusion

We have now seen that ‘values’ in the broader sense are not one single, undifferentiated category but a diverse family of states, behaviors, material goods, relationships, etc. Their key defining characteristic is that they all contribute to a good human life.

Getting clear on this matters. Without a categorization, value-talk collapses into noise — a place where everyone simply calls whatever he or she desires a value, and confusion is the inevitable result.

It is true that most people only ever mean collective behavior-values or collective state-values when they use the term ‘values’. Thus one could fault me for having presented here a theory not of ‘values’, but of ‘all valuable things’.

But I find it useful to view values in the broader context of all valuable things. This, together with the definition of value, allows us to map out the whole territory, and then we can revert back and ask: what part of this territory do people usually mean when they speak of ‘values’ in the context of ethics?

We will thus have a much better understanding of the general territory in which we move, which will let us address political and societal differences much more clearly and directly.

An Interesting Sidenote

Why do we even call values ‘values’? Why not have a distinct word for them, like virtues or relationships? I think calling certain behaviors values grew out of the understanding that it indeed has a value for the individual if all others behave in a certain way.

In a second step, collective states or goals were then also increasingly called ‘values’, because collective goals / states and collective behaviors are so tightly related (as mentioned above). We observe the same phenomenon at work when we call some things material ‘goods’, indicating that they are good to have.

Most People Don’t Know What “Values” Actually Are was originally published in Infinite Within on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.