Incentives Don't Paint a Full Picture of Moral Choice
Resurrection shows how even “rational” systems can reward hypocrisy, offering insight for an age of influencers enamored with behavioral economics.
There’s a popular subculture of online influencer who blames many of society’s (perceived) downfalls as a consequence of “bad incentives.”
“Social programs make people lazier” and “Universal basic income encourages people to participate more fully in society” are political opposites, but they both revolve around choosing the proper incentives for desired behavior.
Resurrection is one of Leo Tolstoy’s novels exploring the bad incentives of his society’s prison system. Dmitri Nekhlyudov sits on a jury that sends an innocent woman, Katerina Maslova, to four years of hard labor in Siberia due to a technicality. Nekhlyudov spends the rest of the novel trying to reverse the decision and make up for his disgraceful history with her.
There are obvious people of low character in this novel. The presiding judge rushing to meet his mistress comes to mind, but one in particular stands out as an example of perverse incentives.
Can a Hypocrite Have Morals?
As Nekhlyudov fights to have Maslova’s sentence overturned, he takes on other cases within the prison system. One comes from a group of religious practitioners who ran afoul of the Orthodox Church and were sentenced to exile in different places across Russia, separating families in the process.
The government official who could decide whether to allow the sentence to be carried out is Toporov, who Tolstoy spends almost a full page describing as someone “lacking in wit and devoid of morality.” Tolstoy describes the hypocrisy that Toporov embodies:
“Like all men devoid of real religious sensibility and belief in the equality and brotherhood of man, Toporov was quite certian that the common people were a species apart, in dire need of something he himself could very nicely do without. At the bottom of his heart he had no real belief in anything, a condition he cold live with conveniently and easily, but it bothered him that the people might one day arrive at the same state, and he saw it as his sacred duty (his own words) to save them from it.”
Here was a man whose job was to crack down on heresy in Russia, and yet had no religious belief of his own. Tolstoy also pointed out the absurdity of a “human institution” defending a Church which “by definition, had been established by God Himself and remained unshakable by the gates of hell or any human agency.”
Still, Toporov initially found himself incentivized to deal harshly with the sectarians. He was worried about the spread of the enlightenment that he himself enjoyed and welcomed the chance to “demonstrate the bishop’s zeal” in punishing heresy.
But Nekhlyudov is a noble, and his involvement changed Toporov’s approach.
Incentives Can Be Unpredictable
When he realized someone with Nekhlyudov’s status was involved in the sectarians’ case, Toporov’s calculations changed:
“…with a champion like Nekhlyudov, with his influential contacts in Petersburg, there was a risk that the case might be presented to the emperor as an act of cruelty, or get into the foreign newspapers, and this brought him to a quick and unexpected decision.”
Toporov pardoned the sectarians almost as soon as Nekhlyudov entered the office. On its face, it looks like Nekhlyudov’s mission to atone for his sins went well. That may be true, but the only way reversals of injustice have occurred in this novel is by connections of well-placed people who cared about the issues. A word to an official’s wife was enough to free one political prisoner.
Incentives in the real world can be just as fickle but far more obscure. It can be difficult to know the full range of pressures leading people to behave the way they do. People who invoke incentives to justify political positions can also overstate their importance and underplay the responsibility of individual choice.
We have a lot more room to impact the world around us than we give ourselves credit for. Even if we can’t saunter into a senator’s office, we can encourage a friend to end self-destructive behaviors or refuse to get involved in needless conflicts between colleagues.
It’s important to consider the larger incentives in our society, but system-level problems shouldn’t make us forget about the ordinary differences we can make around us.