Insufficient Rewards
How We Traded Integrity for Comfort
and Outsourced Morality to History
By
Jay Shapiro

M. P. Ross   9-7-26

‘Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay Him before his day. What need I be so forward with Him that calls not on me? Well, ‘tis no matter. Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to an arm? No. Or a leg? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll have none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
Wm. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

Consider Falstaff’s dilemma. What begins with his usual good humor results in a confrontation with fulfilling his knightly duty at the cost of his own life. He inquires of Prince Hal: “Hal, if thou see me down in the battle and bestride me, so; ‘tis a point of honor.” It is no point of honor for the future King Henry V. What he sees is right through his Falstaffian mentor: “Nothing but a colossus can do thee that friendship. Say thy prayers, and farewell.” “I would, ‘twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.” “Why, thou owest God a death.”

 This is something quite rare; Falstaff facing a moral dilemma and, what is more, attempting to resolve it as honestly as he possible could. He fails the test, of course, at least by our assumed common assessment. But, does he?

Falstaff weighs his obligation to duty versus fleeing with his life by the standard of honor. In philosophical terms, his choices are the competing models of deontology and consequentialism. Deontology judges right or wrong against a fixed code (or rules, laws, commandments). Consequentialism takes into account the actual benefits or harms of one’s actions. Setting aside the merits of his choice, Falstaff does take a moral stand. “Honor is a mere scutcheon,” a piece of knight’s kit, a shield as insufficient against an opponent’s blows as a code by which to live or die. Honor in death offers no advantages to a Falstaff that will live to drink and carouse another day. Let history be the judge.

Within the realm of moral choice, Falstaff’s is quite straightforward. His absence from the field of battle would be no loss to his side. It would go unnoticed, if not outright welcome. His death, however, would be a great loss to him, and we might suppose to his companions who would be bereft of his company. Unobserved honor is a tough sell against retreat to a warm tavern.

The Universe throws plenty of softballs. The Decalogue should not pose much of a challenge to the normally rational person, on either moral or practical grounds. Adultery poses not only a risk to the family, and by extension the stability of society, but to the adulterer of death by gunshot. Moral choices abound, raising many more questions than easy answers. Weighing morality against material reward may be complicated by the size of the reward and the distance and obscurity of the harm. Standards of morality still come down to cultural constructs, as much we might credit them to natural or divine law. After all, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” What is the conscientious person to do?

Author and documentary filmmaker Jay Shapiro rises to the challenge of that question in his new book, Insufficient Rewards: How We Traded Integrity for Comfort and Outsourced Morality to History. How are we to morally acquit ourselves in the face of obvious, and not so obvious, situations in which our attitudes and actions contribute to our complicity in harm to others? Many questions, no easy answers.

The title clues us to how Shapiro will approach the question. Insufficient rewards refers to one group in Leon Festinger’s 1959 Stanford University psychology experiment who are promised $1 to perform the disagreeable task of putting a good gloss on a boring experiment for the next group to participate. Another group is promised $20 for the same task. That second group doesn’t like the task any more than first, but their consciences are more comfortably bought off. For context, in today’s dollars, the first group could just afford a fast food value meal, the second, a nice dinner out with a date. It was found that the $1 group, not so well compensated to be bought off for telling small lies, had convinced themselves they did nothing wrong, as a clear conscience could not be worth so little as a dollar.

In the context of the book, insufficient rewards are what society receives in the form of all the baubles of progress and technology that come at greater costs in terms of morality, the environment, and human rights than reflected in their retail price. The externalities of the good life are outsourced to history, to be judged, and perhaps paid for, by the future. “Much of this book will place us in what feels like an eternal existential predicament. The tension between ‘history’ and ‘morality’ is not new. It has not changed, and it likely never will.”

Note that history and morality are in quotes. Shapiro exercises the philosopher’s prerogative to define the terms within the context of their models. Hegel and Marx can argue over “history” all day long. We will get into history, morality, and other terms and methods shortly.

Insufficient Rewards is a very personal book. Written for the general interest rather than strictly academic audience, it makes an appeal directly to the reader. Examples are provided, with proper citation, but it buries neither its message nor its reader in endnotes and citations. The book examines how one might live an ethical life, making conscious, informed choices, not merely accepting convenient rewards in the present, only to kick the can of morality down the road to be decided after the history of the event is written. Shapiro is hopeful, but recognizes the challenges.

Throughout the book, he wrestles with the angel—as well as with the Cognitive Dissonance Repairman, the voice in our head telling us that we are still a good person if we make a questionable moral choice—trying to do the right and moral thing, whether it is easy, obvious, straightforward, or none of the above. Shapiro clearly wants to take the moral path. “Moral positions might be timeless, but moral action never is.” But individual action is necessarily subjective, and as such subject to all that individual’s capacities and limitations. This is not to equivocate, far from it. Insufficient Rewards is a book to argue with, as the author argues with himself, wrestling with unyielding questions. This review will wrestle along with him.

“…the root of moral life begins in sensation, not abstraction.” An interesting proposition for a philosopher. It does give us an idea of just how personal his subject is for the author. However, abstraction is as deep as we can go if we are consider and communicate moral concepts. This begs the question, what is morality? Simply, it is a code of conduct, based on divine commandments or natural law, highly subject to individual interpretation. Even when formally codified, interpretations will differ. The commandment in the original Hebrew is “Thou shalt not murder,” not “Thou shalt not kill,” (the word, “shalt” likely a contribution from King James’s translators).

This website is concerned with political theory, not theology, so let us add another abstraction to the term morality, its kin, ethics. Ethics is a community’s standard of conduct, whether that community is a nation or a profession or whatever kind of group. Scripture makes no direct reference to double-dipping the guacamole bowl. Our society views it as an ethical no-no, and in any case, for the thoughtful person, it just doesn’t feel the right thing to do.

In any case, the moral/ethical distinction is not so important for reading Insufficient Rewards, given we begin with the above stated premise that moral life is rooted in sensation. To discuss the topic, however, requires abstraction, commonly understood terms that serve as shorthand for sometimes very complicated, involved concepts. Here, on AppliedPoliticalTheory, we are in complete agreement with Shapiro on the importance of “providing tools for real-world application.” That requires getting everyone on the same page, and that requires abstraction, which brings its own set of problems.

Levels of abstraction or, for the glass is half full crowd, degrees of specificity must be taken into account. In short, what is true at a high level of abstraction may be full of holes applied to a very specific example. At a high level of abstraction a diamond is a valuable gem; at very low level of abstraction, that may not be true of a specific diamond, not fit even for industrial use.

History is an abstraction. And, everybody’s got a story… AppliedPoliticalTheory and Shapiro place history in the center of similar triads: Facts/ History/Narrative, and Journalism/History/Interpretation, respectively. The first triad, is at a lower level of abstraction/higher degree of specificity, the second triad the reverse. Facts includes journalistic accounts, but also documented physical evidence. History is a tougher abstraction, being constructed of selective facts from a particular point of view; it comes with a bias. Narrative and Interpretation are related, but serve different functions each for its own model. Interpretation is a moral assessment of personal observation, journalism, and history; for the individual at the point of decision, and as the 3rd term of the triad. Narrative is the story used both to explain a people to the outside world and to itself. It may combine facts, history, creation myths, optimistic thinking, and certainly moral interpretation. Narrative confronting Interpretation is the erection and removal of Edward Colston’s statue from Bristol harbor. Narrative depicted Colson as a beneficent figure who brought prosperity to England; a reassessment as moral interpretation found him complicit in crimes against humanity.

We should also note that at a very high level of abstraction, history is linear. On a timeline, it certainly is. Zooming in to a greater level of specificity, it conforms to AppliedPoliticalTheory’s Conical Helix Model of History, where history progresses in a regular upward spiral; events progress vertically in time, and horizontally we find parallels, with similar events occurring at a greater scope. Zoom in to a yet greater degree of specificity and the model is not a perfect helix at all, it expands and contracts horizontally, and vertically the lines tend to get closer over time, graphing the velocity of history. Every model in its place, employed where most useful, which brings us to yet one more digression from directly addressing Insufficient Rewards, but it is key to the book providing a tool for real-world application.

The Folly of the Pure Model. Relying on any single model (or philosophy, theory, framework) has been the ruin of countless projects, neglecting some key factor that would have been exposed by running the plan through different models, considering it from other perspectives. War is an obvious example, and at present we have our choice of several major conflicts taking place around the world. Here, again, we need to take into account levels of abstraction. The term “war” includes force applied by military assets, but so does a spontaneous skirmish, but that is not war. From another perspective, “war is a mere continuation of politics with other means,” and, through other lenses war is shown impacting entire nations down to its smallest citizens. Neither deontology nor consequentialism, through any of the permutations each may suggest, can provide a sufficiently thorough assessment of all the complexities encompassed when war the term becomes war the reality.

Insufficient Rewards offers us one very useful and welcome model. From its perspective we ask, what are the moral implications of my actions? Conscientious individuals of sound humanity should consider the morality of their actions. Of course, writing this expresses a value judgement, a particular deontological stance. It raises the question, which moral code are we following? Or, more to the point, whose moral code and how are they interpreting it? We can salve conscience with the soothing relief of moral balm contently unaware of all the harms we cause by our actions. Consequentialism catching up with deontology again. The good news is that each individual can exercise their moral agency. Each one of us can choose to make more thoughtful choices, as Shapiro does in his example of buying shoes. As a vegan, he does not consume meat. Only later did he realize that wearing leather shoes amounted to the same thing. If you avoid eating meat on moral grounds, wearing leather presents a contradiction. So, he put his money where his morality is, and sourced high quality shoes made with non-animal leather, even though they cost more—for the initial purchase, that is, they may end up the more economical purchase, offering a longer shoe life as well as an emotionally healthier Shapiro!

Throughout Insufficient Rewards, Shapiro contends with all the complexities, difficulties, and contradictions faced by his model. The book is full of his biases, his acknowledgement of them, and his earnest efforts to work through them. He calls out the failings of Western capitalistic colonialism, yet likewise cautions romanticizing the Global South. (While mostly avoiding “the elephant in the book,” he nonetheless uses a loaded term which functions as a judgement.)

Morality is subjective. Even objective standards are subject to an individual following them– understood, questioned, or not. Setting aside the very important consideration of specific tenets of morality, there is the issue of how people arrive at beliefs and how strongly they adhere to them. At an extreme, belief becomes ideology. A single cigarette tossed aside ignites a wildfire.

Readers of Insufficient Rewards would benefit by reading four books that offer some perspective on how we think and the consequences of our beliefs. Ideological Fixation by Azar Gat, and The Ideological Brain, by Leor Zmigrod seek to understand the origins of ideological thought. In The Tragic Mind, and Waste Land Robert D. Kaplan comes face to face with deciding lesser of two evils. In a career which had taken him into the heart of conflict, nothing had matched the sheer terror of Saddam’s Iraq. Kaplan was initially a supporter of the Iraq War. He did so with the best intentions. What followed, though was even worse. “One year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny.”

Was Saddam’s a brutal, even evil, regime? That’s a softball question. What might have been done about it? Do we yet have a satisfactory answer? Slavery, as Shapiro writes, is an easy question for us today, and really should have been during the relatively modern world of the 18th century, for that matter. Not every moral question is either so great or obvious. But we do have and can make choices of moral consequence, if only to ourselves. “Each honest encounter with our cognitive dissonance and the ensuing moral wrestling match is a passing clash which presents itself a fleeting opportunity to engage, retreat, shrink, ponder, shrug, or grow.”

At best we have the opportunity to take the high road as we understand it. We will likely not know the consequences beforehand. People believe all kinds of stuff… On one hand, spare the world your heartfelt morality. You know? “Yadda, yadda, Warden.” On the other hand, there is great wisdom in the commandments “Thou shalt not be a complete idiot,” and “Thou shalt not be a[n] [derogatory synonym for disagreeable person of your choice].” (Forgive me for being so direct, but the world is in a terrible mess of our own making.) A little more awareness and exercise of agency seems like it might be a good thing.