Ethical actors can lose

Convenient belief for Western society is that our ethical beliefs are correlated with making us powerful.
For example, democracy leads to good governance; free expression leads to a strong research culture which delivers military and economic-technological superiority. US-led victory in WWII and Cold War as expressions of this.
But is this necessarily true or is just a historical coincidence that may not remain true in future? What happens when a society’s ethical values make it uncompetitive with other societies that do not hold those values?
- China’s market authoritarianism also appears capable of delivering a strong economy that underpins large military investment; unclear that research enterprise is necessarily fatally hindered by non-free expression.
- Transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies left most people worse off, but hunter-gatherer societies could not choose to remain as they were because agricultural societies grew faster and overpowered them.
  
  Sapiens
Also true at more personal levels where even though some behaviour may be undesirable to individuals, it may be impossible for them to compete if that behaviour becomes widespread in a larger peer group or society.
- May desire children to have more free play time rather than engaging in intensive tutoring or structured extracurriculars, but if those are the norm, not doing them may limit performance or opportunities. Is it true that free play promotes creativity and other work-relevant outcomes in later life, or is that just a convenient belief?
Parents—sometimes reluctantly, but feeling that they have no alternative—sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job.

Meritocracy Harms Everyone (Markovits)
- Future potential for genetic or bioengineered enhancement for children (“designer babies”). Clear ethical issues for many, but may provide concrete advantages to those who do have it. Does it become impossible to resist?
How to resist these changes?
- Collective action problem: is it possible to pursue agreement that nobody will take this course (eg as with chemical weapons). In the personal sphere this requires a coordination mechanism among e.g. parents at a school. Perhaps opting into values-based communities more common. In a post- or reduced-scarcity society it may also be OK to be less than “optimally competitive” if you still have an excellent standard of living in absolute terms because the whole society is wealthy.