Maximizing Moral Virtue

[The Grand Nudger]

I feel like the question of weather or not we should just allow people to follow their own human nature is a difficult one to answer. It seems to me that when people lose confidence in the authorities appointed over them chaos tends to follow, at least for a short while until a new power takes over. More recently we saw this with the Jan 6 protest, but we're also seeing a lot of rioting and looting spread across the U.S. as a whole, mostly due to our dis-satisfaction with politics and justice.

Absolutely agree, for better and for worse.  We live in gentle times, so this might escape us...but sometimes...chaos is an improvement on the enforced morality of an institution.

Former slaves littering the country rootless and directionless and possibly even angry..being better than the institution of slavery, for example.  Chaos preferable to some order.

On the one hand I feel like if kids are given some form of proper guidance then it is highly likely that they will turn out decent, even if they do have to rebel for about a decade or so after turning 13. My basic idea is simple: 

     Good leaders > anarchy > bad leaders. 

As above, what about bad leaders>anarchy>good leaders?  When I think of a more hands off approach to morality, that stands out as a good application.  If bad leaders are the ones with their hands on, then a hands off approach may result in some anarchy or reshuffling...but, if people are fundamentally good (or at least better than whatever institution was enforcing norms beforehand) then the resultant leaders in the new moral paradigm will be an improvement over the old.

IMO, that's the short version of the long story of theistic norms eroding and being broken.  There are theistic institutions.but theism itself is an institution.  

Any authoritarian structure can become corrupted, any household can be divided by strife. In the end I feel like it all depends on our own strength of will as well as our ability to go against the grain if it means doing what we genuinely believe to be good, not just for ourselves but for our community.

Agree again, however, what if some institutions are bad..not because they're corrupted, but because they're premised on a fundamentally bad ideology?  It isn't so much that they're doing the right thing the wrong way, as they're doing the wrong thing the right way.  I notice that contemporary christians often feel that their religious institutions have been corrupted.  From the outside looking in, though, contemporary christianity is simply an improvement over those older notions.  The institutions weren't corrupted in any meaningful sense...contemporaries have written themselves a new non-traditional religion.

Do you think this might be a good example of moral introspection over moral instruction?