How They TRICK You into Supporting Evil | Jay Shapiro

## Introducing Jay Shapiro and the book A single, recurring moral move animates much of modern politics: translate a contested action into an outcome that the majority can endorse, and then claim history will vindicate you. That observation—paired with the instinctive willingness to treat morality as a ledger of consequences—forms the backbone of Jay Shapiro’s critique in Insufficient Rewards. The conversation that produced these ideas ranges across film, philosophy, psychology, and geopolitics, but its central concern is concrete: how routinized modes of moral reasoning and the incentives of our political systems combine to trick ordinary people into supporting grievous harms while applauding those who engineer them. Shapiro arrives at this diagnosis from an unusual route. Trained as a filmmaker and social commentator rather than as a narrowly credentialed academic philosopher, he draws on film narrative, ethics competitions, and personal encounters with prominent thinkers to expose what he sees as a rut in moral thought. The book is less a primer in technical ethics than a moral anthropology of the present—diagnosing the cognitive and institutional habits that make consequentialist reasoning alluring and yet dangerously elastic. In the exchange under review, those habits are traced from the abstract (utilitarian thought experiments) to the tragic (sanctions, war, and mass suffering), and back toward a plea for moral integrity as a corrective. ## History, morality, and consequentialism One of the conversation’s recurring insights is how the refrain “history will judge” functions as a moral magic trick. It packages contested, complex policies into a narrative of moral teleology: if we can claim an outcome is historically justified, present actions become defensible whatever their immediate cost. Shapiro pushes back against the dominant current of contemporary moral thought—consequentialism—by insisting it is perniciously flexible. Consequentialism measures actions by predicted results across possible futures. That formal attractiveness—its promise of a rational, calculable answer—becomes a liability when the measurement apparatus is ambiguous or manipulated. Shapiro gives the textbook moral dilemma—the person hiding Jews who must decide whether to lie to a Nazi—as a classical illustration of consequentialist calculation. But he presses the point further: consequentialism requires constructing counterfactual worlds, assigning values and probabilities, and then privileging one imagined future over another. Those imaginative moves are not neutral; they reflect political perspectives, epistemic limitations, and often a willingness to discount present harms if a desirable outcome can be plausibly imagined. In practice, that infinite flexibility allows almost any action to be justified by reframing its long-run benefits. When combined with institutional power, such arguments become authoritative moral cover. The conversation also registers how this orientation toward outcomes has become a cultural default, not an arcane philosophical position. In a neoliberal political economy that prizes quantification and measurable impact, moral life too becomes a spreadsheet. Ideas such as “effective altruism” or technocratic “impact” metrics sound rational and humane; yet they can easily serve as rhetorical tools to obscure moral sacrifices demanded of ordinary people by political systems and elites. ## The actor’s moral dilemma To make consequentialist abstractions feel immediate, Shapiro introduces a simple, familiar vignette: an aspiring actor named Marcus who lands a career-making role that caricatures his own racial group. The dilemma is mundane but morally clarifying. If Marcus refuses the role on principled grounds, he may forfeit material security and influence; if he accepts, he tacitly participates in a harmful cultural portrayal. Consequentialist reasoning rapidly produces a list of trade-offs—income, platform, future influence—that could all be marshaled to justify taking the role. Deontological responses insist on inviolable moral lines. Shapiro’s point is not to solve Marcus’s predicament but to reframe it. Whatever Marcus chooses, his decision is embedded within a political question: how often does the system force individuals to choose between survival and integrity? If systems repeatedly demand that people wound their moral integrity for the sake of economic opportunity, then the problem is structural. The moral question for Marcus becomes, at a higher level, a civic and institutional one: how can production, representation, and employment be arranged so that talented people do not have to sell their dignity for a livelihood? This shift in focus—away from isolated dilemmas and toward the moral quality of institutions—changes the evaluative lens. Rather than endlessly adjudicating the rightness of a single act, we should ask how often systems produce such corrosive trade-offs and how reparable they are. For Shapiro, a central virtue is moral integrity understood as the inner honesty of the agent: someone who can say, with integrity, “I had no good options.” If that claim is genuine rather than rationalization, it signifies a systemic failure rather than a private moral lapse. ## Ukraine, sanctions, and moral certainty The conversation turns quickly from philosophical vignettes to geopolitics, and here the stakes become dramatically concrete. The war in Ukraine and the global sanctions regime that accompanies Western policy provide a live case study in how moral narratives and consequentialist reasoning work together. Both proponents and opponents of Western measures invoke moral certainties: one side frames arms shipments and sanctions as necessary defense of sovereignty and justice; the other sees them as prolonging violence and inflicting civilian suffering. Shapiro’s critique is directed at the rhetorical and psychological machinery that allows both camps to claim moral high ground while occluding the real human costs. Sanctions, as discussed in the exchange, are an especially revealing example. Deployed as a coercive tool short of war, they are often justified by appeals to justice and the protection of international norms. Yet independent research shows sanctions commonly cause large civilian suffering, including elevated mortality, through predictable mechanisms. When those outcomes are downplayed or rationalized because the ultimate aim is framed as noble, the moral calculus shifts in ways that are politically consequential and ethically fraught. The conversation also exposes how moral certainty simplifies complex international decisions into moralistic scripts that reward steadfastness rather than critical reflection. When leaders assert that history will vindicate them, citizens are invited to accept high costs now for a promised future verdict. But that verdict is contingent, interpretive, and often settled by those who write the dominant historical narratives. Shapiro warns that such temporal smoothing—trading present integrity for anticipated vindication—is precisely the move that lets states and publics become complicit in sustained harm. ## Moral integrity, self-deception, and complicity A key contribution of the exchange is its psychological anatomy of self-deception. Shapiro draws on psychological concepts—first-order and second-order desires, reward structures, cognitive dissonance—to explain how people rationalize participation in unjust systems. Moral corruption often proceeds not through explicit malice but through a sequence of small accommodations: one justifying claim becomes two, and soon the original integrity erodes under the weight of repeated compromises. The phrase “insufficient rewards” captures this dynamic. When systems offer enough material or reputational reward to offset the immediate sting of a moral compromise, people accept a pattern of behavior that, cumulatively, becomes morally corrosive. The

REVEALED: The Sick TRICK to Make You Support Evil | Jay Shapiro If you kill someone, they call you a murderer. If you kill a few people, they call you a mass- murderer. If you kill millions, they call you a great statesman. But how are we constantly tricked into supporting mass-murder AND applaud the sick monsters that lead us to do it? Well, turns out, there are some tricks. Jay Shapiro, filmmaker, writer, and host of The Dilemma Podcast, discusses his book Insufficient Rewards and its critique of consequentialist morality. The conversation explores cognitive dissonance, moral integrity, political systems, propaganda, objective reality, justice, peace, and how people rationalize participation in violence and injustice. Links: What Jay Thinks: https://whatjaythinks.com Insufficient Rewards: https://www.simonandschuster.net/books /Insufficient-Rewards/Jay-Shapiro/9781803419985 Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz. substack.com Merch: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com /donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introducing Jay Shapiro and the book 00:01:02 Why Jay wrote Insufficient Rewards 00:04:32 History, morality, and consequentialism 00:08:06 The flexibility of consequentialist thinking 00:09:15 The actor’s moral dilemma 00:12:06 Moral integrity and unjust systems 00:16:30 Ukraine, sanctions, and moral certainty 00:18:12 Cognitive dissonance and insufficient rewards 00:27:07 Moral integrity, self-deception, and complicity 00:32:11 First-order and second-order desires 00:43:06 Objective reality and moral truth 00:49:09 Justice, peace, and international violence 00:57:34 Where to find Jay’s work #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. Today, for the first time, with a great colleague in Germany at the moment, Mr. Jay Shapiro, who wrote a very fascinating book recently, Insufficient Rewards: How We Traded Integrity for Comfort and Outsourced Morality to History. A beautifully long title, but you can see he's a philosopher. And Jay, by the way, also has a YouTube channel. That's the one over here, The Dilemma Podcast. But we want to mainly focus on the book today. Jay, welcome. #Jay Shapiro Yeah, thanks. It's a great pleasure being here. I'm a big fan of your show, so this is an honor being on it. #Pascal No, thank you very much for that. And thank you very much for your book, because you try to make sense of the international world and you put clearly a philosophical framework around it, as in -- 1 of 21 -- scholastic philosophy, not just what's good, what's bad, although that's what it boils down to. But can you maybe walk us a little bit through the arguments of your book? #Jay Shapiro Yeah, absolutely. I'll throw one corrective in there, because you called me a philosopher there. I'm uncomfortable with the title. I think of myself as a filmmaker, really. But actually, on this topic, my sort of crash-course background is I was pursuing a degree in screen studies and film, which is what I ended up getting, when 9/11 hit when I was a sophomore. And that was actually the event that started me thinking a lot about questions of morality and political philosophy and moral philosophy. And I started taking more classes in it. I ended up getting the degree in film and ended up making films, and some films that intersected with moral philosophy. But just sort of like, I'm itchy with the title of philosopher because it's such, like, a weird gatekept thing. And in some ways, that's a lot of the reason I wanted to write the book, because I think moral philosophy, as far as my couple decades now of studying it and understanding it and working with well-known intellectuals who I have major disagreements with now, I think it's in a major rut. It's in just like an absolute awful, boring moral stalemate place, where every political conversation, every moral conversation we get into ends up just seeming to get into this gridlock where everyone ends up just calling the other person a hypocrite. It goes nowhere, and I really wanted to get under that and get behind that. And so the book was me, you know, thinking out loud on the page about a lot of the things that I found along the way to think differently about moral philosophy. And especially the question that sort of launched it for me was what we really mean when we use this phrase that history will be the judge, or history will judge our enemies. You know, these classic questions of: can I morally judge a slave trader? Or someone in the future, can they morally judge the way that I'm living now? And what does that really mean, to speak about morality in this sort of context? And so those were the questions that launched my initial sort of path down these questions. And what I came out with was, I hope, a pretty big dose of skepticism on concepts of utilitarianism, sort of consequentialism, effective altruism, which are really—and I could explain those things, we could talk about them more—have become sort of the default way that I think most people digest or think about morality and moral philosophy, even if they've never thought of themselves as even thinking of these things. In a very neoliberal kind of mathematical, quantifiable world, this desire to want to measure morality and measure outcomes is a very utilitarian, consequentialist way of thinking of it. And then the counter to that, the opposite of that, is—this is a little bit of sort of straw man in philosophy—but deontology, which is like a rules-based order, maybe divine command theory, like God tells you what's good and bad and you have to follow those rules. And we have this, like, seesaw of two conversations where you have people just pushing principles all day. Like, I have a -- 2 of 21 -- principle of, let's say, sovereignty, and it's my most classic principle or whatever, but I make some exceptions when it's, I don't know, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, whatever it is. And then suddenly, oh, you're not actually into the principle anymore, you're doing consequentialism, right? It's the consequences, it depends, you know, the outcomes of the thing that actually determines the morality. And we're just always on this stupid seesaw, and we all flip back and forth whenever it's convenient for us. And I want us to sort of just burn down the seesaw and think about morality in a really different way. And so that's why I wrote the book. Not quite the thesis, but those were my frustrations and why I pursued it. #Pascal And, you know, this morality question is very important, especially to kind of a liberal conception of international politics, right? Because we see that the whole time. They're forcing it down our throats on TV and in the newspaper all the time, to be on the right side of history and do the right thing, do the good thing. I mean, you're living in Germany now, and, like, Germany itself, it basically predicates its entire support for Israel's Zionist project on this, you know, the immorality that happened before, the horrible crimes that were happening. And I shouldn't do air quotations. I don't mean that those were horrible—like, what Hitler, Nazi Germany did, what Germany did back then was a horrible crime, because it killed so many people, not just the Jews, first and foremost, also tens of millions of Soviet citizens. But the question over whether it is useful to use that kind of moral framework. #Jay Shapiro What did you come up with in your book then? #Pascal Which kinds of groups of people are using moral frameworks, and which ones are rather going a pragmatist route of trying to analyze what is and then how to improve from where we are, instead of, like, how it should be? #Jay Shapiro Yeah, yeah. No, that's a great question. And I have a chapter in there where I sort of list all—I mean, it wasn't exhaustive—all of the people I could find in history that use the phrase, you know, invoke history to sort of justify what they're doing currently. And Hitler was one of them who said, you know, history—I think he said something like, "History will judge what happens here today," or "will vindicate." You know, everyone has said this, everyone. And so, you know, you ask it there, like, sort of who's using a moral framework versus who's doing sort of pragmatic stuff. I think everyone is using the moral framework, particularly of consequentialism. I could just lay it out here, and it gets critiqued of being infinitely flexible, which I think it is. -- 3 of 21 -- And so the sort of, like, basics, since we're talking World War II here, the one that is usually used in, like, Philosophy 101 classes is, like, everyone knows it's wrong to lie. It's like a moral framework thing. You shouldn't lie, right? But if you're hiding Jews under the floorboards and the Nazis knock on your door and say, "Hey, are you hiding any Jews?" should you lie to them? And then suddenly you're like, "Oh, okay, wait. Lying is wrong, but in this case, I think it's actually good." And so if you slow your brain down there and figure out what's happening there, you're invoking what's called consequentialism. So the act itself is not inherently moral or good or bad or whatever. It's sort of, you project a split in the universe if you make this action. And then you have universe A and universe B. So it's universe A where you lied and presumably the guy at the door believed you, and then this is the universe that pops out of that. Or you have universe B where you told the truth and presumably he believed you. And you're then somehow sort of like putting these two universes on some sort of scale of goodness and badness and figuring out which one is better. In this case, presumably, if they believed you and you saved those people hiding under the floorboards, it's better. And that measurement of these, you know, counterfactual future universes that sounds very, like, technical is really what you're doing there. And the determination of that is actually what determines whether the action was moral or immoral. So that's consequentialism. #Jay Shapiro And yeah, the critique of it is that it's really... It sounds very rational. It sounds very logical. There's like a whole world of sort of, you know, debate bros who love this kind of thinking that's very, like, mathematical and strict, and there's this desire to want to measure these outcomes. But it is infinitely flexible because you can justify anything, given sort of, just let the universe play out long enough, and how you're going to measure these things, and how much is sort of integrity worth? What really is flourishing? So, for example, I'll give, like, a much more mundane example that we all live through, rather than probably, hopefully, none of us are faced with that particular one of hiding people under floorboards. But so I used to judge this competition called the Ethics Bowl, which is a philosophy competition in America for high school students, which is really fantastic. If anybody's looking for a fun night, go to their website and pull up some of these cases they do and just argue with your friends over it because they give you sort of these, like, little, you know, one-page scenarios. And then you have to sort of discuss the moral philosophy of them. So one of them that I use in the book, that I end up using all the time, I just love the way people respond to it, is this one. I'll give it to the audience. There's a young man who wants to be an actor. Let's just name him Marcus. And he's in Los Angeles, and he's always wanted to be an actor, and he's struggling. He's, like, running low on cash. He's been at this for a few years. He's, like, waiting tables. He's just trying to get by. He's going to auditions and auditions and auditions, and he just -- 4 of 21 -- can't find a break. And, you know, he's really, he's really on thin ice. And then he, you know, goes to another audition and finally gets the call from his agent being like, "Oh, wow, you know, they love you, and they want