A Continuum of Conscience

A monitor with a sense of duty internalizes more of the blame for a failure than the attribution protocol assigns him. Duty buys him nothing here: it is a self-imposed cost whose only consequence is that he works harder than his own material interest warrants. A companion paper asks what selection does to a population containing two such kinds, one dutiful and one not. This paper replaces the pair with a distribution, and the substitution is not a generalization — in one place it changes a sign. The mechanism is a blindness. A monitor who gives up pays no attention, so the protocol excuses him to its floor, and that floor is the same for the scrupulous and the careless. The ledger that selects him cannot see his duty. Where duty is a dial rather than a switch this makes a region of the population selectively neutral, so that above a locatable task cost a distribution of conscience survives indefinitely at a level set by whoever was there to begin with — and below it, where something survives but the model rather than the population fixes how much, or where nothing survives at all. Where the least dutiful monitor still works, conscience erodes algebraically rather than exponentially, and so has no half-life. Two further results turn on choices the model does not make. Sorting monitors onto tasks by duty — as the companion’s own composition assumes — destroys what a fixed task preserves, because sorting correlates duty with exposure and the ledger sees exposure. And between two locatable task costs, under one of the readings the companion raised and left open, selection prefers not the monitors who have given up but the one who barely has not. In a population of two types that open reading widens an interval; in a continuum it decides whether the conscience that survives is held by monitors who are working or by monitors who have stopped. The paper is positive throughout. It does not say which of those two populations a protocol should prefer, and the reader should not infer that surviving conscience is worth having: on one side of the open reading it is held by monitors who are not working.