Moral drain
What happens when we encourage good people to leave bad organizations?
There's a widespread view that it is shameful to be affiliated with an organization that does bad things.
On the whole, this makes sense. Our affiliations are for the most part voluntary. If someone sees their org do something bad or “problematic” and chooses to remain affiliated, it stands to reason that they support the bad thing. One assumes that if they disagreed with the thing, they would disaffiliate. Or perhaps they disagree with the bad thing but are willing to tolerate it in order to continue receiving the benefits of affiliation, selfishly putting their own interests above moral requirements.
I have a sense though that in the past, people tended to be more “loyal” in their affiliations. Loyalty, after all, was generally seen to be a virtue. You might have a problem with some of the beliefs and stances of your church, your political party, etc, but you'd stand by them because that's what you do.
This sense of loyalty has eroded significantly. It isn't perceived to be an honorable thing to stand by a bad person or organization out of a sense of duty. Instead, it's perceived as weak and cowardly to stand by while bad things happen.
I think this creates the conditions for a phenomenon I've started calling “moral drain.” Moral drain is a self-reinforcing cycle. It starts when an organization does something wrong. This will cause the most morally upright / morally sensitive people to disaffiliate, reducing the overall moral character of the org. This will lead to further bad things happening, causing more folks to disaffiliate. The logical outcome is the org ends up run entirely by the worst people possible.
Since most power in society is mediated by various organizations and institutions, this dynamic essentially guarantees that the worst people in the world monopolize access to power.
It seems to me like there are only two ways to prevent moral drain.
Make sure organizations always just do the right thing at all times so good people never feel like they have to distance themselves.
Encourage people of good character to stay in organizations even when they do bad things.
Of these options, 2 seems more realistic to me.
Does this mean we should never pressure people to leave evil organizations? I don't think so. But we should see this as a balancing concern. We should know that we need to tolerate a certain amount of bad behavior from an organization without condemning the good people who continue in their affiliation.
A lot also depends on the importance and power of the organization in question. The more power the organization wields, the more cautious we ought to be about simply ceding that power to evil folks.
We can also be strategic in how we think about these things. A coordinated effort to punish really terrible behavior with swift collapse might be quite effective. But it doesn't follow that an endless low-effort boycott will achieve similar effects. But we ought to actually think about what we're trying to achieve with the incentives we create rather than blindly applying the same approach in every situation.