The Erosion of Conscience Institutions as Metastable Equilibria over an Endogenous Type-Mix

Abstract

A companion paper shows that professional duty dismantles the strategic-inattention trap of an oversight model, taking a monitor’s conscience as given. This paper endogenizes it and asks whether the institution that runs on conscience tends to keep it. It does not. Careers are selected on a material ledger that excludes the internalized guilt shaping behaviour, and on that ledger a conscientious monitor is worse off than a rational one in whichever state the rational occupies — trapped wherever the trap exists, engaged below its floor — so selection against conscience is active at every stake; the trap region is where the erosion is costly, since there the entire high-stakes coverage is the conscientious contribution. Selection therefore erodes the conscientious share to zero; because the replicator is exactly logistic, the log-odds of conscience decay at a rate equal to the subsidy conscience pays. High-stakes coverage, which is entirely the conscientious contribution, collapses with the share, and the coverage-maximizing assignment concentrates the loss on the costliest tasks. The direction survives every more generous fitness definition. The institution nonetheless looks alive — the erosion is slow, statistically silent, and hides beneath a still-covered flagship — so survival certifies adaptation to the blame environment, not control quality: an endowment being spent, not an adaptation maintained.