When Good and Bad Stop Working

Integrity in a world built on tradeoffs

Photo by Md Ziaul Hameed on Unsplash

It’s the end of a long workday, and I’m exhausted. The idea of making dinner from scratch feels like too much: the planning, shopping, and half-used ingredients slowly dying in the fridge. I know myself well enough to know that without help, I’ll likely grab whatever is easiest and call it dinner.

So instead, I open a meal kit.

Everything I need is there, pre-measured, thoughtfully prepared, accompanied by a simple recipe card. In thirty minutes, I’ll have a healthy, genuinely good meal on the table. I put on music and start chopping, relieved that I don’t have to think too hard.

Then I open the first plastic bag, green onions sealed inside, and my heart sinks a little. As the ingredients emerge, a small pile of discarded plastic accumulates on the counter, quietly accusing. See what you’ve created in your search for balance?

I soothe myself with familiar justifications. My city recycles soft plastics, and I carefully wash and save every bag to take to the depot each month, where they’re actually turned into pellets locally and reused. But another voice quickly answers back: What about the plastic that was created in the first place? Those bags were almost certainly made from virgin oil.

The pleasure of feeding myself well fades, replaced by guilt.

When good / bad stops working

I’m left bargaining between two poles: the good of reduced food waste and personal sustainability, and the bad of plastic and extractive materials.

On the “good” side: I waste far less food. I eat better. My weekends are more restful. At scale, the company I purchase from reduces food waste dramatically by using every usable scrap. And downstream, at least where I live, the plastic loop is partially closed.

On the “bad” side: the upstream loop remains open. Virgin plastics. Heavy recipe cards printed once and recycled. Externalities I can’t see but know are also there.

Labeling this good or bad doesn’t help me live with it.

Following the incentives

This feels like a solvable problem. In fact, the company already has an alternative: reusable hard-plastic containers divided into compartments that you wash and return each week. About a third of my meals arrive this way. It’s clearly possible, just not universal.

When I imagine the company’s position, the reasons are obvious. The containers cost money. They have a lifespan. They introduce logistical complexity. Filling flexible plastic bags is cheaper, faster, and easier to scale. For a business producing thousands of meals a week, the reusable option likely threatens margins and efficiency.

Why not raise prices to support better practices? Because competition is fierce, and many customers will choose the cheaper option. People vote with their dollars, even when those votes conflict with their stated values.

And upstream of the company are investors: people who put their savings into a venture they hope will succeed. The company isn’t breaking rules; if anything, it’s already behaving more ethically than many competitors, at a cost to itself.

Rational behavior inside misaligned incentives produces outcomes none of us actually want.

The company isn’t evil, it’s surviving in the system it inhabits.

The return of responsibility

But systems don’t arise in isolation. They’re shaped by what we demand, tolerate, and reward, and by what we refuse to pay for.

• We say “down with pesticides,” then seek blemish-free produce.

• We say we must protect the most vulnerable, then resist the taxes required to house, feed, and heal them.

• We say “love thy neighbor,” while keeping our doors firmly closed.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s disconnection between how we live individually and the societies that form from those choices.

When we fail to connect those dots, we externalize morality upward: to corporations, governments, and “bad actors.” We look for villains, rather than staying present to how our own fears, especially the fear of being taken advantage of, shape the systems we collectively build.

The choice that isn’t clean

So what do we do?

• Pressure governments to regulate? Yes, and that work is slow, often lagging behind reality.

• Pressure suppliers? Yes, but they must still survive in competitive markets.

• Absorb the cost ourselves? Perhaps, by paying more, spending more time, carrying more personal burden.

None of these options are pure. All of them cost something. In fact, manufacturing anything costs something. Scaling anything costs something. Even choosing to do everything yourself costs something; including time, energy, and capacity that not everyone has to spare.

The question isn’t how to find a solution without cost,
it’s where we are willing to let that cost land.

From moral outsourcing to moral presence

I don’t know yet whether I’ll stop using this service. I do know I’m willing to name my discomfort to the company, to ask for more closed-loop options, and to accept that doing so may cost me convenience if nothing changes. That doesn’t make me pure, it makes me present.

The real danger, whether we’re talking about food systems, corporations, or AI, isn’t technology without morals, it’s our insistence on locating morality somewhere other than ourselves.

Integrity isn’t the absence of externalities, it’s the willingness to stay in contact with them and to choose, consciously, how we participate.

Journal Prompt: What system do you participate in that produces outcomes you don’t fully agree with, and where are you willing to let the cost land?