Two years in, this system has come in for a ton of criticism. In particular, teams have been willing to make qualifying offers to mid-range free agents such as Kyle Lohse, Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew. Unlike an elite free agent, these players have trouble finding much of market if their buyers also have to surrender a top draft pick. We've seen these players waiting until spring training had already started to sign, and it's speculated that it won't be long before a qualifying offer player waits until mid-season, after the draft has taken place and the compensation issue is off the board, to sign. Currently, Morales, Drew, and Ervin Santana have yet to sign, with actual spring training baseball less than a week away.
Another line of criticism, however, has emerged from this season. Of the thirteen qualifying offer free agents this offseason, four have signed with the New York Yankees. (Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Hiroki Kuroda, although he was a Yankee to begin with.) Two more have signed with the Baltimore Orioles (Ubaldo Jimenez and Brian McCann.) Of the four others who have signed, two signed with teams whose first-round picks were protected, Curtis Granderson to the Mets and Robinson Cano to the Mariners, and one, Mike Napoli, re-signed with his current team, the Red Sox. Only one team so far has signed exactly one qualifying offer free agent from another team and forfeited their first-round pick to do so, the Texas Rangers, signing Shin-Soo Choo.
What we see, in other words, is that already having signed one qualifying offer free agent makes signing the next one look a lot more appealing, because it's just your second-round pick you're surrendering. Trading your top one draft pick (and market salary) for one top free agent is a worse deal than trading your top two picks (and market salary) for two top free agents, because the draft picks have steeply declining value while the free agents do not.
Why do I mention this, and what does it have to do with Macbeth or religious morality? An excellent question. (In the unlikely event you haven't read Macbeth, read no more.)
Macbeth is, among other things, the story of how blood will have blood. Macbeth agonizes over his first murder, of the king Duncan. He would pretty clearly not have committed it had his wife not been egging him on. His next murder, on the other hand, of his best friend Banquo, did not trouble him very much. As soon as he was crowned king, Macbeth started worrying that his title would pass to Banquo's heirs rather than his own, and thus had his best friend murdered by a couple of criminals and left in a ditch. Thereafter he became almost sort of gleefully bloodthirsty, killing, most graphically, the entire family and household of his enemy Macduff.
A few key quotes illustrate the point I'm trying to make here, and the analogy to the qualifying offer. First, shortly before he greeted the "murderers" he employed to kill Banquo:
...and mine eternal jewelTranslating a bit from old-timey euphemism, the "eternal jewel" is his soul and the "common enemy of man" is the devil. Having, that is, damned himself to become king, Macbeth cannot stand the thought that he is not "safely thus," that his crown might be fruitless.
Given to the common enemy of man,
To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings!
Rather than so, come fate into the list.
And champion me to the utterance! Who's there!
Then, after receiving word of Banquo's murder, and seeing his ghost at a banquet, he says the following:
...I am in bloodFinally, when he confronts Macduff in the final battle:
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er...
Of all men else I have avoided thee:In each case the argument is the same: I have already done so much wrong to get where I am that I might as well do even more wrong. It's kind of like the qualifying offer dynamic: the second murder isn't costing him as much, from a moral perspective, as the first one did.
But get thee back; my soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already.
And that's where the part about religious morality comes in. Now, religious people are moral for all sorts of reasons. The kind of morality that is peculiarly religious, however, the reason why one should be good that only has force for a religious person, is the morality derived from fear of hell. No matter how well you conceal your crimes in this life, no matter how much you profit from them, if you are a wicked person then you will be visited with an eternity of torment. The punishment is infinite in severity and is absolutely certain; if one truly believed in it it would be, in theory, the perfect deterrent. And, in conventional theology at least, this is a binary question: you are either damned and go to hell or are saved and go to heaven. (There are some complications, mostly purgatory, but that's only temporary and therefore trivial compared to the eternity of the heaven/hell afterlife itself.)
And on this view, Macbeth's attitude makes complete sense. He is already damned after committing his first murder. Committing more murders won't damn him any more; you can only be damned once. It's worse, even, than the draft pick system: it's as if there are no second or third or fourth rounds to the draft. Having surrendered your top pick, you would just become immune from the draft compensation issue.
Insofar, then, as one's primary motive for being a good person is this fear of hell, and insofar as you believe that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, and especially insofar as you believe that heaven and hell are each internally homogeneous (i.e., that hell is equally bad for everyone in it), then anyone who has already done enough wicked deeds that they have essentially clinched being a bad person has no remaining motive not to commit further wicked deeds. And... that would seem to be a problem.
Now, unsurprisingly actual Christian theology has a number of responses to this problem. Most notably, if you listen to the theologians the "good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell" thing is just wrong. We're all sinners, more or less equally; we have all done enough wrong to "merit" going to hell. But some of us get saved from that fate through our faith in god or whatever, and--importantly--through repentance of our sins. And, again if you listen to the theologians, repentance can be effective even for the worst sinners. So if Macbeth didn't like having given his soul to the devil just to make the seeds of Banquo kings, well, he could've just done a really good job of repenting, and started living a virtuous, godly life, and he'd have his afterlife back, even after having killed the king. The idea that hell is homogeneous may also be somewhat theologically suspect; certainly Dante's Inferno portrays hell as featuring different levels, where the worst sinners are punished the worst.
But my sense from living in society is that fairly few ordinary people have that "sophisticated" understanding of Christian doctrine. The impression you get is that most people do have an intuitive sense of the connection between how moral a person you are and which afterlife you get sent to. And while hell may not be equally bad for everyone who goes there, it's pretty bad for everyone, and the common sufferings overshadow the variations. In practice, then, appealing to people to be good so that they are not damned will just not say very much to those who already believe that they are irredeemably bad. They might as well, as they say, let it go.*
Now fortunately, most religious people also have the same kind of moral sensibility that we atheists rely on, namely a desire to be good simply because, y'know, that's good. And there's no real reason why that should be less strong for someone who already thinks they're a bad person. I mean, someone who kind of knows they're a bad person, but has decided that that means they'll just stop caring about being good because otherwise they'd have to feel all remorseful and whatever is quite plainly not going to care much about moral behavior. Most of us, however, can keep our ethical sensibility more or less intact despite the knowledge that we've done something wrong, and if we have, if anything our desire to do right going forward should be stronger than usual, if only to alleviate our guilt.
I once saw an article, which I cannot now quickly or easily unearth, arguing that the Christian theology necessitated a view of what it takes to be a good person that was attainable by an ordinary person. Otherwise everyone would be going to hell, and we couldn't have that. If you have to be perfect in order to get into heaven, then since you know you can't be perfect, why bother trying to be good? The phenomenon I'm describing is kind of similar: for someone like Macbeth, even just becoming again an ordinary-good person seems impossible, so there's no more reason not to become the blackest devil. This theological dynamic could only serve to reinforce the natural human tendency to try to rationalize one's bad acts. Repenting, as Macbeth notes, is hard. Simply embracing evil is easy, especially if you're being told you will already be given infinite punishment for the wrongs you have already committed.
*No, this song is not actually a manifesto of villainy, but it's hilarious if interpreted out of context as one.
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