The Broken Windows of Our Moral Life

Editor’s Note: In a world where the boundaries between public behaviour and organisational life are blurring, this essay invites us to reflect on the small moral choices that shape our collective future. A meditation not on rules but on the habits and shared standards that hold societies together.

My Uber driver tore through a red light and several sections of the Motor Vehicles Act in one smooth move. I asked him to slow down.

He turned towards me, surprised, almost offended, and said, “Don’t worry, sir. No cop around.”

He genuinely believed he was keeping it safe. The incredulous look on his face said it all: Are you mad? There’s no cop around!

Apparently, breaking rules is fine as long as you’re not caught.

What struck me later was how familiar this logic felt. I’ve heard versions of it in offices too—“No one will notice,” “Everyone does it,” “It’s not a big deal.” The same mindset that treats a red light as optional can quietly shape workplace culture: bending a process, overlooking a policy, or stretching an ethical line because the “cop”—a manager, an auditor, or a colleague—isn’t looking. The street and the organisation are not as far apart as we imagine.

When the ‘We’ becomes ‘Me’

Once upon a time, we had a shared sense of what was right. Maybe it came from religion, community, or just the mild fear of our neighbours’ judgement. Over time, though, collective morality—the idea that goodness is built together—has been replaced by individual moral convenience.

Now everyone has a private version of “okay.” Littering is fine if you’re in a hurry. Taxes feel optional if you contribute to your temple, church, mosque, or charity, and sing the national anthem with pride. Ethics are flexible if you’re “not hurting anyone.” The CEO’s transgressions aren’t okay, but he’s getting us market share, so maybe it’s fine.

As David Brooks reminds us in his 2015 book The Road to Character, “Moral formation is not individual. Character is built in community.”

Somewhere along the way, that community dissolved into WhatsApp groups and gated-community fences. We became free—wonderfully, gloriously free—to do whatever we want. And we have never looked so stuck.

The Slow Creep Before the Crack

Vladimir Lenin once wrote, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” Moral decline follows that pattern in reverse. For decades, nothing seems to happen. Then one day, everything already has.

It’s not that the collective will has vanished. Far from it. We still care deeply—about our families, our faiths, our neighbourhoods. But the bar has sunk by degrees. We still want to do the right thing, but we now measure goodness in convenience units: how much right we can do without being late for work.

A few skipped rules, a small lie on a form, a casual bribe—and suddenly the moral landscape looks like a city of broken windows.

This is exactly what the Broken Windows Theory warns us about. A small violation left unchecked normalises decay. We carry these calibrations into offices too: a leader who storms in and rules by fear, a colleague who bends the truth, a team that looks away because confrontation is tiring. Before long, silence becomes policy and honesty begins to feel naive.

A few days later, on Andheri-Kurla Road in Mumbai, I watched three cars calmly drive the wrong way—not because they were lost, but because the “right side” was too crowded. What began years ago with two-wheelers became common for autorickshaws, and now sedans have joined in. If one person bends the rule, everyone else feels entitled to follow. Red lights become suggestions; zebra crossings, decoration; rules, something other people should obey.

A Japanese friend once asked, after watching someone toss a plastic bottle out of a car window, “Doesn’t he feel bad?” In Japan, schoolchildren carry their lunch waste home if they can’t find a bin, and stadium crowds clean up before leaving. It’s not heroism—it’s habit. A shared sense that individual behaviour reflects on the whole.

The Road Back

I reached for The Road to Character again last week. It had been sitting on my shelf for years, gifted long ago, waiting for me to feel suitably guilty. Brooks writes, “Humility is the awareness that you are not the centre of the universe.”

Maybe that is where the road begins again: for each of us to stop being the hero of our own moral story and remember that the story itself is shared.

The decline of collective morality isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s mine too. I’ve broken a few windows myself—skipped a queue or two, laughed off a rule when it was convenient, excused small wrongs by telling myself there are bigger problems to worry about.

So yes, the agency is with me. Saying yes to moral action also means saying yes to its consequences: the awkwardness, the extra time, the loss of convenience.

And yet, the collective will is still there—alive, if a little weary. It shows up in crises, in kindness, in the everyday decency that still flickers across this land. We just need to raise its standards again, one honest act at a time.

These things evolve over time. What is considered moral can’t be frozen. It needs conversation. The trouble is, we rarely have that conversation. It either turns into moralistic preaching or easy dismissal. What we need instead is dialogue, laced with empathy and curiosity, about what we will hold tight and what we will hold light.

If we can stop treating public life as someone else’s responsibility, there is still hope that the next generation will drive on the correct side of the road—both literally and morally.

And maybe, just maybe, Andheri-Kurla Road will become what it is called.

A road.