edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority.
Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.