I think it makes a big difference, as persistence and morality are two entirely different things, that need to be trained for differently.
If you think of it in human terms: many people don't mind doing immoral things to get what they want.
If you think of it in human terms: many people don't mind doing immoral things to get what they want.
In training you only have a reward score that's either negative or positive.
As far I am aware, which is little, there is no use in discussing wether the desired behavior is about persistence or morality.
You simple need to align the reward signal to the desired behavior.
This can be as simple as rewarding moral behaviour and penalising immoral behaviour in your training, but how is that interacting with persistence? Maybe a white lie is fine sometimes in order to achieve your goal? So, when designing your training, you will need to answer for yourself how persistence interacts with morality. That is not something you can outsource to machine learning. Or rather, you can, but then you get lying and cheating agents.
But that's just my guess.
If you don't know how persistence and morality interact, and you don't have a theory in place for this, I don't have confidence you can properly supervise the training data. Which is how we arrived at the current situation.