There's a difference between caring about your personal work product (and reputation), your colleagues on a personal and professional level, and your employer as an entity.

I expect my employees to show up to work and put forth a solid effort on a regular basis. Note that this doesn't mean a constant death march towards some unreasonable objective, or anything even close to it. Just apply yourself using the skills we agree you have for the pay we also agreed upon for 8 hours a day on average. In my field, this means you have pay that is well above the norm for an average software developer, and the working conditions are good or better.

A shocking number of people are incapable of this, and generally are also the same people who would claim that "they didn't start this".

So is it not good for people to care and yet be blocked from being able to do good work.

Then pay people so they have a reason to care their work. This is like a wife beating husband wondering why his wife to care more about him.

every company in the united states could become a co-op and nothing would change for the business and everything would change for the workers. And everyone would be much happier at work and you would have the caring people you want.

It is the system that is the problem, not the people.

Frankly, people for whom the work is "just a paycheck" I know in real life are simultaneously happy and simultaneously frequently produce actually good reliable work.

Work being "just a paycheck" does not mean you hate it or half ass it. But, it means you do go home to get rest, you do socialize outside of work instead of irrationally pushing it and then using meetings for socialization. It means you do not have ego tied to it so much you throw temper tantrum when things are imperfect (which is not the same as being able to change things for the better).

Give us a reason to care. It's that simple.