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Within the institutions establsihed by God for believer and unbeliever alike, a good argument can be made that the moral unbeliever is advanced above the moral believer. Not because the morality is inherantly better, but because the believer's righteousness is based upon faith through Christ and by continueing in that faith, the law is implicitly fulfilled, whereas if the believer fulfills the law independent of faith through Christ, that moral legalism is a sin.

Some of the most miserable people in all the world are legalistic believers who fail to believe in God through faith in Christ in the performance of good works.

The moral unbeliever is successful not because of anything with value from within them, but quite the opposite. God doesn't punish the moral unbeliever, but He does discipline the unfaithful believer, especially the moral ones.

There are many, many, many good works performed by unbelievers. None of them though are good by the standards of Divine Righteousness which will judge them in the future.

Some might be good for a short period of time, or maybe even for a couple of centuries, but in the long run, any human good work performed independent of God is simply parlayed into evil by the Adversary, attempting to create a counterfeit Paradise. Accordingly, as such works distract from a relationship with God, substituting evil for divine good, they will ultimately be judged as good for nothingness along eternal standards.

The reason God doesn't punish the moral unbeliever is because He doesn't have to do something that is good for nothingness. The unbelieveer is already dead to God and is already condemned to everlasting damnation. (We are condemned before we are saved.) It's only through faith in Him, that the unbeliever may find hope that is eternally trustworthy. If the unbeliever doesn't accept even the death of Christ on the Cross, there really isn't anything else that would be convincing of a sincere faith for God to perform anything more with the unbeliever, other than sorting the good things out from the things that are good for nothingness on Judgment Day.