I fail to understand why someting that is totally reasonable to expect from any indevisual suddenly becomes "amazingly hard" when the indeviduals are grouped together.
btw, how do you know that you're evil? does the evilness change? how so?
We see some of this effect in actual stock market data, today, where "sinful" companies like Altria or defense contractors tend to trade at lower P/E ratios than "good" companies like Google or Merck. Of course, this means that sinful companies tend to pay higher dividend yields, and evil investors end up with more money in their pocket. This is the price of not being evil.
It's not just corporations--street gangs, government agencies, churches, political organizations, and other groups have a much harder time than individuals maintaining a moral compass. As much as you want to pin institutional evil on individuals--be it mafia dons, dictators, CEO's, or crooked cops--at the very least, the institutions these people are part of are a necessary element in what happens.
Even if all people have equally strong consciences, some of them will worry more about proximate responsibility ("clean hands") and others about ultimate responsibility ("clear conscience"). In other words, some people would be more okay with ordering a man shot as long as they don't have to pull the trigger, and others would be more okay with joining a firing squad as long as they don't give the orders. Once the former start giving orders to the latter, the group will be able to do worse things than any individual member was capable of, but everyone still feels morally okay.
To put it yet another way, for each morally questionable task that arises, a large group will probably contain someone who doesn't object to that specific task. Division of labor ensures that group morality sinks to the lowest common denominator.
A corporation is typically considered evil if any of its employees are evil. If you're feeling generous, maybe you'd relax that to a small group of employees, say 0.1%. For example, AIG employs close to 100,000 people, yet I doubt that more than a few hundred were involved in the mortgage derivative mess. Yet we still pretty much universally revile AIG.
Say that 1% of people are evil. It's totally reasonable to expect an individual to be non-evil; after all, 99 out of 100 (in this model) are.
But then extend that out to a large corporation. The probability that you'll find at least one evil person in a startup of 10 is (1 - .99^10) = 0.095, or about 10%. The probability that you'll find at least 100 evil people in a corporation of 20,000 is (1 - .99^19900), which according to Google calculator is 1, i.e. virtually certain (there's some round-off error there, but you get the point). In order to have any fighting chance at being non-evil, a large organization has to actively seek out evil and eject it from the organization, simply because the organization as a whole tends to be judged by its worst members.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by math." - PG
"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
The bigger the group the higher the probability it includes a "good man" (or woman).
I would qualify that by pointing out that it's only true if the worst members are in positions of power. If the evil members of an organization are its janitors, our problem is minimal. Unfortunately, your argument mostly holds true because in any broth, the scum always rises to the top.
No one person has to take the blame for any action. When you are only 1/1,000,000th responsible for something, it becomes easier to justify bad decisions.
If this is even part-way serious as a justification for abuses of corporate power, then what a terrible, glib argument.