> I think it's evil to want profits at the explicit, direct cost millions of people suffering and dying (not to mention the societal drag of hundreds of billions in healthcare costs).
Of course it is, I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing it's illogical to expect an entity that is inherently amoral to act morally. One could make a solid argument that the corporation as a concept is in fact designed to abstract away decisions that carry heavy moral weight into smaller decisions made by people who, while moral themselves, do not connect their morality to their every day decisions about maximizing profits for the good of themselves and their coworkers.
> I personally don't believe that companies should be viewed as entirely amoral agents. I do understand that the vast majority of the time, profit incentives outweigh any moral considerations. But not 100% of the time.
Companies are not inherently immoral, no, not the way I believe corporations are. It's an issue of scale. Once you have sufficient distance between the leadership and the boots-on-the-ground workforce, it's much easier for them to make decisions that directly endanger said workforce without feeling as though they're doing anything wrong, with the added benefit of that same power structure abstracting their actions away to such a degree where they aren't held personally accountable when things go wrong and people die.
Were any of the executives of the Exxon company ever made to personally deal with their oil spills? I doubt it. If they were made to go out there in the freezing cold and clean penguins instead of paying some amount of money that was basically a heavy albeit necessary expense for them, I think you'd find them remembering that experience a lot better.
> Of course, public policy / laws / regulations are powerful tools that should be used as wisely as possible to help some of these issues. But I don't think we should view law as the only barrier that prevents companies from doing evil things -- the law will always be incomplete and limited in power. Human social factors, culture, and morality play a big role, I think, even in broadly affecting company behavior. Still working out my thoughts on this.
Again you're using the word "evil" which I believe is inherently a misnomer. Far more accurate I think is "stupid." If you have for example a small business owner who works in his shop every day and mandates that his workers wear eye protection, he doesn't so much need OSHA because he's also in that shop, and so enforces safety code for his safety, and that he has a direct and personal relationship with his fellow workers, and so wants to ensure their safety as well. In a corporation, you'll find you end up with a particular shop manager who doesn't value safety very much and encourages his workers to "bend the rules" on safety because it allows them to work faster. His higher ups don't necessarily see that, they just see this particular shop has now increased output by 8%, and so they ask their other shops "why are you not increasing output as well?" and those managers in turn feel that pressure and may lax their own standards as well.
"Evil" assigns ill will intent to actions which are not inherently about ill will, and make the people who make them into monsters or some kind of other-human type thing that is harder for people to identify. Making these people out to just be regular people making rational, but flawed, decisions is something people don't like to do because then they have to confront the reality that they are absolutely capable of performing actions that result in people losing eyes, oil tankers wrecking in Alaska, cruise ships capsizing, etc. and people don't like that.