I think this is a bit simplistic or at least too optimistic. The pressures of being listed on the stock market are such that management is more or less compelled to pursue short-term goals.
Indeed in the very long run a lot of corporations are harming themselves by harming the environment, impeding innovation etc. but in the short run firing people, cutting R&D budgets, digging up more coal, oil etc. can be very effective. And shareholders really only care about what your profits are gonna be in the next few quarters, not so much about what's gonna happen decades down the line.
Now, here's an interesting thing to consider. You bring up coal and oil - both industries that are on the way out in the long term. Would it be wise for shareholders to push these companies to invest in R&D to improve their long-term capabilities? No, if coal and oil are on the way out, then the best financial strategy would be to run the companies into the ground as you slowly liquidate them, ideally so that there's nothing left on the very day that fossil fuels are no longer needed. In that case, short-termism is the best strategy.
All in all, putting lives at risk was a good move for Boeing, and they'll surely do it again.
In any case, such judgement is only clear in hindsight (that is, calculating effectiveness implies a time window over which effects are to be tabulated).
Most charitably, the executives perhaps felt they were making judicious, acceptable tradeoffs that would maximize business outcomes over the time horizon they were concerned with - periods measured in quarters or years or even decades.
How would we incentivize people to only take profits over an arbitrarily long (and ever-widening) window? What happens when a black swan occurs and significantly drives down the effectiveness of prior decisions (which until then had been deemed quite effective)? Are profits clawed back?
If the judgment was really only clear in hindsight then no power structure could have altered it. What's clear only in hindsight to a CEO is clear only in hindsight to a union boss, or a collective, anyone else.
>How would we incentivize people to only take profits over an arbitrarily long (and ever-widening) window?
The corporation is already incentivized: in exchange for thinking about long-term profits, it is rewarded with long-term profits. However, executives often have different goals than the corporation they're supposed to represent. If you could figure out how to better align the interests of executives with their corporations, you would see more effective profit-seeking, which would include less killing due to blunders but more killing due to tobacco-industry style exploitation. Giving executives the freedom to put their own interests first (the source of next-quarterism and next-bonusism) is necessary if you want to give them the freedom to pursue ethical goals. You either trust them to make the right decisions or you don't.
>Are profits clawed back?
Yes! That's what happens when something causes you to lose money.