I definitely see it as being used to excuse bad behavior, which is a step up from resignation IMO
> "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation.
This seems to deny any moral agency to "people". If someone were to offer $100 million to whomever kills the CEO of Lufthansa, anyone taking them up on that offer would be morally culpable. Hopefully we don't just resign ourselves to say "yeah, I'd have killed the CEO too, people follow incentives"
Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact.
I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant
People are fucking weird.
I'm not sure how to phrase it properly, but there is a strong selection for people with lax morals here for the simple reason that it's a competitive advantage. A founder with lax morals will generally outcompete someone with stronger morals, as such few people at the top of organizations of any size have strong morals
I ask because I'm a former infantryman and I personally know a handful of people who have. Of those people, most were quite sure they wouldn't have a problem with it, but guess what ...
People have been killed for a lot less than $100M though.