Companies, like people, can be evil while not committing any crimes. Intuit is not even that evil when compared to most larger companies in the US. We only remember it exists during tax season.
The really evil companies manipulate markets, evade labor laws, crush unions, exploit vulnerable users, enable authoritarian surveillance, trivialize wars.
All without breaking a single law.
So dark patterns are good? It was good for cigarette companies to discover tobacco is addictive and take advantage of that by selling cigarettes to kids?
After all, this was legal until people fought a brutal grassroots war against tobacco companies to fix it.
This is the exact argument Jeffrey Skilling presented to me to explain his actions at Enron. He further expanded saying, “You would have done the same thing in my position.”
It’s possible to be both evil and rational. Now regardless of the legality of Skilling’s actual actions—when considering whatever viewpoint he convinced himself of—one must consider ethics and whether or not they are intentionally misleading people in their actions. It can absolutely be evil. How many people lost their entire retirement savings when Enron went under?
Corporations need to be redefined to serving society first, a sort of Prime Directive.
No. You can do things that are immoral, harmful, predatory, and generally shitty while still being perfectly legal.
And people who want fewer regulations hampering businesses need to realize that this only works if businesses work within ethical guidelines that are not mandated by law. Otherwise the government will need to step in and protect people.
But to reiterate: Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's not evil.