Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil.
At least you have to continually monitor them as such.
At least you have to continually monitor them as such.
The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations
2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness
There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
We're being tricked!
An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.
And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.
This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms.
The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it.
You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that.
So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in.
I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.
I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.
"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.
I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).
But if you look at long timescales, it's pretty obvious that cooperation is the more powerful strategy.
We used to live in tribes of hunter gatherers, in constant danger from a hostile environment. Now, we're part of a global technological superorganism that provides for us.
If free-loading was a dominant strategy, this would never have developed.
(1) From the evolutionary biology point of view this can be explained by rate dependent selection- meaning the strategy is strong as long as only a small fraction of a population employ it. Durkheim would probably say you need these people to establish what the norms of a society are.