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Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

> So what is "evil"? Can a company be evil?

An interesting point, made by a friend [1] recently at dinner: companies can't be evil.

Companies can't love, they can't be loyal or caring; they can't be malevolent or heartless. Only people can be those things.

What we mean when we label companies that way is that their employees have acted that way. It's ethical hackery to absolve someone of malevolent acts because they were in the service of an abstraction. We may still continue using that sort of short-hand, but it's important to remember that at the end of the day, a company that's being "evil" is really a bunch of individuals that are collectively and actively making decisions to hurt others.

1) http://twitter.com/tilladam

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Corporations are (made up of) people, my friend! ;-)

The whole purpose of a company is to absolve the individuals involved of some legal consequences. I think right now we are having a debate over exactly how far that absolution extends.

I could imagine a situation where each individual was acting ethically, but the emergent behavior was still unethical. For example, each individual manager might be promoting the worker they feel is best-qualified for the job, but over-all hiring patterns end up being discriminatory due to small, unnoticed biases. Corporations are emergent systems, much like programs themselves. Race conditions, concurrency, stampeding herd dynamics, failing to have anyone be responsible for important considerations: all the downfalls of parallelism apply to human organizations as well.

"Corporations are (made up of) people, my friend! ;-)"

That's funny because for the past few months, my mind has replayed Romney's quote every time I've heard someone say 'corporation'. I don't know why, it just happens.

You make some good points, of course. A company is a single entity after all.

This ignores company culture, and the fact that people that reflect the company culture the most are the highest rewarded, and that often this culture is perpetuated by a small minority of individuals that control the companies.

I bet Cash4Gold has a ton of friendly ethical people working the lower ranks, but that doesn't balance out the fact that the entire organization is a scam.

> I bet Cash4Gold has a ton of friendly ethical people working the lower ranks

What you did there is the anti-thesis to my point though: if your job requires you to make specific decisions that you feel are hurting others, you are not absolved of that malevolence just because of "corporate culture". You are still an individual making decisions that you believe will hurt other people. (And that you'd be rewarded for such is even less morally relevant.) Naturally there tends to be more of that decision making power resting with the executives.

Culture is useful if we want to understand the context and root of ethical or unethical acts, but it doesn't whitewash them – most people don't believe that growing up in a tough neighborhood makes it ok to steal, even if it does give that act context.

most people don't believe that growing up in a tough neighborhood makes it ok to steal, even if it does give that act context.

So, when it's stealing or starving, and I'm offered a job at Cash4Gold, should I reject it?

Any rational person would accept, and live to pass on his/her genes.

I think companies can hold worldviews, which in themselves can be opposed to our own worldviews and therefore be 'evil'.

I view Apple's stance on intellectual property to be 'evil', the fact that they would rather use lawyers than engineers, reduce competition rather than increase it to win their battles, it's an 'evil' concept to me, which is why I will never use apple and always give my opinion to family members on why to avoid them when asked.

Technically they're not a person and cannot have any standing, but the worldviews of the culture, when sufficiently opposed to our own, are indistinguishable from 'evil'

Who says we're absolving the members of the employees? If you continue to strip away the abstractions, an evil person is just a collection of neurons and other cells that are collectively making decisions to hurt others, but it's still reasonable to call the person evil. Likewise I would argue that we can call a company "evil" if the people who make it up are acting in an evil way.

People absolve the companies all the time. "They're just employees, they don't make the policies." "Oh, yeah, Zynga's awful, but he's a good guy." Etc, etc.

I think that's factually true, but the moral implication is false. Nobody says, "Oh, it's not his fault the mob assigned him to break kneecaps. He doesn't set the policies, you know."

Right, what I meant was that this particular group of people here on HN doesn't seem prone to that, not that people in general don't do it.

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