[bigiain]

Ideas of "Shareholder primacy" and the that the sole role of directors of corporations is to "maximise shareholder value" are coming under fire lately, but they're still a pretty good rule-of-thumb for a Company Director about how to avoid investor lawsuits. There "may" be other desires and motivations the shareholders have which would influence the decision making philosophy of the company leadership, But if you had a decision to make where you could choose to "make Zuckerberg richer" or to "have Facebook assist in that humanitarian cause Mark once talked about while high at Burningman", which do you suppose you'd have an easier time defending if anybody ever called you on it?

You're right - it's often extremely damaging. But we've ingrained it into capitalist society in the same sort of ways as casual racism and everyday sexism. Pretty much completely socially acceptable, and often easy to participate in unintentionally even when you're trying not to...