[ALittleLight]

I think this is what Nietzche calls the master and slave morality. Basically, generations of slaves, or peasants, or whatever, develop a morality that is fit for purpose for the life of a slave. Slaves care about things like loyalty, keeping your word, not being a squeaky wheel, honesty, and all that because those traits are adaptive for living and working together with a with a bunch of peers.

Conversely, the master morality is adapted to being a master. A King may lie in diplomacy and betray allies and that kind of thing would be horrible in a peasant, but the King's actions might make his entire country better off and in a utilitarian sense that values only the King's countrymen - it may make everyone better off. But regardless of who is made better off by it the masters, like the peasants, have developed their own sense of morality, closer to ends justifying the means, because it is adaptive for them.

Names like "Master" and "Slave" make it seem like the master morality is the good morality or that the slave morality is bad. But I think those are just value judgments that come from the words. Nietzche says (to my understanding) that the truly noble person must move beyond either the master or slave morality and do what is actually right based on his own understanding and without regarding for the folk traditions of either class of master or slave morality.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at is it may be the case that your morality is adapted to being a worker-bee and the CEO's morality is adapted to being a CEO and so what the CEO does can seem sociopathic because the CEO is actually playing by a different set of rules or with different goals in mind.

[jdkee]

CEO pay going from an average of 21-1 of the average worker in the 1960s to over 335-1 by the 2010s is certainly “playing by a different set of rules”.

See https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

[GoldenMonkey]

It is like the rules change, for the game that is played.