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by MeVfm
4320 days ago
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> Companies are not inherently evil You're right, companies are inherently amoral. If their pursuit of profit happens to be moral, all the better, but don't expect them to rescind immoral policies if it means it'll hurt profit and nobody with any power is around to put on pressure to make them stop. When they do awful things, those poor persecuted businessmen can always count on apologists like you to come to their defence though. |
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I fully subscribe to one of the basic economic axioms. That people act out of self-interest (whether being a manager in a capitalist system or volunteering in a hospital in North Korea). This is a rule that's true "on average", not absolutely, but it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases you'll look at.
That means "evil" barely ever happens. There are very, very few people who hurt others knowing they'll also hurt themselves in the process (there are, in theory they should be confined to insane asylums). This suggests it's at least a Nash balance.
Almost all people who commit bad acts do so because they are expected a benefit in return. Murder, theft, rape, hell, even suicide bombing ... all come with a benefit to the perpetrator. This makes their actions fit your description of "amoral".
The opposite of good is not your definition of evil. That's merely insanity. I'm not saying that never happens, but it very rarely do. The opposite of good is your definition of "amoral", and because of that it makes a lot of sense to call anything amoral evil.
Having some machine learning experience I might also mention that I've noticed on easy communality in evil versus good. There is this concept of "time horizon" of decisions. Because predicting the world is a cpu and memory expensive process, when evaluating a decision people only simulate X time out. X is called the time horizon. If there is a decision that will have good effects for X-1, and cause a disaster at X, they will make that decision. What we call evil can, to some extent, be simplified as being a "decision with low time horizon" and good is the opposite. Hell, what most saints did can be summarized as making decisions where the time horizon is far longer than their lifespan, which doesn't make sense for most people.
Alternatively one could say that you're trying to let companies get away from being called "evil" by taking a far extreme and then showing that they don't satisfy that standard. That you are presenting a "reductio ad absurdum" fallacy.