I've long thought that in many ways, a corporation is nothing but a system which shields people from the moral consequences of their actions. A company like Altria, for example, couldn't function if you were told your job was to give people lung cancer, so the company instead has layers and layers of bureaucracy and paper pushers so that each individual person takes actions which they're only slightly uncomfortable with at worst. When I was in my early 20s, I saw how it works first hand when I worked at a company that did market research surveys at a mall, and we had a survey from Phillip Morris, and I refused to do it, and my manager tried to say: "You're not doing anything wrong, you're just asking people their opinions, you're not giving away samples or advertising to them, etc..." It all sounded so convincing, but it eventually came down to me either doing it or being fired, so I quit. Easy to do when you're still living at home and don't need the job, a lot harder if you have a family.

I've always thought that modern corporate capitalism in general is a system that makes sure that you never actually meet the people whose weakness you are taking the most advantage of. Consumers and citizens encounter hourly-paid clerks and customer service reps who probably make less than they do, those clerks work under salaried managers who are overworked because they don't get overtime, those managers work under well-paid but even more overworked managers of managers, who work under well-paid, less-overworked, but more precariously-employed project/regional heads whose primary job is taking the blame for failures. Then you get to overpaid, overworked, secure people who dictate parts of the overall strategy of a company, the vastly-paid and secure people who run the place, and the people who passively own the place and take all the profits.

At every step, you are surrounded by people roughly as put-upon and desperate as you are. While profit filters up and compromise filters down, the only people to appeal to are in roughly in the same situation you are, if not worse off.

Not doing a survey for Philip Morris as one of those leaves of the corporate graph who faces the raw material of the consumer just means you don't eat, and they find another person who will.

I think more importantly is that there are legal and organizational structures (General Counsel, HR, lobbyists etc...) that are introduced at a certain point in a companies lifecycle that prevent external costs from being imposed.

I agree with you and would add loss of high level mission. When it becomes unclear to people what the broader goal of the company is and how they fit into it, or if they are only rewarded for achieving a local goal (eg hitting some artificial metric) even if their actions impede the broader goal, then you will only get optimization towards the local goals regardless of overall outcomes.

Ding ding ding.

Read a great article once about how trading stocks will turn pretty much anyones actions sociopathic. The gist is that nobody really has to take responsibility, so most just follow the money. Unfortunately, the closer to slavery the better the profit margin.