Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.

Yeah ok, the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight.

> the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight

The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.

They're lawnmowers[1], not bears.

1: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

I'm not trying to spend too much time in a tank with an octopus, either.

Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.

Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that:

1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations

2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness

There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.

If corporations are not people then why are their ads full of elements that make us feel warm and fuzzy?

We're being tricked!

> you can assume they'll tend towards evil.

An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.

And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.

Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.

Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual.

Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit whole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population.

In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.

That can happen, sure, but the cancer's strategy is not a winning one - it dies along with the host.

Again, I'm not arguing for some naive Panglossian view. Things can get pretty bad transiently.

I just take exception at the cynical view that evil is somehow intrinsically more powerful than good.

"Survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood that way too, as survival of the strong and selfish, when, on the contrary, evolution is full of examples of cooperation being stable over long timescales.

Evil simply has more options available than good. Sure, those options, like all options, have pros and cons. Cancer, like sociopathy, can have a pretty good run even if it ends ultimately in demise.

I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).

The cynical view suffers from availability bias - it's easy for us to think of someone who sticks out through bad behavior, but somehow gets away with it, precisely because it is not normal. (1)

But if you look at long timescales, it's pretty obvious that cooperation is the more powerful strategy.

We used to live in tribes of hunter gatherers, in constant danger from a hostile environment. Now, we're part of a global technological superorganism that provides for us.

If free-loading was a dominant strategy, this would never have developed.

(1) From the evolutionary biology point of view this can be explained by rate dependent selection- meaning the strategy is strong as long as only a small fraction of a population employ it. Durkheim would probably say you need these people to establish what the norms of a society are.

It's not that cynical when you consider that corporations exist precisely to shield owners and leadership from legal (and to a lesser extent) monetary responsibility.