A rich and thoroughly evil man establishes an organisation designed to perpetrate acts of harm on individuals. He sets up the organisation such that no individual within the organisation knows about the acts of harm - those who gather the information have no knowledge of the acts, and those who commit the acts have no knowledge that the acts are harmful.
It is theoretically possible that a senior manager or director could discover that the company is causing harm, but no manager or director has motivation to do so. The company is structured such that efforts to increase profitability or efficiency will preserve or increase the amount of harm. It is also possible that actions of a senior manager or director could inadvertently stop the company causing harm, but this is unlikely.
Is the company itself evil? Are any of the managers or directors being immoral for running the company?
More importantly, does this thought experiment show that a society or organisation can be evil whilst all members are acting morally? Does that then mean that we have a moral obligation to be aware of system effects of which we are only a small component, and fight against the system if it is evil?
The company is evil in the way that mass murder is typically evil (that is, as an abstract concept, obviously doesn’t bear any moral responsibility itself, but is an evil thing for someone to cause) and evil in the way that a robot programmed (without understanding) to commit mass murder is evil, in that if it were committed by a human it WOULD be evil, and that’s a convenient shorthand to describe what it’s doing, but without saying it actually DOES have moral responsibility. Whether a company or other concept can possess human attributes is a question of how you choose to define words.
The people running the company are not automatically immoral if they have no reason to know. However, the experiment itself shows you have a reasonable duty to figure out if you ARE unknowingly perpetuating harm. If they might have known, but refused to look, then they do bear responsibility to that. If everything looked perfectly normal and a reasonable person would have assumed everything was fine, then they’ve no reason to be held responsible.
Obviously in real life many people do feel guilty for inadvertent but large harm, and even are unable to live with themselves. Which is understandable, but most of the time they chose not to look for some reason, so bear a little bit (or sometimes a lot) of responsibility, which they then magnify. I do not think they are culpable, even if they feel awful :()
Obviously, in real life, it’s much more common that people have some idea that something bad is going on but choose not to investigate, for instance because they’re making so much money (bad) or because they fear for their life (justifiable).
Seems like you have just described the Madoff company.
A good friend of mine worked there, and had no idea what was going on. Can’t see how that would make him immoral. He was being used, and in that sense, was a victim of evil too.
NUMBER TWO: Dr. Evil, I have found a way we can make a lot of money while still maintaining the ethics of an evil organization. We’re branching into Hollywood.
I don’t buy that someone can commit acts of evil without knowing they are acts of evil - or at least without working hard not to know. The guy who shot an arrow into the air is generally considered culpable if it fell to earth in someone’s keister.
Tobacco companies, 20th century? At the point where not everyone knew about the medical evidence, maybe? These companies weren’t set up with evil in mind, but at the point where the medical evidence became compelling it seems to me that the guys running them started engaging in evil practices - suppressing the evidence etc.
I still have a vivid picture in my mind of all those suits leaning towards the senate committee microphone and declaring that I believe that nicotine is not addictive, and thinking “no you don’t, it’s just convenient for you to lie about it.”
For reference, this theme has been mentioned in varying levels of detail in a wide variety of films including:
1984
Brazil
Cube
Michael Clayton
Schindler’s List (presumably, I’ve never seen it)
Syriana
Thank You for Smoking
The Good Shepherd
Basically the premise is because (for most people) they are so far removed from the end results of their labor, occupy such a small role in the overall scheme of things and often have no motivation beyond working an honest job to pay the mortgage, it is entirely possible that they may act in a way that may seem totally moral or innocuous, while contributing to something that is, in fact quite evil (or at least potentially very harmful and controvertial).
Now clearly as you rise up through an organization and gain increasing levels of responsibility and knowledge on how it works, it becomes a bit more difficult to dilude yourself that you aren’t part of the problem.
But what about the guy who sold him the arrow or the employees at ACME Compound Bows, Inc.?
What if someone sets up a game at a carnival that gives an unusually good prize for hitting the bullseye with an arrow at least in carnival terms? Let’s say you pay an average of $10 and get a medium-sized stuffed animal which many people think is a great deal at the end of the day even if it only costs $2 to make and the game is easy because the distance is short and the bullseye is unusually large. The operator makes a ton of money only limited by his ability to change the targets fast enough which seems overly complicated. Still, there is a line around the corner and it seems like half the people in the park have these stuffed animals making everyone else want them even more.
At the end of the day, there is a massive bust and crowds run away screaming and shocked beyond recognition. When the police remove the frame that holds a target, they pull it away only to find…
A dead baby with an arrow through its forehead. Other sedated babies who haven’t yet been shot are strapped to movable racks to be placed behind the targets.
Who feels is really guilty and who just feels like a giant douche in this scenario?
babies were future members of the American Fascist Party who otherwise would have grown up to start a nuclear war that destroyed civilization? (The proprietor of the booth being a time-traveler from the future obviously.)
I’m me a materialist, so I think that every cell in your body and brain is an ‘employee’ in your ‘company’. If you are evil, it may be their fault, but it doesn’t make the cells themselves evil.
I’d argue that the organisation in the OP cannot exist. Or rather, the only way it can mostly exist is if the founder (or some other evil agent) is a part of the organisation, subverting the work of the ignorant, moral workers.
The only ones that are guilty are the ones responsible for the deception. Falling for a booby trap you could not have reasonably foreseen is not immoral, even if you’re not the one that suffers harm as a consequence.
Really, this sounds like a Paladin Trap, the sort of thing asshole DMs pull on their players so they can pretend you’re evil for not being omniscient.
I think what we have here is basically a version of the Chinese room thought experiment: A company that systematically does evil without any individual in the company intending it sounds to me a lot like a system that converses in Chinese without any component of the system knowing Chinese. Surely, it’s possible for a sufficiently-complicated system, but I see no evidence that we’re currently capable of constructing such a system.
Imagine a covert-ops set-up like the one in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, with good guys all around for the sake of argument: undercover spies who painstakingly research a given situation, and then give a “your mission, if you choose to accept it” briefing to a special agent tasked with going in and dropping the bad guy marked for removal to help the designated good guy thereabouts.
Except now imagine the researchers relay their inside-information conclusions by marking pictures in the dossier with an “O” or and “X” to signify who to kill and who needs help. And now imagine the agents – have been told that “O” and “X” have the opposite meanings.
Right there is where I have my problem with the scenario. IMO, management always have an ethical responsibility to ensure their company doesn’t do harm, and are supposed to perform all due diligence to ensure this.
Now, if such due diligence couldn’t turn up anything, then I’d say your scenario was too perfect to be useful as a guide for real-world ethics, and to carry on with the mental wankery.