businesses and organizations have become a whole new entity.
i agree very much with plato/socrates in their view of humans being essentially good/virtuous but doing bad/vicious things out of ignorance as doing wrong results in bad things happening to those who do it and no one would willingly wish harm upon themselves.
To put it in Biblical and evolutionary terms, this greatest plague of society is the sin of Cain - intraspecies predation. Bettering yourself at the expense of others.
And these are some possible ways in which good (or at least neutral) people may get to commit or be accomplices to evil deeds, just off the top of my head:
Distance and lack of empathy - they do not feel the pain they are causing - just the benefit they will earn. If one would feel, or at least imagine, the suffering of their victim, they would have second thoughts. Btw, I think this is one of the reasons why women are more afraid of violence than men.
Short-sightedness - what goes around, comes around eventually, for the vast majority of wrongdoers, but they are blinded by the immediate prospect of profit. Play now, pay later - they tout the slogan but probably don't really understand its implications.
Organizations:
Diffusion of responsibility - Being part of a group, especially impersonal, may make it easier for people to shed moral responsibility and project it on the fictional construct of the personified Organization. There is no such thing, it's just a group of people, the organization does not tell them what to do, each bears personal responsibility for what they make themselves part of.
Groupthink - Individuals melting into a collective mass are also prone to reciprocally reassure one another about being right, however insane their ideas might be. Other persons' opinions, the more the better, are held in too high an esteem by people, and are too readily used as justification for their own foolishness. Basically, a gang of fools may goad and reassure one another that they are wise men. I'm sure that for example many Nazis were normal people.
Another mechanism that I do not fully understand derives from the motivation structure of people. It is said that the greatest evil is good people doing nothing. So called 'evil' people are in fact neutral in intent - most do not want to hurt anyone, they just want power / wealth. Predation is just the means to that end. Thus, they have a personal and immediate incentive to do things that might harm others. The 'good' people, the sheep who fall victim to the wolves, have no incentive to do anything until they are personally victimised - another consequence of short-sightedness. But by that time it is late - the wolves have the advantage of offense over defense and of divide et impera. And people who want to acquire power in order to defend themselves but are not willing to harm others are at a disadvantage simply because 'evil' people are willing to use techniques that they are not.
In the end though, in normal conditions predation is self-limiting. 'Evil' people are always a minority; they cannot impose themselves by force, but must partially depend on not provoking a response from their victims; if they do TOO much harm or if they do not hide their actions and manipulate their victims, the sheep will smother them by sheer numbers. Somewhat like in nature, they are a fringe phenomenon that preys on the weaker.
But as human society becomes more centralized, it is moving away from this model. The few, the wolves, are gaining more power over the sheep. I believe that if sheep want to stay free they will at some point have to grow fangs.
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