I was taking annual mandated training at work the other day. Like, you know, watch the video, try not to snooze when you fall asleep, and then answer a very basic question or two at then end. One of the videos was about ethics. I work for a government contractor and ethics is a big deal.
But it was boring and I started noodling on my phone. I looked up my employer’s Wikipedia page. And wouldn’t you know it, they mentioned that my employer was responsible for running a disinformation campaign in the Philippines during the pandemic, at the request of the American government, trying to convince people that the vaccine was bad for them because it was from China. There are very likely to be people who refused the vaccine and died because of the lies of my employer, and I was learning this literally while an ethics video played on my computer screen.
This came to light only because my employer had, according to a government report, “sloppy tradecraft” and failed to sufficiently cover their tracks.
I think it’s likely that every large firm, and lots of smaller ones, are at least partially responsible for something horrible. The only differences are whether we know about it or not, and if that horrible thing is the only/main reason the firm exists. There’s a good chance that your past and future employers did/knowingly enabled something ethically indefensible. That doesn’t make YOU a bad person.
Most of that is indirect, exploitation, greed. That’s very different than actively committing evil. And before anyone claims false marketing is false marketing, no it’s not. False marketing to rip someone odd is a scan. False marketing to encourage deaths should be a major crime