Evil, as you suggest, Lew, may be too Biblical a word; what we have a moral equivocation -- a behavior that justifies itself under the construct that says 'if the boss says it's okay, it is." In leaders this shows up as moral ignorance and delusion (which, I suppose, is a definition); in employees it's unquestioning followership.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about this, describing the 'banality of evil': Hitler's Reich evolved from a kind of green-eyeshades consciousness that allowed people to invent, participate in and justify many machinations that added up to a massive horror.

The mortgage preditors may fall into this class. The best explication was broadcast on the NPR show "This American Life." In a show entitled "The Giant Pool of Money" broadcast May 9th, you can hear about the banality of evil firsthand from the perpetrators. Worth downloading.

First thing: I second Bronwyn's recommendation of This American Life's piece, called The Giant Pool of Money. It's one of the best and most important pieces of reporting I've ever heard.

About evil: If I do good for you, by selling you my last chocolate cupcake, can it also be evil for Fred, who wanted one but didn't get it? Evil depends on the perspective - Although I didn't intend to keep Fred from getting a cupcake, he may very well blame me for his lack of desert, especially if he ends up starving to death.

I think to be evil means there is the intent to harm, or a clear awareness of harm that is not communicated to the customer. I think anyone involved in the sub-prime crisis who understand how bad the loans were and signed them anyway has something to apologize for. Yes, I believe in buyer beware, but I also believe people know what's right, and generally feel guilty when they do what's wrong.

Some business are based more on willful deception and taking advantage of ignorance than others. And I think it is far to apply words like evil, or cruel, mean, or even weak to those businesses. Preying on helpless people can not possibly be noble, or good, or whatever word we might agree is the opposite of evil. Every company has a culture, and a culture can be defined as a shared set of values and ethics.

It's interesting to consider the different ways corporations are defined around the world, and how they promote, or discourage, questionable behavior. The 1866 Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations protection as independent entities was a landmark case: it protected CEOs and Executives in new ways, and enabled behavior, both good and bad, that they would never have conducted otherwise.

Around the same time came this notable quote:

“corporations have been enthroned… an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people…until wealth is aggregated in a few hands…and the republic is destroyed”
-Abraham Lincoln, 1864 (reference)

I find it quite interesting to discuss whether business can be evil.

After WWII it was no problem to label Nazism and Fascism as evil - they lost, we won, and the winners get to write history. Sort of same thing with Communism.

But what about unfettered Capitalism as displayed during the last couple of years? It's harder to brand as evil, since most of us are integrated parts of the system.

Take this quote from the article:

"The problem with accusing a business of evil is that the behavior of an enterprise is collective, consisting of so many individuals, engaged daily in myriad acts of omission and commission, that it is virtually impossible to fix moral accountability in a meaningful way."

...and replace business with The Third Reich and enterprise with the state. Do you still think it holds water?

I think that sometimes we use such labels in ordinary language without real regard to the connotations. People swear everyday without much thought to what the words actually mean. Of course to use the word "evil" in a country where a vast majority believe in religions that have the good/evil binary, well then one has to be more careful in public discourse. Politicians use the word effectively when they want to convince the people something is bad. For my own part, to call businesses, corporations, inflation, unemployment, etc, evil, is just a way off letting steam. I do believe that those at the apex of the subprime fiasco should be culpable, because what happened could have been avoided, and as for all those who were part of the "machine", those who just went along with it, well that is not true, because the majority of them had an interest in putting people into greater debt - now that I call plain evil. They knew the risks. All these speculative moments from boom to credit crunch can be averted by tightening fiscal controls and most importantly reforming and expanding the concept of fiduciary duty so as to prevent any situation where someone giving advice knowingly puts the client into a worse situation than before. Instead what happened was the complete opposite: loosening up of fiscal controls and advice that might have been given by Christopher Marlowe's Mephistopheles.

I am grateful for Mads Kristensen’s entirely correct observation that large-scale collective action is found not only in business but in governments—and that immunity from the charge of evil should probably not be granted solely because too many people dilute the accountability. While I was writing the sentence Mads quoted, it did in fact cross my mind that the same logic might be applied to the Third Reich. That made me briefly uncomfortable, and probably should have made me think twice. But, as Scott Berkun wisely suggested is the proper thing to do, I waved away my discomfort by focusing on intent to do harm: the official Third Reich policy of programmatic genocidal murder vs. some uncommonly rapacious mortgage brokers, banks and loan bundlers—who seem like small potatoes by comparison. But then Stephen Pain reminded me that Mephistopheles operated by using trickery to induce his victims to take on a debt they couldn’t afford to pay off. And now I’m determined to do as Bronwyn recommended and listen to the episode of “This American Life” about that giant pool of money…

"Evil thrives when good people do nothing" is adapted from Edmund Burke's famous quote.

Maybe evil also thrives when good people take leave of their common sense and rush in where wise men fear to tread.

I am fortunate that I have taken leave of my senses and been suckered more than a few times, but not to the devastating levels of people like Carlene Baldarrama.

Nevertheless it has given me pause to try to avoid it. Something I have done to try to ward off evil or at least being snookered by an unscrupulous type:

1. Be aware of someone trying to snow me.
2. Be aware of my hastiness to agree to something that I should think about.
3. Listen to the person selling me hard.
4. Pausing for a full count of ten and look for tell tale signs of anxiety on the seller such as nervousness, being fidgety, or even irritable (as they worry that they have been found out).
5. Look them straight in the eye and ask them: "If you were me would you do this deal" then pause and ask "and if so, why?" If it is a win win deal they will have nothing to hide, if it's a win lose (with you as the loser) they will fumble and I will sotpp and reconsider, if not run for the hills.

Evil is generated by people and they are the ones running the businesses so yes, business is capable of evil. No, no amount of shared responsibility makes any business evil more acceptable. It really is about the individual, the leader, manager and how far they are willing to go in ensuring that business does both- provide a living but doing no harm at all...or at least as far as possible.

I think it's more a question of knowledge than of evil. People taking the loans were ignorant in what they were getting into; people on the other side were also ignorant of the consequences of this type of deals. Everybody was overly optimistic. Now we are all losers.