I suppose it depends how you're defining evil. If you define it as knowingly commiting unethical or illegal actions simply for personal profit, then yes, they are evil. They have screwed over partners in the past, been fined for breaches in ethics and labor violations, tried to renege on contracts, as well as utilizing knowingly frivolous lawsuits that they would lose, but they have enough money to delay a verdict to the point that their opponent is driven to bankruptcy through legal fees (coincedently, this is a favored tactic used by banks to drive small business owners bankrupt).
If you define evil by drawing a line in the sand and saying that only certain especially harmful actions can count, then probably no, while an example of the typical big business, profit at any cost mentality, EA hasn't actually gone into the territory of directly killing other people through exploitation and willful negligence, and they haven't caused mass suffering on the scale of economic collapse and starvation.
So the answer depends entirely on where you draw the line on what's considered evil. Some people think that throwing the term around in any case except the most extreme, cheapens the concept of evil. Others believe that evil can be stratified into levels, so calling EA evil does not cheapen the much greater evils of larger companies and governments. In either case, EA's practices are still troubling at best, and grossly unethical at worst, so quibbling over the definition of evil and whether or not EA qualifies strikes me as a mostly useless argument that distracts us from the things EA should be rightly criticized for, whether we consider them evil or not
If you define evil by drawing a line in the sand and saying that only certain especially harmful actions can count, then probably no, while an example of the typical big business, profit at any cost mentality, EA hasn't actually gone into the territory of directly killing other people through exploitation and willful negligence, and they haven't caused mass suffering on the scale of economic collapse and starvation.
So the answer depends entirely on where you draw the line on what's considered evil. Some people think that throwing the term around in any case except the most extreme, cheapens the concept of evil. Others believe that evil can be stratified into levels, so calling EA evil does not cheapen the much greater evils of larger companies and governments. In either case, EA's practices are still troubling at best, and grossly unethical at worst, so quibbling over the definition of evil and whether or not EA qualifies strikes me as a mostly useless argument that distracts us from the things EA should be rightly criticized for, whether we consider them evil or not
