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Desrtopa comments on Is ruthlessness in business executives ever useful? - Less Wrong
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I chose a somewhat misleading title deliberately, although I can understand if people take issue with that. As I acknowledged in the post itself, it's clear that ruthlessness can be useful from the perspective of individual companies. From the perspective of a person judging their value to society, it's not so clear that ruthless business executives are useful. Their competitive advantage may lie purely in allowing them to make decisions that are in the company's interest, but not the public interest.
Where is the incentive for them to consider the public interest, save for insofar as it is the same as the company interest?
It sounds like you think there is a problem: that executives being ruthless is not necessarily beneficial for society as a whole. But I don't think that's the root problem. Even if you got rid of all of the ruthless executives and replaced them with competitive-yet-conscientious executives, the pressures that creates and nurtures ruthless executives would still be in place. There are ruthless executives because the environment favors them in many circumstances.
I'm not arguing that the core of the problem is that business executives are too ruthless. But I do suspect that to the extent that the current system rewards ruthlessness, it may be purely or almost purely due to ways in which it deviates from a system that offers no perverse incentives from a societal perspective.