Enabling corporate immorality: Understanding administrative evil through Better Off Ted

Abstract

Even where corporations actively engage in unquestionably immoral behaviour, the vast majority of their employees are often morally good people. When moral people produce significantly immoral results simply by doing their jobs, we call it ‘administrative evil’. Administrative evil is humorously, but revealingly presented in Better Off Ted (2009–10). Through Better Off Ted, we learn how administrative evil derives in large part from bureaucratic structures that facilitate moral employees into thinking of both their companies and their own identities in fashions that distance their labour from the products of their work. These bureaucratic systems encourage employees to view themselves as constructive and valuable workers, while seeing their companies as incompetent organizations that are merely performing immoral acts by mistake. Through realistic, fleshed-out examples, Better Off Ted enables us to understand how corporations use bureaucracy to constrain the moral senses of its employees, who follow seemingly dumb rules that just happen to lead to inherently immoral, but consistently profitable results.