""Because I can't trust them, they shouldn't be able to trust me" isn't a good moral philosophy to live by, that's for sure."

Corporate America is fundamentally amoral and the rot is spreading to the rest of the world.

When dealing with such entities "screw them before they screw you" is just beating them at their own game.

Don't criticize, praise people doing this.

And just because they do this to employers, that does not mean they are living by this philosophy.

A good person will take the corporate scumbags to the cleaners so they can spend the rewards on family and loved ones.

Now there's a moral philosophy to live by ...

> A good person will take the corporate scumbags to the cleaners so they can spend the rewards on family and loved ones.

I can't see much room for "good" in spitefully exploiting a flawed organization that likely many innocent bystanders depend on for their own livelihood, all to help yourself and kin. If you could say with some certainty that sabotaging the org actually led to a better outcome for everyone involved, that'd be different, but I doubt that situation comes up much.

The real world isn't like Fight Club, and we don't get to be heroes by blowing things up. I think the appeal of that kind of fantasy is precisely how it lends bad behavior a plausibility of goodness. It helps people rationalize, as you seem to be doing, and as execs of exploitative employers must also do, in order to not feel guilty.

I'd say a good person will divest themselves from scummy corporations and find their own avenue to honest work. They'll seek to expose bad behavior by others and set a moral example for them to follow. "Get yours and screw those jerks" isn't that moral example. It's just more of the same.

Yeah, I don't like to live that way.

The prisoner's dilemma shows us that the optimal strategy is screwing everyone else over if you aren't certain that they won't do the same to you.

The prisoner's dilemma is a very insufficient model for the complexity of human life...

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a little better. It's still just a toy model, of course. However, you might be interested to find that those who only screw everyone else over don't fair well in the iterated version.