You're touching on some very well-trodden lines of thinking. It's the distinction between thinking of a situation as "morals aside, here's what's happening" and thinking of a situation as "high road and low road lead to the same place, but one is clearly better." This distinction and the conflation of the two perspectives is why Machiavelli has a bad name.
Uber isn't inherently "evil" to the extent that its product and mission aren't clearly one way or another morally.
But based on Ms. Fowler's blog post and the information that has come out afterwards, Uber has systematically done immoral things by creating a culture clearly hostile to women. And they knew about it and did nothing about it. In that sense, yes, they are being evil.
In the long run, maybe this isn't enough to sink the Uber ship. Maybe keeping the brilliant jerks around was actually the right decision from a business standpoint. That doesn't stop Uber from being evil, it just means that they succeeded in the amoral sense. But you also can't draw any conclusions about whether neglecting HR was or wasn't advantageous, because there are too many factors at play.
So at the end of the day, we make a value judgement that women should be treated equitably regardless of the situation (within sensible bounds), and Uber seems to have done the opposite in many big ways.
Uber isn't inherently "evil" to the extent that its product and mission aren't clearly one way or another morally.
But based on Ms. Fowler's blog post and the information that has come out afterwards, Uber has systematically done immoral things by creating a culture clearly hostile to women. And they knew about it and did nothing about it. In that sense, yes, they are being evil.
In the long run, maybe this isn't enough to sink the Uber ship. Maybe keeping the brilliant jerks around was actually the right decision from a business standpoint. That doesn't stop Uber from being evil, it just means that they succeeded in the amoral sense. But you also can't draw any conclusions about whether neglecting HR was or wasn't advantageous, because there are too many factors at play.
So at the end of the day, we make a value judgement that women should be treated equitably regardless of the situation (within sensible bounds), and Uber seems to have done the opposite in many big ways.