Obvious example: selling cigarettes.
The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. [...] Cigarettes cause about one death per million smoked³⁵ with a latency of about 25 years, which is why the 6 trillion smoked in 1990 will cause about 6 million deaths in 2015. [...] One-third or one-quarter of those deaths will be from lung cancer; about one every 15 or 20 s. [...] Cigarette companies make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, or about US$10 000 for every million cigarettes purchased. Since there is one death for every million cigarettes sold (or smoked), a tobacco manufacturer will make about US$10 000 for every death caused by their products.
Presumably there are even worse legal ways to make a profit, but this sets a nicely unambiguous lower bound, I think.
Enjoy it? Or want it because they're addicted? What we want and what we enjoy are not guaranteed to be aligned.
Gold mining. Adding marginal ounces of gold to world supply adds very little utility because gold can be pretty much endlessly reused and there is plenty of it around that has already been mined. Central banks of fiat currencies sit on many years supply for no particularly good reason. Meanwhile, the industry consumes $billions annually of real resources (like fossil fuels and capital equipment) and produce pollution and environmental damage.
One possibility is computer games, e.g. I've certainly lost a good chunk of hours to the game Diablo. Modern things like Farmville seem especially pernicious. [This is not to be construed as all gaming is bad, etc.]
I recently read Peter Leeson's paper, Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse, which argues that Somalia's government was so awful that anarchy was actually better in most of the ways we care about. It has an example of a profit-making enterprise with negative value:
Under government, a great deal of Somali production was military hardware that citizens did not consume. In fact, to the extent that this hardware was used to suppress the Somali population, this sizeable portion of pre-1991 GDP was actually negative value added from the perspective of citizens’ welfare
...
[Military spending] left few resources for investment in public goods, like education, health, or transportation infrastructure...[In 1990,] government spent less than one percent of GDP on economic and social services, while military and administration consumed 90 percent of the state’s total recurrent expenditure
So, weapons manufacturing for an evil regime seems like a candidate for effective malice.
Homeopathy and naturopathic health cures. The only argument for these is that they work as well as a placebo.
Cosmetics and jewelery. These are particularly expensive mate attraction and social standing boosters.
Lobbying for government handouts/boons/subsidies. These have the potential to have net utility, but in many cases do not.
Monopoly businesses. Net loss of utility through inefficiency.
And finally, an overarching overemphasis on reliability. By declaring that 'failure is not an option', we spend vastly more resources than if we were to simply acc...
Your question makes me think of what economists call negative externalities. Wikipedia has a list of them
The problem with vice-type industries like gambling, cigarettes, and junk food is that one can make a reasonable argument that the users are deriving some kind of utility from gambling, smoking, and stuffing their faces with Cheetos. How do you measure utility? If it's strictly in terms of WTP (willingness-to-pay), then vice doesn't seem to be such a good candidate, you need to look at industries where there is an element of force or fraud, but not so extreme that the industry is banned.
Also one needs to distinguish between utility at an individual level...
Zero-sum advertising for products like Coca-Cola, which are nearly indistinguishable from readily available substitutes?
Operating casinos? They're fairly harmless to most people, but gambling addiction has destroyed people's lives.
Getting governments to change laws to protect your profits. A classic example of this is taxi cartels, enforced by medallion systems - it's bad for cabbies, astonishingly bad for users, not great for new entrants to the system(and bankruptcy-inducing if they ever unwind the system), but the guys who paid a hundred bucks for a medallion in 1950 and sell them for half a million today earned a gargantuan profit for no good reason except regulatory capture.
How do you measure arms-race type goods? For example, the world would be better off without any nuclear weapons. However the world is made better off if several reasonable countries can obtain nuclear weapons to serve as deterrents to others using them.
A similar analysis exists for guns.
Not sure it's a useful question - whether it's financially profitable or not, harm is harm. Doing harm for political or personal reasons is no better than doing so for profit.
There's probably no industry that doesn't cause some harm. Certainly we can all agree that career politicians, teachers, and surgeons all get paid and cause harm to some.
The interconnected web of modern finance which produces a monetary and economic system which must expand exponentially or face instability. This causes us to in the course of avoiding short-term economic upset and recession on decadal timescales destroy our long-term prospects on millennial-plus timescales via incessant privatization of the commons into market systems, draining of irreplaceable resources such as fossil fuels soil fertility and ecosystem services from capital-analogues into one-time income boosts much more frequently than would otherwise o...
Hard to avoid being controversial: for-profit abortion firms.
I have better examples but it would be immoral to mention them.
This is an offshoot of a thread I made earlier, but which wasn't eliciting the sort of responses I'd hoped for.
So let me pose a clearer question with less potential to get people on watchlists.
What legal ways of making a profit are the most anti-altruistic, the most damaging to society, the opposite of effective altruism in result.
I am using utility loosely. The answers need not be given from a utilitarian perspective at all, but instead merely deal with any means of making a profit that seems to you clearly wretched, and such that the world would be better if nobody participated in it.
I'd also like to emphasize that these things should be legal. There are some obviously wretched illegal businesses that would top the list otherwise. If something is legal but only in a particular jurisdiction, then you should only discuss it within the context of the jurisdiction where it is legal.
If it's a grey area, go for it, but extra points for society-harming enterprises definitely legal in both the letter an the spirit of the law.
This is NOT about whether the enterprise in question should be illegal, just whether it causes a net loss of utility (deal with counterfactuals however you see fit).