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What are the best examples of companies trying to do harm mitigation in a harmful industry and actually being roughly correct (morally) in their theses?
The only relatively clear and robust example I'm aware of is vaping (and ChatGPT essentially got the same answer[1] when I asked it this question, unprompted). The case seems conceptually and quantitiatively straightforward:
the thing that's most addictive in smoking is nicotine
the vast majority of bad health outcomes (like 10x) in smoking comes from the smoking not the nicotine
if you can get more people to switch from smoking nicotine to vaping it this is net positive even if some non-smokers become addicted to vaping in the process. Or if vaping is sometimes a gateway drug to smoking. The ratios have to be really dramatic for this to turn out net harmful.
the existing tobacco companies have relatively little incentive to switching to vaping since it cuts into their normal profits
as a new entrant you can specialize/market-segment in a way that cuts into their customer base, without strong investor or internal pressure to expand into more harmful tobacco products.
I note that analogues of this is mostly untrue for most other forms of harm mitigation in a harmful industry (say sports gambling, factory farming, weapons design, AI, etc) nor do I see either conceptual arguments or evidence from observed behavior nearly as strong.
Corporate campaigns to ban the worst practices like battery cages as well as new tech to improve factory farming also counts, and while the factory farm industry is nowhere near towards abolition, the suffering of animals has decreased (at least relative to the most likely counterfactuals where EAs never existed)
It admittedly is a much smaller win, but it is a win here.
True though most of that came from the activist and political layers right? I'm more optimistic about incrementalist solutions from government or mass outcry than from a company, think the track record from gov't and societal solutions is overall better (though with many backfires too, of course).