This is false. Companies are made of people. They're not machines, they're organizations of people. There is no "business ethics" there's just ethics. People in leadership positions can take actions that aren't always in the interest of short term profit maximization, and will not get fired for it, so long as these actions are vaguely aligned to the long term health of the organization.

One might suggest that encouraging freedom / democracy is in the long run health of all for-profit companies. I haven't seen any boards or shareholder activists argue against this yet.

>Companies are made of people.

That is "technically correct" but meaningless in practice. It's like saying that people are just a collection of molecules. While technically not wrong, humans are of course more than the sum of its parts. The collection of molecules, arranged in a certain way, exhibits emergent behaviour; it will seek food or have intelligent thoughts, which molecules individually can't be said to do.

Likewise, companies as institutions are more than the sum of their people, and will display behaviour that cannot be fully explained by looking at their people individually, and this has very much real consequences. Like a nation is more than a collection of people, and this fact has consequences on the real world.

It is not meaningless in practice. I can agree it is insufficient and that groups lead to emergent behavior. But it is meaningful to note that the individual components of an organization have free will and potentially a sense of ethics/morality.

Each company has different behaviors, some broadly can be assumed, like, a company won’t usually want to deliberately destroy or bankrupt itself (there have been exceptions to this!). Others will contribute greatly to social or environmental programs that directly hurt short term profits. how they get to those decisions is complex and requires strategy, execution, leadership, etc. Not something so 19th century as “profit maximization”

My original post was to state that’s it is false to suggest that a company is always a profit-maximizing amoral machine. People aren’t machines and The emergent behavior of any given corporation rarely is “Profit maximization”. It is sort of like saying the emergent behavior of a sports team is “point maximization”. It is meaningless and not true.

I generally agree and think this is a very helpful perspective. It's too much to expect companies to choose ethics over profit, even if the companies are temporarily made up of ethical people -- these are mere components. (Hence the goal of governments/regulations should be to align profit-making with societal goals.)

>It's too much to expect companies to choose ethics over profit, even if the companies are temporarily made up of ethical people -- these are mere components.

What's with the apologist mindset there?

If you can't hold a group of people accountable for ethical conduct, from whence comes the idea that singular actors should be regulatable by traditional justice systems?

Corporations were intended to distribute risk to enable collective groups to attempt something which none individually could have hoped to do without a significant chance of losing everything.

They were not intended as a bulwark through which to engage in ethically dubious behavior in search of profit. Profit is not a right. Merely a happy byproduct of a job well done.

Ethical behavior, and actually performing a valuable service for the society hosting the corporation is the primary goal. Not profit generation.

The sheer bullheaded insistence that profit is the be all end all of human activity needs to die.

Thanks for the post, I strongly agree with your points and may have stated mine badly. I am purely stating a descriptive view of how the world works. My conclusion is that we cannot just sit back and hope companies will act ethically. We have to actively shape the rules to incentivize or require them to do so.