"A company's job is to make as much profit as possible, and ethics can't be put on the balance sheet." What is wrong with that argument?
It quietly assumes that everything ethics is supposed to protect is somebody else's department — while treating business success as self-evidently good, which is itself a moral claim.
The objection has real force and shouldn't be waved away. Ethical obligations genuinely are hard to express in economic figures, and "what is the quantifiable value of ethics in business practice?" has no clean answer. But the argument smuggles in two moves that don't survive inspection:
- It claims the credit for the good side effects. Business success is defended by pointing to jobs, innovation, national prosperity and higher tax revenue — that is, by its consequences for society. But once you justify profit-seeking by its social consequences, you have accepted that social consequences are the relevant measure. You cannot then refuse to count the harmful ones.
- It outsources the bill. The provision of public goods and the redistribution of wealth get assigned to the state and civil society. That is a convenient division of labour: the company keeps the gains and hands the costs — environmental damage, exhausted employees, depleted resources — to a payer who never agreed to the deal.
So the honest version of the position is not "ethics is irrelevant to business" but "the ethical framework for business should be set by law and the state, and firms should optimise within it". That is a defensible stance — and a much narrower one, which immediately raises the question of what firms should do where the rules haven't caught up or aren't enforced.
Go deeper:
Stanford Encyclopedia: Business Ethics — the shareholder-versus-stakeholder debate this objection belongs to, argued properly on both sides.- Wikipedia: Business ethics — the field's overview, including how the profit objection has been answered historically.