> companies are not bound by ethics or morality..... There are three mechanisms that can cause companies to prioritise ethics and morality. 1. The voting publ

> companies are not bound by ethics or morality..... There are three mechanisms that can cause companies to prioritise ethics and morality. 1. The voting public encourage their representatives to change the regulatory environment based on their morality. This is one reason why a whole host of unethical companies don't exist. Companies on the margins of morality suffer from extra risk that the regulatory environment will change too. 2. The customers exercising their personal morality are reluctant to buy from an unethical company, or boycott it, thus affecting the value of the company. 3. Key individuals find that there are moral and ethical limits to what they will do in pursuit of shareholder value, and they provide enough value in other ways that replacing them would be a net loss for the company (or activist shareholders actually share their views). Deliberately selecting your leadership team for poor ethics is likely to have some downsides too. > Individuals can have morals and ethics. If they control a company and choose to enforce their values through their company, well, that's their choice. But if the ownership of the company changed, so would the values. Exactly, and individually speaking, in my ethics, in role of voter, legislator, customer, shareholder, employee or executive of a company, morality and ethics certainly do play into my decisions. I believe that it is right that they should, and I expect the same of everyone. In particular, you say > [maximising value] is the extent of a company's moral obligation Which is an assertion without evidence that I simply disagree with. Maximising value might well be what is promised to the shareholders, but it's obvious that just as with all promises there is a context and limits to that. No shareholder would expect the CEO of a company to sacrifice their life if it would increase the value of the company by a cent. Everyone understands that the trust we have that the management of a company is trying to make money for the shareholder exists in a context, and one of the large parts of that context is morality. Your earlier statement almost seemed to imply that we shouldn't hold companies to standards of morality beyond the law, but that is just giving up. Expecting immoral behaviour from people in particular roles is a self fulfilling prophecy, and poisons the context.