If an organization is chartered to produce profits, than any moral or ethical considerations made by that organization are in violation of their charter, in violation of the organization’s fundamental principle.

If it is more profitable to produce pollution than to not produce pollution, than a for-profit corporation is obliged by charter to produce pollution.

What’s more, I suspect that the for-profit corporate system produces an emergent system which enforces exactly this, and enforces it primarily for rate of profit generation (read: the short term).

Organizations which exist to produce profit are going to attract the capital of people who are primarily interested in producing profit. These ‘for-profit’ individuals can be expected to employ their shares to enforce the corporation’s charter, to produce optimal profits without consideration. Their firms will then produce more profits, returning them more capital with which they will invest in more firms.

In such a scenario, these ‘for-profit’ individuals can be expected to outcompete other individuals who would exercise moral or ethical considerations with their shares, becoming wealthier, faster and ultimately coming to dominate any given industry, enforcing a lack of ethics on each of them.

I disagree with friedman myself for three reasons(at least).

Firstly Basic rules of society constantly change/fall behind as technological capability increases so new business avenues provide oppurtunities to make profit which do not break “basic rules” but still cause massive harm. IBM for example used telecommunications to secretly operate a shell company called Dehomag in Nazi germany, turning a massive profit but aiding the nazis in a variety of ways.

Secondly Friedman claims that his hypothesis works in a “free” society.

two problems with this.

One. freedom is an illusion wrought by modern democracies to placate their populaces, many larger corporations in fact control the lives of people who live in the societies they operate within much more than those people’s governments while turning a morally acceptable profit.

Thirdly. Globalisation which was growing in friedman’s day has expanded the moral obligation of larger corporate from just the borders of a single state.
Company profits in one country which bring so much to the shareholder at the expense of sweatshop labour or ecological disaster in another country are at best a moral nullity and a worst crimes against humanity.

We cannot eat money.

If we continue to blunder blindly ahead we will destroy this world.

Profit as a sole moral compass in business is morally abhorrent today and it was morally abhorrent in friedman’s time.

terrible write

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in essence.. it works out for everyone.. if they all do their job..

where it fails is if the business pushes out crap.. the media reporting is crap.. and the consumers don’t read papers or news outlets.. that is a bad day.