Are Business Ethics & Profit Maximization Compatible?

1416 Words6 Pages
In today’s world, the drive for running a business is the pursuit of profit such that the revenues attained by the business from the sale of goods and services are always more than the cost of producing and selling them. However, profit maximization alone should not be a business’s aim. They also need to consider promoting desirable sociable ends, i.e., focus on corporate social responsibility and finer aspects of business. This is where business ethics comes into work. When we refer to the term business ethics, we talk about how individuals and business organizations should conduct themselves in the world of business. It involves examining their actions and how it affects others in the society, i.e., the consumers, employees, investors, suppliers and the government. However, profit maximization as a business’s primary goal has been viewed with suspicion when seen from the business ethics point of view, being either immoral or unjust since it often discards a business’s social responsibility towards its community. Therefore, this leads us to the issue at hand as to whether business ethics and profit maximization are compatible. It is often believed that business ethics and profit maximization are at odds, and that they do not complement each other. Since profit maximization is the primary purpose of a business, other moral goals that a business is legally obliged to accomplish are often not performed. In the book Commerce and Morality, Milton Friedman’s fundamentalist theory of social responsibility supports this claim. Friedman, a Noble prize winner in economics believes that in a capitalist economy, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”, i.e., within the framework of the law. According to Friedman, rather than
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