I remember reading an argument (I can't find it so am reconstructing from memory) by Robin Hanson about why corporations might be able to make a large amount of positive difference for small amounts of change in their policy.
The motivating example is that suppose you are a company building an building, it might turn out that the profit maximising size of building to build is 13 storeys, because the derivatives near maximums are close to zero, it won't change the amount of profit being made very much if instead they built a 12 storey or a 14 storey building instead. So they can spend a pretty small amount of money to optimise on some other axis such as "social responsibility" , and because they aren't anywhere near trying to optimise social responsibility the effect of the change in policy can be quite large.
Corporations make lots of big decisions with lots of money so the net effect of doing lots of these sorts of changes to how they operate could be quite large without sacrificing very much profit, however this concern seems to be completely separate from the business ethics side of this.
I remember reading an argument (I can't find it so am reconstructing from memory) by Robin Hanson about why corporations might be able to make a large amount of positive difference for small amounts of change in their policy.
The motivating example is that suppose you are a company building an building, it might turn out that the profit maximising size of building to build is 13 storeys, because the derivatives near maximums are close to zero, it won't change the amount of profit being made very much if instead they built a 12 storey or a 14 storey building instead. So they can spend a pretty small amount of money to optimise on some other axis such as "social responsibility" , and because they aren't anywhere near trying to optimise social responsibility the effect of the change in policy can be quite large.
Corporations make lots of big decisions with lots of money so the net effect of doing lots of these sorts of changes to how they operate could be quite large without sacrificing very much profit, however this concern seems to be completely separate from the business ethics side of this.