&gt; Whether or not businesses have a concept of &#x27;ethics&#x27;, they can be forced to act as if they do, which amounts to essentially the same thing.<p>Ah excellent point!  But your hypothetical offers an external market correcting force.  Another external market force would be government regulation (take for example the recent government laws forcing retirement investors to put their clients first).<p>The lines get pretty gray when you try to figure out what should be considered part of the market and what should be considered external to it.  Personally, I would consider public perception outside of a traditional &quot;market&quot; model...but like I said, I am by no means an economist.<p>I also wanted to mention that most companies think in the short run and therefore often make self-harmful decisions to themselves.  This relates to your comment:<p>&gt; ...pricing in the risk-adjusted expected future costs?<p>Companies can only sell products to people that can afford them, so by keeping wages low, they are actually pricing themselves out of the market.  A classic and oft referenced counter-example to this is when Henry Ford payed his factory workers well-enough that they could afford to buy the cars they were assembling.<p>Anyways, I obviously like to philosophize about economics far too much and don&#x27;t want to bore anyone :)  I am also NOT an economist so I have a rather limited perspective.