I just won't put profit for shareholders into an "ethical concern" bucket, but a legal one.
Worth noting that from a legal perspective unless a company is acting both truly perversely and failing to pay out to shareholders it rarely is a legal issue (i.e. if the company leadership decides to burn the company to the ground and funnel the profits to shareholders it's very unlikely they'll get sued - if they do the same and funnel the profits solely to management, they definitely will). There's a common myth that companies are required, legally, to "maximize shareholder profits" or the like, and indeed this myth is actively and intentionally spread by a lot of people who know better (including people at WSJ for god's sake! It's literally their job to know better! But WSJ is a ghastly rag these days, and has been for a couple of decades). There are companies who have that in their charter, but most have vastly more mild and flexible verbiage, if anything.
What it actually tends to be if a company is publicly traded is a
practical issue.
Often, behaving ethically towards shareholders will cause people to sell your shares, because many and in some cases most shareholders are interested solely in short-term profits and absolutely nothing else. Which if you're publicly-traded, gives you a huge problem.
I question whether it is possible for a publicly-traded company to act in a truly ethical way in the longer-term, simply because sooner or later, the ethical approach and the need to convince flighty, short-termist shareholders/investors to not take their money away will conflict too much. We've seen this countless times with companies that are, by all accounts, on-book and real-terms successful/profitable, but that make a decision that lessens short-term shareholder gains, and then boom they plunge by 25%, 40%, even 80% or more. These aren't bad companies, but looking at long-term success can be hugely costly.
