If you truly care about for-profit companies’ ability to create social benefits, then perhaps you should try to distill what’s useful in our paper, “The Single Bottom Line,” rather than caricaturing it.

For example, the paper clearly acknowledges that it’s impractical for any executive to have an infinite time horizon. The very next line is the following:

“To be sure, most companies have limited time and resources for making decisions, so they cannot handicap every potential risk and opportunity that may arise between now and the end of time.”

The paper also recognizes that some companies may wish to engage in philanthropy without any view to how it might contribute to their own bottom lines. These are not profit-maximizing companies, so they should have (at least tacit) shareholder approval for deciding to pursue multiple objectives at the expense of profits.

We think that using the single bottom line with a long (not infinite) time horizon will actually encourage profit-maximizing companies to invest in more social initiatives, since they’ll see how those initiatives can help their profitability in the long term.

Best regards,
Daniel Altman

Applied to a moral dilemma, let’s say my boss commits a crime and I have proof. I should NOT turn him in because to do so would lower my profit and reduce my ability to volunteer by disrupting my job and cash flow.

The crime is already done, after all, so surely society profits more by my not turning him in. And what of my poor co-workers and their families?

Sounds like Wall Street Logic to me!

Quid pro quo.