I once had a conversation with a manager at a fairly famous software company that I was working for. I asked, "Is it an imperative for us to make as much money as possible, no matter the ethics". He answered in the affirmative. I followed up with: "Then why aren't we selling drugs?" Interestingly, he understood what I meant.

It's easy to say that you won't sell heroine to addicts, you won't murder people, you won't poison entire cities because we sell software. But we don't have to sell software. There is no law saying that although we are a software organisation that we can't do something else if it made us more money. So why are we selling software? We've already arbitrarily built this wall of ethics around ourselves. You're lying to yourself if you say that "We need to do whatever is necessary to make more money". The reality is that we need to do what ever is necessary to make money within the boundaries that we have set for our company -- and those boundaries are whatever we want them to be. We choose.

It was interesting, because after I explained this to the manager, he was a lot happier. I honestly think he originally felt that he had no choice but to do horrible things. It was his job to optimise for profit at the expense of everything else. I don't think he wanted that job.