This article from the Boston Globe talks about the idea that maximizing profits and shareholder value (which hypothetically is the present value of all future profits) is the sole function of a corporation.

Experts on the history of business say the Market Basket saga is a window onto something deeper than a power struggle among the Demoulas clan that owns it. They see it as emblematic of a war over the future of the American corporation—what its purpose is, how it should be run, and whom it should be engineered to benefit. They argue that maximizing profit and shareholder value—an approach to running companies that drives investment on Wall Street and serves as the closest thing to modern management gospel—is only one way of defining corporate success, and a fairly new one at that…

Post and others argue that a well-run company can—and should—be managed in a way that benefits not just the investors who own its stock, but a wide range of constituents. As opposed to “shareholders,” they call these people “stakeholders”: a group that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors, as well as the broader community in which the company operates, and even the country that it calls home. According to that view, Market Basket’s employees and customers are essential to the firm’s success and, thus, rightful beneficiaries of its prosperity.

It also links back to a 1970 Milton Friedman article in which he argued that it is unethical for a person employed by a corporation to try to be ethical on the company dime:

In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

The main problem I have with this is that the ownership of corporations is so diffuse these days that it is almost impossible for shareholders to exercise any sort of ethical control. Many shareholders are large institutions that collectively have no motives beyond the profit motive, even if individuals among them are ethical. No, the only way for society as a whole to behave ethically is for the vast majority of individuals to consciously act ethically every day – be they shareholders, employees, or customers. I don’t see that happening today.