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Originally Posted by willravel
Business ethics dictate that a company has an obligation to make moral decisions.
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Business ethics dictates nothing of the sort. A company's first and foremost obligation is to turn a profit. Period. It also needs to follow the law. Ethics dictates that the company must make the moral decision in light of those two rules.
Pan made a very good point about greed, and I think that my earlier post highlights some of his points fairly well (although I'll disagree that this is a recent phenomenon - there are lots of examples from the 1800's). When people get greedy (and they ALWAYS do at some point, with no exceptions), the company and employees suffer. In some cases, the entire community suffers. The ethical decision for the pharmaceutical manufacturers comes in reducing the price, not offering it for free. If the Thai government were serious, they try to negotiate bulk discounts or possibly team up with neighboring governments to negotiate as a group.
In the free market system, companies have a right and an obligation to make a profit. Roachboy may not like it, but it is the system in place and will almost certainly be so throughout all of our lifetimes. As such, there's little reason to discuss any radical changes. If "harming society" (whatever that means) will both make the company a profit and not injury the company short- or long-term, then there's no ethical reason for the company not to chose that course of action. However, I can't really imagine how inflicting societal harm could ever be at best a neutral for a company, so it's hard to imagine how the company would make that kind of decision. However, not all companies behave ethically and some do things that are bad for themselves in the long run, espeically when those things come to the attention of the greater public. Enron is one of the classic examples, and they made a lot of money in the short term over the power crises in California, only to have those choices come back to kill the company in the end.