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I worked as vice president for a corporation for 2 years. In the real world. By the time I had left, we had consistently given 10% of our profits back into our community without fail. We supported a tee ball team, we donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (I know someone who works there), and we hosted free community food drives for local shelters. Guess what? It was easy. It took almost no management, it ended up being a boon to community relations, and I slept like a baby knowing I was doing good.
One could make the argument that the dollars we spent had value in customer relations and community relations, but frankly those considerations should be secondary. I should have to make the case for $$ to my boss in order to justify doing the right thing. We had two great years where profits soared and all of the employees, myself included, had fair salaries and hourly wages. We helped kids learn teamwork and to learn excellent exercise skills, we helped people who may not have eaten eat, and we could have helped to cure Parkinson's.
BTW, ethics aren't relative. People are able to bend or break their ethics when they allow greed to tempt them away from doing the right thing. This is going to sound despicably self centered, but the world would operate better if corporations were run by people like me. Profits may not be as high, but lives would be saved or at least extended. Since the introduction of the first AIDS medicine into Thailand, AIDS has dropped 70%! Can you imagine that number in Africa?
With Abbott, when they heard that the patent was going to be broken, they pulled arthritis, blood pressure and even AIDS medicines from the Thai market. That's not valuing the dollar, that's an act of vengeance. It would be easy to say that Abbott was afraid that they were worried that their other patents would be broken, but why would a government need to break a patent on arthritis medication?
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