What are the motivations for companies to be ethical?

to be or not to be ethical

Being ethical is not profitable and not easy to implement. Sometimes as Rumman Chowdhury mentioned you have to come up with positive values and metrics that help the company understand that being ethical is aligned with the company’s interests. However, not always the positive metrics and values are easy to measure or implement. So companies do their minimum efforts to satisfy enough of the requirements. And usually the minimum effort is not enough for the public. (You can see the minimum effort even from the presentation slides!)

This problem does not stop with companies, they also exist at the governments level. Countries still struggle with laws that are not ethical and harm the people while making profits for conglomerates. We are still struggling to come up with laws to stop the climate change. So when governments cannot implement ethical laws, how can we expect companies to follow ethics? For example, we saw how Facebook got away with its unethical data practices. What would be the motivation for smaller companies to be ethical?

This reminded me of the Silicon Valley series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ