Some things are just cyclical.  For instance, every year I get that email that claims that Bill Gates will send me money if I forward the email to 10 people as part of some test of email tracking systems.  I usually try to respond to the sender with the article about it from Snopes, because for some reason, my word that it's fake doesn't seem to be enough.  But despite my best efforts, the following year I'll still get that email from someone.  Likewise, whenever there is some sort of economic crisis where business ethics is involved, someone will try to shame business by applying poor ethical arguments to how they should be run:

As the Wall Street and Washington crime families loot banks, real estate, insurance, etc. it is a good time to ask what the purpose of business is. I love to ask this of my students.

The usual student response is: "The purpose of business is to make money." If all you want to do is to make money, join the Mafia. Colombian drug cartels work here too.

For ethical reasons, I prefer the answer of Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005): "The purpose of business is to create jobs." Money is simply a means to this end, not an end in itself.
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Drucker’s cure is to understand and refocus on the purpose of business – to create and preserve jobs that support lives and families. Whatever undermines this gets outlawed.

It's a comforting argument.  After all, who doesn't like to create jobs?  But then, if we start to outlaw anything that undermines this, we end up with some strange decisions to make.  Should automobile robots be outlawed because it displaces UAW members?  Should the automatic train braking systems have been outlawed, since it put railroad brakemen out of a job?  The former made cars cheaper, and the latter certainly put an end to potentially the most dangerous job in the nation at the time.  I could go on and on, but hopefully you get my point.

But instead of trying to recreate the wheel here, I'll simply point you over to the man who best explained it more than 30 years ago... Milton Friedman:

When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system," I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free en­terprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers. In fact they are–or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously–preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. Busi­nessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

He goes on into much more detail, so if you've never read it, I suggest you take the time.  I like to keep a bookmark to this article... because it seems like once a year, someone tries to incorrectly talk about the particular ethics of running a business... kind of like Bill Gates sending me money for forwarding an email.