With this confounding issue aside, what can we say about the instrumental approach? There are, we believe, two major problems with that line of thought, a practical and a more principled. The practical problem is that an instrumental approach might be unstable, at least in the longer run. If a company only invests resources in CSR-programs and only “behaves ethically” if it is indeed profitable, and backs out whenever long term maximizing of profits are seen to be undermined by doing so, then stakeholders such as customers, employees and policy-makers are
likely to be alienated. Of course, a clever instrumental approach might take this into
consideration. But the stability of such a line of thought depends ultimately on the same happy coincidence between morality and profits that is unlikely to hold for hybrid theories. The more principled problem is that is becomes hard to envisage what should legitimize the instrumental approach: since moral arguments cannot underpin it (remember, that the Friedman position rests on a moral argument), what could? With reference to what could corporations argue that their profit is the only things that matters in principle, without reference to some ethical background theory? See, however, the final discussion in this article.