Saying that all ethics must be obstructions commerce is a pretty extreme view, that I really can’t see any justification for. An economy is nothing more than the sum of decisions made by the individuals that comprise it. I’m pretty sure the only way anybody could hold such a view would be to view all decisions they disagree with as unethical. Which is an opinion, I guess...
I'm not saying all ethics is against commerce, though I can't think of an ethical rule for which I couldn't construct a situation, in which breaking it is profitable. What I am claiming, though, is that the market strives to extract profit from everything that's possible, and that it will break every ethical rule that can be broken for profit in absence of very strong controls against that.
It's not about what I personally view as ethical or not[0]; here I'm talking about the market as if it was a fire. You don't act surprised that fire will burn everything combustible it can get to.
As for "no more than sum of decisions", I disagree. Economic forces are way more powerful than any individual or group of individuals. Individuals reacting to them in aggregate give rise to behavior that's - to my current belief - best described as amoral, profit-seeking, non-human entities, essentially the closest humanity got to creating an AI.
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[0] - if we go there, I hold that most advertising is deeply unethical.
I mean this is really just a substanceless metaphor that you’ve come up with. Your definition of economics is also just flat out wrong. Economies are comprised entirely of economic actors interacting with each other. Every economic agent is either a human being, or a collection of human beings. There are no non-human economic agents, and there are no human non-economic-agents.
By mentioning large bureaucratic structures like corporation and calling them "non-human actors", I wanted to focus your attention on the fact that behavior of a group of people working together, cooperating and competing with other such groups of people, is not well-predicted by looking at behavior of each individual involved. Much like you don't reason about a computer system by looking at what each transistor and resistor does - instead, you look at aggregates as a unit (CPU, power converter, ...), at aggregate's behavior (firmware) as modulated by the information and energy flow within the system.
I'd say it's systems thinking 101 - the behavior of the system is nothing like the behavior of individual components, and is defined primarily by the interactions that happen.
That’s simply not true. Large organisations of people have decision makers, and their decisions can be predicted just as well as anybody else’s. Perhaps your confusion lies in the fact that in an organisation, not everybody is going to have equal influence over decisions, therefor your suggestion that every individual be accounted for in such predictions is pointless.
Perhaps. But I feel you're overestimating just how much choice the decision makers have. The interactions between an organization and the rest of the market severely constrain the space of choices available to decision makers, and there may very well be no good/ethical course of action available to them (except resigning and passing the choice to someone else, which isn't an attractive option either).