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> You can only be as ethical as your board allows

Personal integrity is something you control for yourself. Nobody "allows" you to have it. If we still taught this and more people lived by it, we'd have a lot fewer problems.

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You're misunderstanding the point, a CEO's control of the company is contingent on the boards approval. Yes, of course you can hold the standard for yourself, but you serve at the pleasure of the board and investors. The system selects for amorality because the incentive is profit. I agree with your statement in general, but even if 95% of people live by that rule, there still is systematic pressure to select CEOs out of the other 5%, because then 401k go up (including yours and mine).

We should expect personal integrity from board members and investors as well. This is a social problem, and a very old one. The solutions that worked best (religion/morality codes or laws) are not popular today.

When have religion and "morality codes" meaningfully constrained elites? I can't think of an elite caste anywhere in history that is really even close to what a rational observer would call "moral". Yes, certain things are verboten in a given moral code (usury, for example), but elites either outsource it (e.g. to a "court Jew") or just do other evil stuff that isn't addressed in the code (and won't be, since they are the elites and therefore control things like that).

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