Doing the right thing?

Is the term "corporate ethics" oxymoronic? A friend of mine was just laid off from a position with a NYSE traded company after years of service that went way above and beyond the call of duty. The news was delivered by telephone in the middle of a business trip while my friend was far away from any familial support system. The company had enjoyed the benefits of her considerable intellect, her total loyalty and her willingness to work hundred hour plus weeks during which she accomplished what a team of people could not do in a similar time frame. The abilities she had demonstrated over the years had led them to press her to relocate half way across the country to take on a project that no one else could manage and that was so fouled up it appeared beyond salvation. Is loyalty a one way street where the traffic is controlled only by dollars signs and decimal points?

I was reading a couple of speeches delivered by novelist Pat Conroy yesterday in which he mentioned people who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing. Conroy himself paid for Shannon Faulkner's undergraduate education after she left the Citadel. He did it, according to him, as a kind of penance for the shabby treatment she had experienced at his alma mater as the first woman to be admitted. 

Last weekend I watched a movie called "Radio" where Ed Harris played the role of a man who did the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do. When asked by his school principal why he had taken a young black man played by Cuba Gooding under his wing, he said simply that it had seemed like the right thing to do. It was a dramatization of a true story so it wasn't entirely fictional.

Are corporations losing their ability to make these kinds of ethical decisions? Does the term "best practices" now mean only "what's most expedient for the company and the decision makers"?  Maybe I don't understand enough about business and maybe I'm too naive to accept that there are tough decisions that a business must make. I've always been a bit of an idealist though and I hope I never become calloused to the point that I believe that the means justify the ends.