Profits are bad when they exist due to unethical cost cutting. Profits are bad when they artificially lower the cost of the good by exporting the costs to other people.

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.

If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.

If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.

You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.

In other words, profits are bad when they necessitate some threshold of negative externalities.

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, the use of slave labor is bad.

The profit is not the problem. It wouldn't be any better if the company made no profit.

This is a distinction unworthy of merit. The slave labor creates the profit. The only reason it exists is because of the profit.

On the contrary, it will be an incentive to stop.

Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.

In the narrow sense it’s good. It’s an optimization function, yes. With a wider lens it leads to problems that are just lumped into the big pile of things called Externalities. One of which is ecological collapse. Or just climate change if that sounds too drastic.

Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.

So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).

Actually economic profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. Demand is what tells you that you’re selling something of value. Extended profits mean competition hasn’t caught up yet. It has nothing to do with good or bad. If there is profit to be made in a market, firms will enter until it reaches an equilibrium where profit is 0, then when it becomes overcrowded and firms are losing money, they leave the market. This is why anticompetitive business practices are so successful at generating profits, and at the same time are so horribly bad for the free market. In an efficient market, profits converge towards zero.

"economic profit" is a different concept. non-profits, the topic of this discussion, are defined as not allowed to make "accounting profit"

Profit has two commonly used meanings. One is basically revenues minus expenses, and is essentially a measure of how successfully the company is operating.

But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.

Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.