In a situation where it doesn’t happen this way, the ethics team grows in power and staffing over time until it destroys the company, because ultimately all commercial activity can be construed as less than perfectly ethical at some level, or it morphs into an elaborate legalese department that masks unethical practices in a cloak of justification.

Either way, you need third party regulation and then a department dedicated to ethical compliance, or you end up with corporate cancer.

I say this as a person with a knee-jerk anti-regulation reflex.