The Ethics of Money

If your profession comes anywhere near the subject of Business, you’re going to have to get used to the idea of people ragging on you as a mercenary, a robber baron, an evil captain of industry, or just someone whose only connection to ethical behavior was a two-day seminar you took during MBA school – assuming that you weren’t out sick those days. Unlike such noble professions as a Doctor (healing the sick and reducing human suffering!) or a Teacher (fighting ignorance, illiteracy, and bad penmanship!) or a Peace Officer (fighting crime and defending our society!) or even a Lawyer (defending the innocent, punishing the guilty, and driving a really nice car!) most people seem to feel that there’s something wrong, evil, or at least ignoble about a career in business. I mean, we’re just dedicating ourselves to the pursuit of filthy money, aren’t we? What’s good or noble about that?

Well, as previously noted in this space, a successful company isn’t just an engine for putting huge amounts of money into the CEO’s pockets. A good company provides jobs for hundreds or even thousands of ordinary people, as well as all of the people who sell anything to those employees, including houses, cars, food, energy and personal items. A lot of companies also have charity programs that support the local Red Cross or United Way or similar agencies, but even without such support the company’s tax payments will also support the state and local governments, contributing to such non-trivial aspects of the local quality of life as roads, schools, police and fire coverage, and social programs. All across America you can find towns based around a single large factory that employs half of the community directly and most of the rest of it indirectly, as well as paying for all of the local services. And increasingly, tragically, you can find remnants of towns, now little more than ghost towns, where the plant has closed and the former residents have been forced to give up the lives they loved and move away…

Then too, we should consider all of the new technologies and products that have been produced by for-profit companies over the past few centuries. It’s probably true that most of the new science is discovered by pure empirical research, but the application of those new discoveries is usually left to private companies and their R&D sections, and without that basic profit motive most of the comforts we take for granted in modern life, from electric lights and telephones to plasma-screen televisions and laptop computers, would not exist. There would be fewer types of fabric for clothing, fewer types of food (and less of them available), less convenient transportation (and less of that available), less comfortable houses and offices, and even fewer medications (and far higher prices on the ones that exist) if not for those money-grubbing companies that make their living producing these things…

One could argue, I supposed, that capitalism and for-profit companies aren’t necessary to produce all of these things, but history has already provided some hair-raising rebuttals in Soviet-era Russia, contemporary Cuba, and parts of China that are generally kept away from international scrutiny. There are other ways to motivate people to perform and companies to produce, but none of them have ever worked in both large-scale and long-term operations. Until such time as a post-scarcity economy arrives (and the jury is still out as to whether that will be a blessing or a curse), the only practical way to generate the things we want seems to be paying for them – and for that you’re going to need for-profit businesses and the people who run them…

Now, to be sure, no one is claiming that making money is a holy crusade, or that the people who want to do that are a bunch of saints. But I would argue that even if the world won’t be a better place tomorrow because we made a lot of money today, it won’t be a better place if we just sit here and starve, either. In fact, if we accept that business gives millions (or hundreds of millions) of people the chance to live good and comfortable lifestyles, drives the development of new science and technology, supports education and the arts, and contributes to the sort of life that most people actually want to live, it’s hard to say what is actually evil or even wrong about the business sector…

It’s worth thinking about…