IS PROFIT MORALLY NEUTRAL?

Profit. If you went around and asked a random person if profit was a good, bad, or neutral thing, they’d probably tell you that obviously profit is great. However, philosophers find that concept debatable. So, let’s get into it and see what people believe and why.

Profit is defined as the financial gain of a business when its revenue exceeds the costs in a specific period of time. For example, if a company spends $40K and gains $50K, the company’s profit would be $10K.

Now that we’ve gotten definitions out of the way, it’s time to discuss the 2 sides of the question. First, we’ll address the side that claims that profit is a neutral concept. Proponents of this belief believe that is simply a number as a result of a mathematical calculation that works as an efficiency metric for corporations. It can serve as an incentive and disincentive for investment and can help signal under or over usage of resources. This concept is pretty simple, so let’s move on to the idea that profit is not morally neutral.

Many argue that how the profit is obtained or what it signals and creates proves that profit cannot be morally neutral. For example, profit from steel industries in the early to mid 1900s were high–which seems positive–but were often as a result of major worker exploitation, including unethical labor hours, child labor, and wage inequality. This is why profit here is morally bad. Many also argue that profit is completely immoral because it is a privatized gain for the company itself and doesn’t always lead to a general benefit for society as a whole.

Kant, for example, would argue that profit is not morally neutral because the intentions behind actions that lead to the profit can be morally wrong. Rawls would inquire whether the profit was benefiting the least advantaged people of society–which many times is not the case–and would thus evaluate the morality of profit in that.

At first glance, I didn’t think that profit could be a moral or immoral concept either. Even now, the idea is still debatable. Is profit itself what is unethical, or is it the ways companies obtain profit. And, if the ways companies obtain profit are moral or immoral, is it fair to apply that morality to the profit itself?