MORAL PROFIT

For the next few articles, we’ll delve into the world of ethics in business. One very popular example is the philosophy of moral profit. The central idea of this philosophy is that profit should not be seen as a means to an end of a business, but rather an evidential prospect that shows a created value. In other words, profit is not to be seen as something that is extracted.

Let’s first discuss the roots of this philosophy. One root is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, which believes that true happiness comes through good virtue, not indulgence. This translates to moral profit as we can see that the profit isn’t something that is an end of a business of indulgence, but rather evidence, or virtue. Another philosophical root is Kant’s Moral Imperative. This philosophy says that you should never use something to be a means to an end, which similarly translates to moral profit by explaining that money isn’t a means to an end. Finally, we have the Modern Echo, which believes that capitalism should be conscious instead of, again, a means to an end.

These roots snowballed into the core principles of moral profit. One core idea is that value exceeds exchange; simply put, this means that economics are measured through philosophical transactions rather than the amount of money gained. One example is a company selling software for education is ethically profiting only if the transaction includes the expansion of learning access and isn’t just based on gaining money from subscriptions. Another core belief is the symmetry of benefit. This idea focuses on the idea that a true profit only matters if the transaction is morally good. It focuses on the “ethical debt” of a transaction. When you make an immoral transaction only motivated by money that doesn’t actually better the universe, your business gains ethical debt and the moral profit goes down. A third core belief is the Integrity Multiplier. This idea argues that the moral profit of a company compounds like interest: when a company has integrity, it compounds and builds a trust capital that lasts many cycles. Finally, we have the core principle of the redistribution of responsibility, which claims that everyone is responsible for moral profit. Every person’s decisions have an impact on moral profit, and every person can be responsible for ethical debt.

Since we’ve gone over the core ideas, let’s go over some tensions and even paradoxes of this belief. One question is if it is possible for a company to truly be moral in the capitalist society we live in today that prioritizes profit over ethics. Leading off of that argument, another issue is that if most other companies are motivated by malintent, how is ethical marketing possible when surrounded by a world with unethical but more advantageous-for-profit marketing.