On the (No) Goodness of Greed
Is there any morality to profit maximization?
By MARTIN REZNY
I may have already expressed my dislike toward the whole concept of money and various aspects of everyday capitalism a couple of times, so you could assume that my opinion can only be that greed is terrible, full stop. Well, I’m also a big believer that things exist for a reason, even those that I don’t like.
While no amount or kind of logical reasoning or evidence can change my feelings about capitalism, that doesn’t mean reasons for implementing greed-based economic and political systems don’t exist. If an obviously superior and perfectly safe alternative exists, well, where the hell is it?
Don’t get me wrong, a viable alternative does exist, the kind of thing that anarchist intellectuals like David Graeber keep talking about. No, it’s not Marxist socialism or communism, it’s the ancient communal approach. Not derived from the word “commune”, but from the word “community”.
It’s a system where everyone involved knows each other personally, where the currency is social credit, and where disputes are arbitrated by the whole community until a consensus is reached. Most people already exist primarily within such a system, with their friends, family, and neighbors.
The problem is, it doesn’t scale up, at least not easily. First of all, it has some minimum requirements on the quality of people involved. If too many of the people in a community are too gullible, and if there is a sufficiently competent snake in the garden, so to speak, the community can become a cult. Also, all thieves, perverts, and murderers have to be exiled, which often amounted to a death penalty. Tolerance would threaten the community’s survival.
Secondly, communities based on volunteering and consensus aren’t great at waging wars, certainly not offensive ones. The largest they ever got were essentially city states, and that’s only with the help of many slaves who did all the work that the citizens would never volunteer for.
We can do it better today, sure. Machines can be used instead of slaves to do all the things people don’t like doing, including military defense. We have the capacity to treat or try to reform bad apples, or to maybe even prevent most crime by focusing on healthy upbringing. And maybe we will go the way of community again yet. But first, the empires have to be dealt with.
The Origin of Empires and Money
The main historical reason why hierarchical empires won as the go-to model is that when you don’t really mind forcing everyone to do the things that need to be done, and when your sole ambition is to keep increasing the number of people you can force to do stuff, the ability to wage war becomes key.
There are some examples of alliances of city states holding empires at bay, like in some of the wars between Greeks and Persians, but that’s just a great opportunity for some internal snake to then turn the alliance into an empire from within. Once everyone is an empire, reverting back just invites attack.
So, like David Graeber says, the only reason we need icky things like armies or lawyers is that once somebody has them, everybody else has to have them as well. We all would have to decide to get rid of them all at once. Money and profit are just other examples of icky things that we can’t get rid of.
Historically, money appeared along with large standing armies, in the form of wages and taxes. It’s a brilliant scheme, really. The king decrees that from now on, money exists, and that every citizen has to pay a tax. Meaning that they now need to make money, meaning they will accept it. From whom?
From the soldiers, who are paid in money. Why? Once your army reaches a certain size, random spoils just won’t cut it anymore. To get enough money to be able to pay taxes, the citizens will from now on sell supplies and services to your glorious army, as well as other agents of the state. But it goes deeper.
Why do you need an ever-larger army? Not for defense, I can tell you that. At the core, the main motivation, the driving force of all this, is the king’s greed. Then you may ask, why are there kings? There were successful communities without them, weren’t there. Well, some people are wired to want more.
Why We Need Want
And here’s where annoying fair ethical considerations come in. It’s not inherently bad to want more. People who want more for themselves, even when they’re horrible, have a tendency to create more for everyone else. Without greed, you don’t get a big chunk of the progress that’s possible.
Without such people, I highly doubt there would be any possibility of developing a global technological civilization. The process of creating ours certainly created many big problems as well, but you always have to think about what the alternative would have been - dependency on nature.
Nature isn’t nice. Without a global technological civilization, Mother Nature is guaranteed to wipe us out, sooner or later, Pompey-style. I guess there are people whose temperament allows them to be at peace with that, but then what you get is an ethical calculation of which scenario is more painful.
Pain as such is a very hard thing to like, but it does serve a purpose. It also seems to be a universal currency of sorts, given that it is difficult to gain anything or grow in any sense of the word without pain being a part of it. Ideally, one should inflict it on oneself, but what if the “one” is a society?
Yes, we will always be dependent on nature, to an extent, and yes, a lot of the suffering created by greedy people is needless. Ideally, what you want is an enlightened greedy person in charge who only demands sacrifices that will lead to objective utilitarian improvement and who listens to science.
I guess that would even be agreeable to most people, but how do you make sure that you get ambitious geniuses on top and not insatiable monsters? That’s the hard part. It’s also where you realize that the society as a whole is complicit. The capitalist system is really about what people want.
People Are the Market
Pick any example of a historical crime, mass abuse, or environmental damage and you’ll find that they wouldn’t have happened at all if people didn’t want a particular thing while not really caring about the hidden costs of getting it. Most colonial wars were about commodities as silly as spices or sugar.
As long as people, in the so called free world at least, don’t care about the consequences of getting what they want, you will get sociopathic leaders who reflect that attitude. In a properly functioning capitalistic system, customers have a lot of power. We can boycott goods and thus pressure corporations.
It is more difficult with essential goods, like energy, but imagine how much better things could be if we stopped wanting most of the frivolous things, or if we refused to buy goods from all companies that abuse workers, exploit some natives somewhere, or ruin the environment. Well, as much as we can.
It wouldn’t make the people in charge of the companies any less greedy, but it would turn them into maximizers of doing good, or at least minimizing harm, in the world. The quality of reward-driven people is largely determined by what we decide to reward. Which finally brings me to what I’m replying to.
After considering all this as fairly as I can, I don’t think one can say that the maximization of profit is always good or always bad. The key questions to consider are what is the end to which I’m making all this profit, and how much harm, or good, will be caused by it. Let’s look at that more closely.
The Ethics of Profiteering
If you’re making a profit, it means that you’re taking money away from someone else. Who is it? Is it a bad person or bad people who made it unethically? Robin-Hood it then, take it and reinvest it into more deserving hands. Investing your profits as much as you can to do good is always good.
Then there is the example mentioned in the article that I’m replying to, taking money from what you could more accurately classify as ignorant or stupid people. I think this can be ethically defensible as long you consider it a teachable moment (if the transaction is consensual and not a scam). As long as you can do something better with the money than the other guy.
Taking money away from good people should obviously be the most problematic option, if it was obvious what it means to be a good person. The invisible hand of the market isn’t really concerned with determining that. In this case, you should think more about the objective harm you might cause.
A person may be stupid with money, which most sales people would punish without question, but there is an ethical difference between taking a small percentage of some rich guy’s wealth, and taking all of the savings of a struggling family. Preying on the weak is easy, and nature tends to thin the herd to make it stronger, but a moral predator has other considerations.
In a sort of inversion, in human society, the weakness that needs to be weeded out to improve the health of the whole is moral weakness, especially among the most powerful. I guess the maxim here is don’t be a vulture, a bottom feeder. Instead, aspire to be a sabertooth tiger, taking down the megafauna.
In the end, the ethics of being a money-maker boil down to the ultimate consequences of your business. Which is only fitting, as the whole point of business is supposed to be the so called bottom line. You just have to expand your conception of what bottom line means. It’s not just a number. It is a tally, alright, but a tally of pain, and a tally of growth, of progress. Make all the money you want, as long as you use it to make the world better in the end.
