Why not do good and make money? I asked myself that question when I turned 33. I was tired of just making money. Since I was 14, most of what I did for money was not ethically aligned. That’s not to say I was doing evil work. I was making website for whoever hired me. But I couldn’t definitively say that what I was doing was good, so my work gave me very little value beyond the cash in my bank account.
In my time of building a company that both makes money and intentionally does good, I have started to form a thesis for why others should focus on doing good when making money. That thesis is drawn around the fact that very few companies do good.
Does PayPal improve our well-being? What about Facebook or Apple? Think seriously. Your well-being is what you deeply value. Most people I’ve met value health above all else. Does PayPal improve your health?
If business founders focused solely on well-being, how would our world be different? Would Dow Chemicals exist? Would we have more low-intervention, life-saving therapies like Oral Rehydration Therapy?
Some say well-being comes from abstraction; from art or play. That’s fine. Art and play will always exist. But shouldn’t we focus our professional time on tasks that directly improve well-being?
And in improving well-being, how do we focus on ourselves, society, or our future?
In building My Ethical Business, I’ve realized that a truly good business must focus on bettering others. That concept is shared by some of the most successful people I’ve interviewed. Like me, they believe resources are meant to be used. When we focus our professional time on adequately using resources, our current society and future generations benefit. Perhaps we can avoid problems like cancers from nasty chemical plants or foreclosures from greedy bankers by just working ethically?
Some say ethics stifle business. That’s not true. I asked Matt Mullenweg, the billionaire founder of WordPress, if he works to benefit society. He looked at me like I was asking something absurd.
“Of course!” he answered.
That sentiment is echoed by researchers who’ve cured diseases, CEOs with multiple IPOs, celebrities we celebrate, and others I’ve met. You can be both wildly successful and ethical, you can do good better.
Good may be objective, subjective, or hidden in sentiments like “love” and “duty.”
Since Aristotle, philosophers have tried to create a systematic form of ethics. Systematic ethics create an objective good. Instead of agonizing over what we should do, we would immediately know the good way with a systematic good.
Philosophers like Kant and Nietzche argued that an objective good is ridiculous. They think a subjective system of morality defines our good. Humans build their morality from abstract notions. And with a subjective system, it would be impossible, maybe even unethical to develop a systematic good.
1950s Oxford Philosopher Philippa Foot took the idea of a subjective good into her argument for love. If an objective good was unachievable, wouldn’t something like the holocaust be permissible? Foot found hope in the idea that groups of people can band together for a cause that feels overwhelmingly right, which she saw as a manifestation of love. This collective moral intuition suggests that some actions can be seen as inherently good, despite the challenges of defining an objective good.
Moreover, even if we could have an objective good, Foot argued that that objective good could not necessarily be an organizing principle for everyone. A child, for instance, could simply say “no” after their parents lay out very common sense grounding for not doing something.
That idea of common sense informing our good was expanded by other philosophers at Oxford. A movement of “Ordinary Language” philosophers studied the language that people used to make ethical decisions. Words like “ Good,” “right,” “ought,” “duty,” and “obligation” define ethical systems. To understand ethics, we simply need to understand how people speak about what they should or should not do.
However we find good, all philosophers can probably agree that the good life can be informed by as many different perspectives as possible. We must have courage to face the world and all its contradictions. Courage is a type of wisdom, Plato tells us. Courage is “the knowledge of what inspires fear or confidence in war, or in anything.”