SEVEN would like to thank the authors who participated in the Morality of Profit essay competition, and our recent mini-competition to post excerpts on MoralityofProfit.com. We appreciate your important contribution to the discussion, and are delighted with the number of essay excerpts that we received. In total, over 175 authors posted their excerpts to the site, and those posts cumulatively received thousands of Facebook posts, comments, and hundreds of Twitter mentions.

We are pleased to announce that Ms. Carol Gutierrez Esguerra’s submission “The Good Story” received an unprecedented number of hits, including 882 Facebook shares and 24 Retweets.  Congratulations to all the participants for generating so much feedback and discussion around the topic of Morality of Profit.

Our main Morality of Profit essay competition is coming to an exciting conclusion. We’re currently finalizing outreach to the winners, which is sometimes a challenge across time zones and continents.  We will make the public announcement of our first, second, and third place winners by Friday, August 6^th at 5:00pm EST.   We will distribute our final press release via email to everyone that participated, and it will be available online at www.sevenfund.org and www.moralityofprofit.com.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed, and we look forward to announcing the winners as well as moving to the next stages of finalizing the manuscript and conference.

Best regards,

Elizabeth Hooper
Executive Director
SEVEN Fund

I think that I and people in developing nations want the same thing: a guaranteed source of income, doing meaningful work with benefits, without the need for a boss. This is what “In the River They Swim” has omitted so far. Sure, it’s liberating to not to need government aid, but isn’t even more liberating not to need a boss? Can the internet provide such an opportunity? Can we teach a person to “swim” in the river by themselves without a boss? Can’t we teach them to catch their own fish? It looks like it because I get many email offers to run independent businesses but so far, I can’t tell if they are scams or not.

So if children in Africa got those laptops from Nicholas Negroponte, and if adults in developing nations got them too, and had a system for evaluating on-line enterprises to create independent wealth, where only the most honest, environmentally sane, opportunities that are respectful of human rights and of the stakeholders were available, would this put everyone in every country on an equal playing field, able to earn meaningful income, possibly without the hierarchy of a traditional boss?

Perhaps, but some computer education and education about economics may first be in order for this method to succeed.

What I find a very inspiring source of guidelines on this subject are ideas presented by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Here I would especially like to mention a few thoughts of Lord Shaftesbury, who introduced the expression of a natural moral sense, later famously used by Adam Smith. In his ‘Characteristics’, while arguing against psychological egoism, he regarded the self-directed impulses (‘self-passions’ as he called them) as necessary aspects of human nature. The important thing for him was knowledge of one’s true self-interest:

“Happiness was to be pursued and in fact was always sought after; but whether found in following Nature, and giving way to common affection, or in suppressing it, and turning every passion towards private advantage, a narrow self-end or the preservation of mere life, this would be the matter in debate between us. The question would not be, who loved himself or who not, but who loved and served himself the rightest and after the truest manner”.

and the height of wisdom was ‘to be rightly selfish’ because narrowly considered self-interest provokes actions that work against a person’s real interest:

“Now these affections (self-passions), if they are moderate and within certain bounds, are neither injurious to social life nor a hindrance to virtue; but being in an extreme degree, they become cowardice, revengefulness, luxury, avarice, vanity and ambition, sloth; and as such are owned vicious and ill with respect to human society. They are ill also with respect to the private person and are to his disadvantage”.

Thus it is not greed, but rational and tempered self-interest that contributes to people’s social and economic welfare. The wise man is not necessarily someone who renounces wealth, but someone who understands its proper role in human life.

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

– Persian Proverb

Many consider this a time of economic darkness. The news is littered with cries of ruin, poverty, and self-indulgence in the wake of the current global economic crisis— a result of undue federal regulation and an element of greed, both on the part of the brokers, investors, and bankers and on the part of the consumers. Venerable journalist Robert Samuelson agrees that “Greed and fear…have seeded this global crises…short term rewards blinded [profiteers] to the long term dangers.” Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening, indicates that “the moral consequence of [this] greed [is that] private profit has prevailed over the concept of the common good.” Richard C. Cook, a retired federal analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department, realizes that “this [outlook] is what must be changed, not just mechanics.” It’s against the dark backdrop of this defective moral outlook that we are able to see the stars—to see profit not through the polluted lens of greed but through the Biblical lens of stewardship.

Greed and profit have become synonymous for each other in modern-day society, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Greed is unquestionably immoral; profit, on the other hand, (as well as the entire market system) is amoral and condoned by the majority of world religions, but particularly by Christianity. Deuteronomy 8:18 declares simply that “it is [the LORD your God] who gives you the ability to produce wealth” (NIV). But the key is not the profit itself; rather, it’s the motive behind the accretion of profit and the ultimate application of profit that becomes moral or immoral…

The poverty-battling circulation of profit gives life to Deuteronomy 15:4 which argues that “there should be no poor among you.” Nelson Mandela agrees that “poverty is man-made and it can be overcome by the actions of human beings.” The total eradication of poverty will not be in this moment, but right now we can take a step that may lead to that day. As the Chinese Proverb goes, “Those who wish to move a mountain must first start by clearing away small stones.” Profit is the key. If we harness profit and use it for the common good, poverty won’t have much of a chance. Profit must be altruistic, not egoistic. Once we as a collective global community choose to love our global neighbors as ourselves (Romans 13:9) instead of forsaking the common good out of self-indulgence, we will be closer to moving this mountain of poverty than we’ve ever been. It’s in these darkened days of greed that we need to see the Biblical model of profit twinkling in this economic night. It’s time we recognize the saving power built into profit and unleash this power in an unselfish defense of the worlds’ poor.

It is not out of the benevolence of the brewer, the baker or the butcher that we get our daily bread but by their own selfish interest.

This statement by Adam Smith underscores the fact that our global economy cannot be shaped without considering the workings of the global society. The recent economic crisis show that global markets have separated morality and business activity in recent times. The missing piece, I believe, is recognition and care for society. It is fundamental to promoting the real ethical principle of responsibility in the event of the crisis. Managers especially, in their risk taking ride forgot that their actions impact beyond their offices and national borders. If one could mirror the devastating effects of a wrong decision in their institution on the poor in the global society we would have been better of.
We need to shape moral markets formed by institutions driven by a ‘compass of morality’ and also built on the six dimensions of virtue ethics in business as Aristotle present in his philosophical theory of ethics- community, excellence, role identity, holism, integrity and judgment.

Greed makes the global system volatile and morality is key because any wrong act sends seismic waves across the global landscape. We are at the cross-roads to act together for generations to come. I conclude with Albert Einstein’s quote, “The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”. Let’s think and act differently.

“Sharing Skills and Changing Lives,” said Julie to me, “is not as easy as it sounds.”

Julie was a 32 year-old Canadian midwife working in Sri Lanka. She was talking to me about the tagline of VSO, an international development organization that had employed me as one of its national program officers. At that time, I had returned to Sri Lanka from the U. K. only recently. I found it easy to identify with Julie.

Every year VSO places international volunteers who possess skills that are scarce in fields such as mental health, good governance and disability which the organization identifies as its development-goal areas in the most disadvantaged countries around the world. During a placement that averages two years, volunteers attempt to strengthen local organizations by sharing their knowledge with employees. The request for the volunteer is made by the organization. The program officers assess the organization’s need and match volunteers to the request. Julie was one of my volunteers. I was directly linked to her placement and her progress.

I posted Julie on a sprawling plantation settlement on a mountain range eight hours away from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. During the last three hours of our journey to her plantation bungalow we travelled on narrow dirt roads that had been cut into the mountain surfaces. All around us we saw emerald tea plantations and in the far distance beyond the valleys, the southern plains we had travelled from shimmered in the morning sun.

In the 19th century the British had cleared virgin forests of this region and planted one of the most lucrative crops at the time; tea. When they found that the locals did not want to work on the tea plantations, they brought laborers from South India. Until recently this group of estate Tamil people has had little access to their rights such as a minimum wage or claims to citizenship.

When I met the managers of the tea plantation companies they told me they wanted change. Most of the plantation companies had made substantial efforts to improve housing facilities and provide access to health and primary education for their employees. This is a labor intensive industry. Every morning women climb the mountain face picking out two leaves and a bud from tea plants. The women bear the real burden of labor on a tea plantation.

My first visit to Julie’s plantation came two months after I had taken her there. I had left behind a young, enthusiastic and highly skilled woman. The plantation women laughed and giggled the moment she greeted them in her wavering tamil. The children and the dogs flocked around her. When I went back Julie had changed, had become subdued. She was having issues with her employer. She told me that the managers only promised to implement her suggestions. She wanted to work with the local nurse at the plantation health unit and train her in more up-to-date nursing care procedures, but the managers had not given her the time to do so. Julie also expressed doubts that the plantation women really wanted the sterilization they opted for after the birth of their second child.

I acted as an intermediary between Julie and the superintendents of the estate. They seemed surprised and upset that Julie could not appreciate the efforts they had made to allow her to work on the plantation.

When I returned 4 months later Julie displayed obvious signs of despair. She had doubts about the impact of her work. She had still not met the local nurse. She complained that the doctor did not administer adequate levels of anesthetic to the women during the sterilization procedure. She was angry. She said that the administrators of the plantations manipulated the women’s choice to be sterilized by giving them a financial bonus for the decision. “This is not right. This is very unethical,” she said over and over again, shaking her head.

Now I ask, is there a way to make the pursuit of profits our way to solve social problems?  Is there a way to steer the invisible hand towards social justice? Is there a way to make the interest of a CEO akin to those of a Nigerian child? Instead of saying no, ill say lets try.  Let’s try making the pursuit of profits and the pursuit of social justice compatible.  We have done it in the past.  Some governments have give tax breaks to companies who turn environmentally friendly.

Are markets moral?  They could be more moral.  Let’s try to make markets moral.  In my country we pay a 7% sales tax.  Why keep it 7% for all products?  We can charge 10% to a company who exploits children and isn’t environmentally friendly.  We can charge 7% to a company who evidences that they are environmentally friendly, 6% to a company who evidence that they keep with labor laws and 3% to those who keep with both.  This can give an economic advantage to companies that wanted to change their ways but couldn’t because of profits or make very greedy companies change their ways to maximize profits.  This gives also the knowledge to consumers that the higher the sales tax of the product the more suffering or destruction it laid in its wake.  Individual human choices are paramount in life.  We must try to make conditions so that the correct and easy choices tend to be the same.

Imagine the looks on their faces, when Deng Xiaoping sold them out. The old commies in China had tried to make steel in backyard barbecues. They’d carried the fat Mao on a litter, on a long march to nowhere. They’d pretended his Little Red Book was more than drivel. They’d endured one absurdity after another… purges, starvation, and misery. All for the cause. And now this… “To get rich is glorious…” Xiaoping is alleged to have said.

Whether he said it or not, millions of Chinese took it to heart. They got richer, faster than any people ever had. The economy is now 10 times larger than it was then; it grew 300% just in the last 10 years. Incomes rose every year. There are now more millionaires there than anywhere else on earth. Living standards have improved and poverty alleviation does not look like a farfetched dream. Perhaps the Chinese can give their African brothers and sisters some pointers on wealth creation and entrepreneurship. Africa has received bailout after bailout from the IMF and World Bank, but dismal economic development, poor roads, high taxes and corruption cling to Africa’s future like the laughter of cruel Greek Gods. Even though Africa has cheap labour and weak currencies as compared to the United States and Europe, industrialization seems to have evaded the continent. In the dire consternation of my corporeality, the only words that spring to my mind are those that were uttered by Xiaoping. I say to Africa “To get rich is glorious”. Only through free market capitalism can Africa and other developing countries unleash the potential of the masses.
Emerging market growth should be driven by creativity and innovation rather than public sector spending by willy- nilly politicans…

Before I begin my dissertation on the morality of profit, let me first remind us of the imperative of profit. It is the abiding promise and allure of profit that has kept and would continue to keep businesses in business, it is the reward provided by a return on investment that continually encourages innovators to innovate.

Profit is the one motivator that encourages people to delve into the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship. Were it not for the prospect of reaping a return on investment, business would just be a lackluster endeavour, a merry go round of mediocrity much like what was witnessed in the hay days of communism with its often outlandish econometrics.
The issue of morality as it concerns profit in particular also extends to free enterprise in a rather remote manner, is particularly touchy in nature and it has only come into the fore again as a direct consequence of the worst economic crisis that has hit humanity since the great depression of some 70yrs ago.

I am referring to greed as giving into immorality, such as stock market fraud for the sake of gaining wealth. Poverty can stem from being misinformed, or choosing to ignore all of the complexities that enterprising solutions may involve. In order evolve into empowerment from poverty, if you so desire, you must acknowledge that providing human and economic rights are vital to understanding how morality bridges the gap of greed and profit. Empowerment of education, and social diversity awareness, along with a universal code of ethics based on biblical, and socially acceptable principles as our forefathers supplanted can be some powerful steps toward economic and moral empowerment for both the impoverished minded and the morally bankrupt .

Having the capacity to speak, worship, pay our debts and forgive our debtors, and not fearing anything but God is a sign of breaking free of poverty. The greatest achievement is acknowledging that you have something to give that’s bigger than yourself to become the solution to a problem. A universal alliance of building trust and accountability for our actions, along with a team approach in humanitarian efforts can go a long way. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Maybe then we will become “a society that is undergirded by values like empathy, honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness” that will use self interest to become effective in channeling, into an economy that will produce international development, and solutions to poverty. That is the morality of profit.