On Money

There is nothing inherently wrong with making millions or billions of dollars if that is your choice.  How you make that money and what you do with it are where to place your attention.

There are some businesses that are automatic no-nos: human trafficking, smuggling genuine art or pilfered property, prostitution, slavery, illegal drug manufacturing and selling, crime, and selling arms.  These industries create pain, misery, and trauma for those who suffer the consequences.  Plus, they involve choices that are anathema to spiritual development: if you are selling human beings, should you be thinking about profit margins?  Efficiency?  Supply and demand?  Deliberately breaking up single-parent families?  Catering to unsavory customers?  Needless to say, the aforementioned businesses should be avoided at all costs.

Here are some questions to ask no matter what line of work you are involved in though they are especially important for those who are self-employed:

  1. What motivates you?  Why do you work or want to start or own a business?
  2. Do you accept the consequences that your job or business may have on your soul or the spirits of your employees and customers?
  3. Does your labor make a positive contribution to society?  If so, at what level?  Whom are you serving through your job or business? 
  4. Do you stand behind your product or service?  Is your reputation on the line with every transaction? 
  5. Do you maximize the sale price to increase profit margins or do you charge enough to pay your business costs and meet your personal needs (or somewhere in the middle)?
  6. How well do you know your employees?  Do you value their time? 
  7. How do you treat your employees?  Do you pay your employees the minimum wage?  Do you offer benefits such as health insurance, pension, workers’ compensation insurance, life insurance, paid sick leave, and/or paid vacation time?  Do you have a mandatory retirement age for your employees?  How many hours do you require of your employees and in what conditions? 
  8. How happy are your employees?  Do they believe they have job security?  Do they feel like they are making a meaningful contribution to society?
  9. Do you resolve disputes on the workplace or do you delegate that duty to someone else?
  10. In your advertising, do you capitalize on selling a model’s looks or do you use other ways to get visibility for your business in your target market?
  11. What market are you directing your business toward (e.g., are you selling cigarettes to children)?
  12. Are you updating your products and/or services with the latest technology? 
  13. Does your business take advantage of perverse incentives (e.g., the private prison industry benefits when people are imprisoned and when their sentences are maximized even if that time has no rehabilitative or retributive function)?
  14. Are you stealing someone else’s intellectual property or did you follow the legal channels to get their permission to compete with a similar or identical product or service?  Are you deliberately taking advantage of another company’s intellectual property (e.g., setting up a 'McDermott's' with golden arches much like those of McDonald’s)?
  15. Are you skirting the tax laws through aggressive tactics? 
  16. Are you evading criminal liability through a legal formalism? 
  17. How and where are your goods made?  For example, are you selling goods made in sweat shops or through slave or child labor? 
  18. Do you have a monopoly in the market or industry that you deliberately exploit?


These questions may not have a clear right answer.  Instead, there is a spectrum on which you can plot your answers for each question: on one side are those answers that are acceptable to you and on the other are those answers which are distasteful or even repulsive.  Plot a course so that more of your answers to the questions above fall on the acceptable side of the spectrum in the future.  Evaluate each business-related choice based on the probability of the effect of each decision on whether it advances your goals (e.g., importing goods from New Mexico improves the chance of avoiding products made through slave labor by 70%).  Remember that you alone have to live with your choices so you have to find the answers to the aforementioned questions that your conscience can accept.  When in doubt about what is morally right, err on the side that feels right in your heart.  The heart is a valuable guide.  It is also a source of positive encouragement when your business has an unintended effect or you make a mistake.

What To Do With Your Assets

With respect to appropriate uses of money earned, consider the following:

  1. Contribute to a place of worship or religious institution;
  2. Pay the costs of someone doing valuable spiritual work (e.g., a monk, theologian, or priest); 
  3. Contribute to nonprofit organizations that meet a need of society by providing services that would otherwise be paid for by the government;
  4. Fund research and development projects to advance human capabilities in science, technology, medicine, computer science, mathematics,  architecture, or engineering;
  5. Directly facilitate needed services like health care, legal advice and/or representation, vocational education, psychiatric or psychological counseling, orphanages, personal hygiene, shelters for the homeless and those dealing with domestic violence, soup kitchens, and providing other sources of financial or social support to those in need;
  6. Enable artists to create socially meaningful art (e.g., literature, poetry, music, sculpture, dance, painting, drawing, or other non-commercial forms of creative expression);
  7. Cover the costs of academic research and historical preservation projects;
  8. Establish a family foundation as a vehicle for charitable giving;
  9. Settle a trust for future generations to pay for their education, weddings, and house purchases and to provide startup capital for businesses;
  10. Fund scholarships for poor students or create fellowships in under-resourced areas of achievement;
  11. Provide capital to socially-meaningful businesses at low rates of interest (or none) and without stealing the entrepreneur’s equity; and
  12. Broaden your cultural horizons by traveling to UNESCO sites around the world.


Money can carry negative connotations in some circles but there is no doubting that it is necessary to sustain good outcomes (e.g., school teachers have to be paid as do doctors, nurses, engineers, and other laborers).  Remember that there is nothing inherently wrong with being rich but there is with becoming so in an unethical way.  You can make good money and do good things with your money.

Send your thoughts on money to scott@theorism.org.