11 of 18

Write now Article Tools

Page 2 of 3

of goods or services far more conveniently than any other commodity in most situations. Money can buy books or pay for courses that will give a person knowledge and skills. Money can buy training equipment to increase one's health and fitness. Money can even buy gifts to friends to sustain positive social relationships. Money can buy leisure goods used to rejuvenate one's energies and improve one's standard of living. Furthermore, money can be invested into valuable assets to generate additional money. If flourishing is one's goal, money should at least play an important role in attaining it.

Profit is moral because flourishing and improving one's life are moral; profit by definition cannot be destructive to one's own life. Yet some claim that profit is destructive to the lives of others. This, too, cannot be.

A man can only make a profit in two ways. He can pursue an action which benefits himself but is irrelevant to other people. That is, he can embark on a solitary self-improvement program or in a direct transformation of inanimate objects without the participation of other people. Or he can pursue an action in cooperation with other people in order to achieve a mutually beneficial objective. He can embark in a voluntary trade with another individual or collaborate on a project or participate in a mutually valued friendship. In the first case, no other person is harmed, and many indirect benefits will flow to other people as a result of the individual's self-improvement and improvement of inanimate entities. In the second case, other people are directly benefited; they earn a profit in return for helping the individual make a profit.

Furthermore, pure entrepreneurial profit on the free market is gained by observing and eliminating arbitrage opportunities caused by widespread errors of perception. If errors in people's knowledge at present cause resources to be misallocated away from their optimal uses, the entrepreneur can try to find a better allocation by distributing these resources in a different way than had been done before. If the entrepreneur makes a profit in doing so, then he has put the resources to a better use than previously; people are willing to pay him more for the new allocation of resources than they were willing to pay for the prior allocation. By pursuing and eliminating arbitrage opportunities, entrepreneurs benefit everybody in correcting market errors and aligning supply with demand to optimally satisfy human needs. The market's profit-and-loss

• << previous page
• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about The pursuit of profit is moral?
We want to hear your view. Write now!