The notion that business should sacrifice its self-interest—profit—to some undefinable “collective good” is ludicrous.
What is “the greater good” and how is business supposed to contribute to it? And how does such contribution conflict with self-interested profit making? The term “greater good” is used to refer to the “good of society.” Since society consists of individuals, its good means the sum of the good of its individual members. And since individuals choose to value different things and place their values in different hierarchies, there is no way of “summing up” their “collective” good—and thus no way for anyone, including business, to contribute to it.
So what is the role of business in society, if the notion of contributing to some vague, undefinable “greater good” can be dismissed? Businesses create and trade material values: food, clothes, houses and apartment buildings, medicine, insurance policies, hair salon services, cell phones, computes, heating oil, fuel for our vehicles, bank loans—an endless range of goods and services on which our lives and well-being depends on. The creation and trade of material values, motivated by profit seeking, is the contribution of business to us for which we should be grateful. Thanks to business and division of labor that they make possible, we don’t have to live on self-sustaining farms, producing everything we consume by ourselves.
The notion that business should sacrifice its self-interest—profit—to some undefinable “collective good” is ludicrous. Such action would hinder the creation and trade of material values—the true role of business—on which our survival and flourishing depends. People like the 53% of the Canadian respondents to the Edelman survey (some 650 souls, assuming 1,200 respondents per country) want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want business to produce the material values that their lives depend on. At the same time, they want it to sacrifice some of the incentive of doing so, for the sake of the undefinable goal of “the greater good.”
There is no conflict between what is good for us (individuals in society) and the self-interested profit seeking by companies.
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2015/02/the-greater-good-versus-self-interest-for-profit/
