photo credit: hartlandmartin
Google’s motto is ‘don’t be evil’ and the company has built its code of practice around this guiding principle which aims to ensure that everything they do is ‘measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct.’ Many people think that money is somehow tainted, that there is something rather unsavory about it, and that the rich cannot also be the good.
Of course, there are lots of ways to make money, and many of them are decidedly evil. There are crude and violent ways of making money, like robbing a bank, blackmailing people or running protection rackets. People sell drugs, traffic in people, run prostitution rings and exploit people, usually the weak and vulnerable.
Then there are more subtle, but obviously dishonest ways of making money. I get dozens of e-mails each week telling me that I’ve won some lottery, or that a government agency is giving me millions of dollars, or that someone has left me money in their will. I guess people must fall for these scams or else they wouldn’t keep sending the e-mails.
I’m sure that most of us wouldn’t dream of doing these kind of things, but of course there are even more subtly dishonest ways to make money. Using legal loopholes to get out of paying tax, not owning up when you get given too much change, all kinds of little dodges and tricks we use to profit. We can tell ourselves ‘it’s not that bad – anyone would have done the same thing,’ and that’s probably true, but we still know that we have acted dishonestly, and it still leaves a bad association about money in our mind. And this is the problem.