In my last post, I defended the idea of going into corporate law in order to earn a large salary, so that you can donate more to the most cost-effective charities. An objection I’ve often heard is that corporate law or other high-earning career paths are morally problematic because they involve causing harm — they benefit big business while making the poor worse off. In this post, I’ll defend my argument against that objection.
I’m going to assume that the objection is not that, through corporate law, you do more harm than good even if you do donate a large chunk of your income. I don’t think that’s plausible, nor is it the strongest form of the objection. The strongest form of the objection is that it’s not morally permissible to cause harm, even if you bring about a significantly greater good. That is, you might think that earning to give through a morally controversial career like corporate law is analogous to the classic Transplant counterexample to consequentialism, in which one considers whether it’s permissible to kill one person in order to transplant her organs and save the lives of five other people. In this case, one has the choice to act against the interests of one person, in order to satisfy the interests of five others. According to both non-consequentialism and common-sense intuition, it is not permissible to do this.
However, in many cases, pursuing philanthropy through a morally controversial career is not like the Transplant case. Of those careers that are morally controversial because they involve causing harm, many do not involve intentionally causing harm. Rather, the harm caused is a forseen but unintended side-effect of one’s action.
If the harm one causes in one’s career is merely an unintended side-effect of one’s career choice, then the situation is not analogous to the Transplant case, in which one intentionally kills one person in order to save five. Rather, the situation can be analogous to one of two cases. The first is the Trolley case, where one has the option to switch the tracks of a runaway train, redirecting the threat from the train and saving the five who would have been run over, but running over and killing one other person instead. In the Trolley case, it seems clear that it is ethically preferable to switch the tracks and kill the one rather than do nothing: the fact that you mitigate the harm gives you a reason that outweighs the fact that you act to change who is harmed. The second case is the Tactical Bombing case, in which one can end a war early by destroying an ammunitions factory, foreseeably killing some civilians as an unintended side-effect. As long as the benefit is great enough, or the harm small enough, then it is ethically preferable to do the tactical bombing rather than to do nothing. In both cases, the reason why it can be ethically preferable to cause harm rather than do nothing is because one intentionally brings about a significantly greater good, merely causing the harm as an unintended side-effect of one’s attempt to bring about that greater good.
As an example of how earning to give through a morally controversial career can be analogous to these cases, we may consider a philanthropist who makes her money through corporate law, working for Big Pharma, with work that includes cracking down on the development of cheap generic drugs that enable the poor to access medicine that they would not otherwise be able to afford but which violate (unjust) international intellectual property laws.
However, let’s suppose, as is natural, that the person pursuing philanthropy is altruistically minded, so she doesn’t intend the harm to the global poor. Rather, the intention of the philanthropist is just to make money, so that she can help the poor with her donations. If she could make as much money through pursuing a career that didn’t involve harming others, then she would do that instead. So the harm caused is a forseen but unintended side-effect of her actions.
Moreover, we must bear in mind that the harm she causes would have happened anyway. Corporate law careers are extremely competitive, so, if she hadn’t been doing that work, someone else would have been, in her place. Inevitably, she would be changing who gets harmed by her work – she would win and lose different cases than her replacement would have done. But it’s still true that the ethical reasons she has to pursue the career depend in part on whether she would do more harm in that career than her replacement would have done.
If she is able to cause less harm than her replacement would have done – perhaps she is able to encourage the firm for PR reasons not to press the cases that would be most harmful to the poor – then the situation is analogous to the Trolley case. She is redirecting and mitigating a threat, and the harm she causes is merely an unintended side-effect of redirecting that threat. For this reason, it can be ethically preferable for her to pursue philanthropy through this career than through a morally innocuous career. Note, moreover, that this argument holds independently of the good that her donations do. So, even if she could earn no more through this career than through some other, morally innocuous career, she would still have an ethical reason in favour of choosing the morally controversial career.
If, in contrast, she were to do as much harm or even more harm than her replacement would have done, in her corporate law job, then the situation is a little different. It can still be ethically preferable for her to pursue such a career, but only if she earns significantly more through that career, and can therefore produce a greater benefit through her donations. If so, this makes her pursuit of philanthropy through corporate law to be more like the Tactical Bombing case: she creates a threat, causing a harm that wouldn’t have happened anyway, but does so as a forseen but unintended side-effect of pursuing a significantly greater good. It’s generally thought that there is an asymmetry between bringing about harms and bringing about benefits, where it is more wrong to bring about a harm than it is right to bring about a benefit of the corresponding magnitude. For example, in the Tactical Bombing case, on non-consequentialist grounds it does not seem right to cause the (foreseen but unintended) deaths of 100 civilians in order to save the lives of 101 other civilians. So one might reasonably think that one should not enter that financial trading job if the harm is great and the benefit only slightly greater. But if the ratio of benefit to harm is great enough, then it can be ethically preferable for her to pursue that career.
The conclusion of the above argument might seem counterintuitive, so it is worthwhile to consider a concrete, real-life case, about which we have well-developed intuitions. The example I suggest is Oskar Schindler, who was immortalized through the novel Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List. Schindler ran munitions factories for the Nazis, producing mess kits and later ammunitions for Nazi soldiers. He did this so that he could earn enough money to literally buy the lives of 1200 Jews. A key aspect of the story is that he deliberately ran his factories less efficiently than whoever would have been in his place. Though accounts of Schindler have questioned his character — he was an opportunist and a womanizer — his decision to run the Nazi factories in order to save his workers has been universally admired. In particular, we think that Schindler should have acted as he did even if he had had the option to escape, avoiding having to work for the Nazis, but saving a much smaller number of Jews. As well as the sheer size of the benefit he was able to give others, two salient reasons why we think it admirable that he acted as he did are that he did not intend any of the harm that he caused, and that he in fact managed to better the lives of many people by running his factories less efficiently than the person who would have been in his shoes.
As regards career choice, we often think that working for an immoral organization is thereby immoral. The example of Schindler shows this not to be the case. In general, any harm-based reason against pursuing philanthropy through a morally controversial career has to be able to explain why Schindler acted commendably. It seems to me that this would be extremely difficult to do.
