The Duty to Make Money

Granting that a business person’s ultimate objective is to make the world better, how is
this best achieved? A common view is that it is achieved by making as much money as possible.
The best thing business people can do for society is to be good business people, which is to say,
to maximize the company’s profit. They should therefore stick to finance, marketing and
operations management rather than waste time with ethics.
Economist Milton Friedman articulates this view in an essay that is quite popular with
business students, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase its Profits.”1 According
to Friedman, corporate officers have no obligation to support such social causes as hiring the
hard-core unemployed to reduce poverty, or reducing pollution beyond that mandated by law.
Their sole task is to maximize profit for the company, subject to the limits of law and “rules of
the game” that ensure “open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Friedman advances two main arguments for this position. First, corporate executives and
directors are not qualified to do anything other than maximize profit. Business people are expert
at making money, not at making social policy. They lack the perspective and training to address
complex social problems, which should be left to governments and social service agencies.