Greed or Opportunity?

Wealth... We think about wealth all of the time, but usually when we think about it we think about it in terms of money. Money is as important today as food and water... or even air. Money gives us stability, it gives us status, it gives us everything from our necessities to our biggest wants. Money makes us do things (good and bad).

Last week in class we had a couple of presentations, one about free speech and the other was about wealth. So, after class I started thinking about wealth and what it is, but most importantly what it does. I began to google some stuff about wealth and came upon this question: Does wealth make people less ethical? 

I did some research on this question that I stumbled upon and found out that wealth really does make us do unethical things, whether it's cheating to win a prize, cutting off another motorist, or lying in a negotiation. So, why does money make people decide to do unethical things? The answer is greed. 

In all of the articles and studies I have read, the common thread was greed. Greed makes people feel like it is okay to literally take candy from babies. Greed is a huge factor in many unethical choices made by the wealthy. 

In all honesty, I was pretty surprised by the outcome of these experiments. I'd never had anything against wealthy people (and I still don't), so I decided to do some more research... The research I did after that was to find out if wealthy people make more unethical decisions than less wealthy people, and the outcome was just as surprising. In every single article about rich and poor people's ethics, the outcome was the same, if given the opportunity both sides would do the unethical things as long as it got them ahead. 

In the end, I have learned that all people make unethical decisions regardless of their social standing, and it left me with this final question: Are we all innately unethical?