In the previous essay, I looked at the question of whether a good person could be a billionaire. I concluded that, in general, the two are not compatible. The gist of the argument is that if a person is good and they have vast resources, then they would use those resources to do good. I, of course, also used an analogy: could a good person on a derelict ship sit on a giant pile of supplies while other people suffered and died from lack? The answer is obvious: a good person would not do that.   In thinking a bit more about this matter, I realized I had omitted some important ethical considerations.

In moral philosophy, philosophers make an important moral distinction between doing harm and not doing good. As philosophers such as J.S. Mill have argued, we generally consider harming others to be wrong (although there are exceptions). So, a billionaire who becomes rich by doing harm to others or uses their wealth to cause harm would usually be a bad person, or at least not good. But one can make a case that people have no moral obligation to help others and can withhold their assistance while still being good.

Immanual Kant considers this possibility. He asks us to imagine a person who is well off and could easily help others. This person considers their options and elects to avoid harming people but also decides to withhold all assistance. Kant considers this person more honest than those who speak of good will and charity but do nothing. But Kant being Kant, he believes they would be acting immorally.

Kant seems to appeal to the Golden Rule here: he asks us to imagine what the person would want if they found themselves in dire straits and in need of assistance. Kant claims they would want help and thus must accept there is an obligation to help others. This sort of reasoning can, and has, been countered.

A hard-core approach a person can take is to insist they would not want help.  If they were in need, then they think they should be left to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This is easy enough for a well-off person to claim. But even if it were true this is hardly a decisive refutation: what some would or would not want doesn’t seem sufficient to show what is good or bad. This also applies to Kant’s case: even if everyone would want help, this seems to be just a fact of psychology rather than proof of what is right. That said, the Golden Rule is a good starting place as it can be useful in considering the morality of actions. After all, thinking about why you would not want something done unto you can help in sorting out why you, perhaps, should not do it to others.

Another classic distinction in ethics is between killing (or doing harm) and letting die (or allowing harm to come to others). In the case of the billionaire, if they acquired their wealth by or used it to cause harm, then they would be doing active harm and thus would not be a good person (in general). But if they merely allowed harm to come to others, then one could contend they are not doing wrong as they are merely allowing wrong to occur. Going back to the ship analogy, someone who is killing other people and taking their supplies is doing wrong actively. But if they sit on their vast stockpile, they are merely letting people die. One could argue that a good person could do this, since they are not doing evil.

One can, of course, argue that letting people die is a form of active evil. In the analogy of the ship, the person who stockpiles the supplies is actively denying other people what they need to survive. They are killing rather than letting die. Likewise, a billionaire who stockpiles wealth is denying others what they need, thus they are actively doing harm. To use a more extreme analogy, think of a derelict spaceship and imagine someone who is stockpiling air cannisters and have such a vast supply it would take them centuries to use it all. They are thus actively killing the other people on the ship by taking away air they need. They cannot be a good person. Likewise, a billionaire is actively harming people by taking away resources.

One could, of course, argue that there is plenty for people if they would just work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But that is simply not true; a person cannot be a billionaire in a meaningful sense unless other people are poor. So there are no good billionaires.