You hold a gun in your hand. The gun is loaded. Is the gun evil, immoral, saintly, good, or none of the above? I think everyone would agree that the gun has no morality. That it doesn’t make sense to give moral character to an inanimate piece of machinery. In the same sense, a disk of metal, a piece of paper, or the numbers in an account have no morality. They are all amoral.
Therefore, any physical object money (POM) is also amoral. Any morality associated with money is a result of the use that one or more human beings makes of that money. The morality comes from the use of that money to motivate some other person’s actions.
Money can be used to build hospitals to care for sick and dying children. Money can be used to create weapons of mass destruction. Money can be used for almost anything. There is nothing about money which prevents its use for evil purposes.
If money were not a physical object then it might possibly have some ethical content. One might be able to speak of money as being a moral force. But that could only be the case if money were not a POM and did not represent a POM.
As we brought to mind in the previous article “POM Can Be Taken, Lost, Or Destroyed” there will be a temptation on the part of virtually everyone to take money from others against their will by force or fraud. This temptation is increased by the fact that money may furthermore be used to motivate others to help one take people’s money. I can hire (using money) a lawyer to fraudulently sue other people. This compounding effect of POMs is only possible because a POM is always amoral. If a POM were moral it could not be used to reward immoral behavior. And if a POM were used only to motivate immoral behavior that POM would be immoral.
Because physical object money is amoral, the power of those who possess or control money to do harm is greatly increased. Look back over history at the most evil actions: those historical events which were the actions of human beings harming and destroying large numbers of other human beings. In every case, money is an essential element of those tragedies. To use a traditional modern example, the actions of the Nazi party in exterminating minorities in the 1930s and 1940s were the actions of a bureaucracy paid by money. These horrific crimes against humanity could not have been carried out if the secretaries, guards, engineers, construction crews, and police were not being paid money for their work. No one would have manufactured the poison gas or built the death camps or kept the records of who was a member of a minority marked for death or sought them out or done any of the other work necessary to bring those innocent people to their deaths. It was only possible because the economy used a POM and that POM was amoral.
Thus the sins that would be the minor sins of individuals become the major sins of organizations with great power. The festering hatred of one diseased mind becomes the national and even global tragedy of a world war. That is the exponential multiplying effect of money being amoral.
