I have been really enjoying reading your books and articles on business ethics. In one of your articles, you mention that rather than persuade students that they can do well by doing good, you suggest how they can do good by doing well: how they can use business as an instrument for making the positive contribution you know they want to make. The meaning of doing well by doing good is clear to me, but not that of doing good by doing well. I would appreciate it if you could kindly expand on and clarify that for me for my learning.
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Ethical Decisions 
Business has the potential to do enormous good, and it often realizes this potential. Of course, being the powerful instrument it is, business can also do much harm. In any event, a business can fully realize its positive potential only if it is successful as a business. This is why I say that someone in business can do good by doing well.
How does business make a positive contribution? For one thing, the very act of engaging in commerce tends to make the buyer and seller better off. When a merchant sells an item at the market price, many customers pay less than what the item is worth to them (that is, they would be willing to pay more). This is what economists call consumer surplus. At the same time, many merchants sell for a higher price than the item costs them, which is producer surplus. So both parties tend to come out ahead.
Commerce also tends to supply the goods and services that people want and need, since otherwise no one would buy them. For the same reason, entrepreneurs develop new products that make life better for many, such as the computer on which I am typing this and the electric grid that powers it. (The entrepreneur who gave us our AC electric grid, George Westinghouse, lived just around the corner from my residence in Pittsburgh.)
Of course, things can go haywire. Merchants can sell harmful products or deceive customers about what they are buying. Advertisers can persuade customers to spend their money on frivolous items that deliver little value. Unregulated business can consume excessive resources, pollute the natural environment, build an unstable and exploitative financial system, and create monopolies that wipe out consumer surplus. The business sector also fails to deliver many things we need, and for which we rely heavily on public sector and nonprofit organizations. These include infrastructure such as roads and bridges, medical treatment for all, scientific research, civil governance, a civil and criminal justice system, and the most important of all — education.
To point out the contribution of business is not to endorse capitalism or any other particular economic system. Whatever the system, we must be on guard against the tendency of business to exacerbate wealth inequality and neglect disadvantaged socioeconomic classes. On the other hand, commerce and trade have sustained human communities since prehistoric times, and they continue to do so in every economic system that exists today. Our task is to strive for an economic and political environment in which commerce can make its best contribution.
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