(Im)Moral?

Two days ago, I was at the kick-off party of seenDesign, a customer/partner of us, when somebody asked me how we came to the idea
to start a business in Pakistan. When I told
him that we had had some previous dealings with Pakistan as UN volunteers
after the 2005
Kashmir Earthquake, he said: “So you went there for a very moral reason
and ended up starting something immoral”.

That kind of pissed me off. What’s so immoral about starting a company? What’s
immoral about giving up your job, having no income
for over 13 months while investing € 200.000 somewhere else? What’s so
bad about paying 15 people in a third world country more money each month than
you can spare for yourself?

The difference with ordinary third world development programmes might be that
a business eventually wants to make money, but believe me when I say that
morality and ethics are far more important than that. Even in most of today’s
businesses. And now we’re at it, let’s not forget to mention that money is
necessary for creating sustainability and the fact that NGO’s are not so
different form ordinary companies after all…

When thinking about it, I guess going to Scotland to do “volunteer” work,
paid by European tax money (so one can feel good after doing something
“good”) is far more immoral then.

END