Would I hurt other people in some strange hypothetical to literally save my family’s life from certain death? Maybe, and I’d be guilt ridden about it for the rest of my life.
Would I hurt people to make more money? Of course not, and that’s not a defensible reason to hurt others… at all, and it makes you deeply broken at your core, especially as habit.
Really the only thing I can think of as a more horrifying reason to be cruel to others than “for money herp derp” would be “because its fun!”
Hurting others for profit in the name of business shouldn’t be a defense, it should be considered an admission of guilt and come with consequences.
Seems very popular when given at face value like this.
Yes. It’s the modern equivalent of “I was just following orders”.
I would argue that it shows how blinded one can be by the demands placed upon us by capitalism. We think about the rewards more than the karmic costs, because it’s easy to think about what you got at Walmart but abstract how that’s undermined life all over.
How is this even remotely unpopular?
I don’t think you’re interpreting the phrase correctly. It’s not about harming someone in order to make money vs not harming them at all, but rather about harming someone in order to make money (or attain some other reasonable goal) vs harming them simply because you wanted to. Consider the analogous situation with animals: shooting a deer because you want to eat it vs shooting it because you like killing things. The deer probably won’t like you any better in the first case, but most onlookers will.
