A conservative after action report on the struggle against woke corporations might highlight banks abandoning net zero goals, investors dumping ESG (environmental, social, and governance) funds, and companies celebrating diversity sotto voce. Those are all important tactical victories. But if the larger strategic goal is simply restoration of the Friedman doctrine—that the sole social responsibility of business is to increase profits—conservatives will surely lose the war.
For all the errors in the left’s embrace of ESG, at least it begins with the right question: Are corporations a force for good or evil? Wokeism gets the answer wrong. But the right’s response—declaring such questions out of bounds altogether—is worse. It is moral abdication.
Why have conservatives come to occupy and defend amoral ground? In part, to facilitate economic analysis. Wealth maximization offers a convenient simplification. It distills the diverse concerns of millions of investors into a single aim: return on capital—or, to simplify further, share price. With this number, everything—corporate decisions, government policy, entire bodies of law—can be measured on the scale of efficiency. All other concerns are excluded.
Excluding morality also resonates with the logic of liberal pluralism. Human values are many and conflicting, but everyone wants more money. Conflicting values are treated as inappropriate ends in a pluralistic society, leaving only the lowest common denominator. Greed becomes our shared purpose.
There is more to us than that, of course. Human beings seek truth and long for God. But modern finance divorces such concerns from economic decision-making and teaches us to live divided lives.
Ordinary Americans now own enormous portions of the economy through their 401(k)s, IRAs, and index funds—yet we are entirely disengaged. Our savings are automatically allocated across thousands of companies, managed by algorithms, and adjusted without our involvement. We do not monitor the companies we own. We cannot even name them. Our risk is so broadly diversified that the conduct of any one company no longer merits our attention. We are passive—or, as the economists say, rationally apathetic.
But diversification spreads moral responsibility as thinly as it does financial risk. In our portfolios, we hold purveyors of pornography, makers of abortifacients, and empires built on addiction. We own companies that despise our beliefs and subvert our traditions. Daily we subsidize practices we could not defend—and could only confess—if forced to confront them. Still, we ratify these actions by accepting their returns. We are passive in more ways than one.
As with anything else we do, finance forms us. It habituates us into thinking of moral responsibility as someone else’s problem—or, more accurately, as nobody’s problem. It is tempting to answer that maximizing returns means having more to give to church and charity. But our souls are not divided and compartmentalized.
Christian tradition teaches that human beings are moral agents in every domain of life. We are stewards, not owners, and responsibility cannot be shirked or outsourced. The servant who buried his talent was not condemned for avoiding risk, but for refusing responsibility. Every part of life must be ordered to higher ends. When called upon to give account, we will not be able to say that financing pornography and addiction allowed us to put more into the collection box on Sunday.
A fully human approach to finance means subordinating the pursuit of wealth to the larger moral narrative that gives coherence to our lives. It means living out the same commitments in our economic decisions as we do when we raise our children, care for our neighbors, and serve our Lord.
At a minimum, this means moral concerns must inform how investors allocate and monitor their capital. Some investments—where vice is the product, where addiction is the business model, where human weakness is cultivated for profit—simply don’t fit. A portfolio cannot be virtuous if it is built upon the corrosion of the soul. Refusing to participate is not political activism. It is moral clarity.
Institutions that manage our savings should not presume that such concerns are eccentric or irrational. And political authorities, who already shape economic life in countless ways, need not pretend that vice is a neutral commodity like any other. Law inevitably reflects moral judgment. The only question is which judgments it will reflect.
The error of the left is not that it makes moral claims. It is that it makes the wrong ones. There is no return to liberal neutrality. Like political liberalism, economic liberalism depended on a shared moral inheritance it did not create and could not sustain. Having thoroughly squandered our inheritance, neither form of liberalism is tenable anymore.
This is not a call to capture institutions, but to recover ourselves. Modern finance has taught us to stop asking who we are and what we are for.
We need to ask those questions again.
