Interestingly enough, I am writing this chapter during a week in which I have found myself giving several different versions of essentially the same advice. With one team, I am discussing how we should conduct transactions and what people on both sides should reasonably expect from one another. With another

Most people can agree on many moral principles, unsurprisingly these principles start to look less attractive when money gets involved. Compassion is wonderful, fairness is essential, generosity makes society better, and everyone should certainly receive what they deserve. These are points we naturally agree on but then money enters the

Justice is easiest to admire when we are the ones asking for it. Almost everyone believes in fairness when they are the employee waiting to be paid, the customer expecting what was promised, the tenant wanting a deposit returned, the borrower asking for honest terms, or the child watching a

Most of us become noticeably more ethical if we know the person affected by our choices or if she lives close enough for us to see the consequences. It is one thing to think about a borrower, employee, customer, tenant, supplier, or stranger in the abstract but it becomes quite

At the end of the last chapter, we arrived at a principle that sounds almost obvious once stated plainly: if responsibility grows wherever our ability to affect others grows, then greater power should probably make us more careful rather than less. The word power, however, can immediately send our minds

If our actions should be sincere and the things placed within our care are trusts rather than absolute possessions, how do we determine what is actually due to everything and everyone affected by those actions, protect their rights, and become true stewards of what has been placed within our care?

There is something very revealing about what human beings do when we think nobody is watching. I am not talking only about the shameful things people try to hide, but also the mundane acts of goodness that go completely unnoticed. If you reflect on the simple charitable things people do

At the end of the last chapter, I asked what I believe is one of the most important questions in this entire discussion. If humanity has been given the keys, whose house is it? The question sounds simple, but if we sit with it for a while, the answer can

One of the things I find most fascinating about human beings is how physically unimpressive we are when compared with much of the creation around us. We are not especially fast, particularly strong, or exceptionally well equipped to survive on our own. We cannot soar through the sky like birds,