Workplace studies show that money itself doesn't cause evil, but greed does

The argument

The purchasing power of money provides us with an array of material goods and also intangible things. How we can earn and possess money varies, but what is constant is the fact that money is instrumental in surviving and living well today. Ali Mahdi Kazem carried out a study exploring the relationship between income, the love of money and unethical behaviour within a business context. Results of the study, which are based on data from over 2000 employees, suggested that income does not have a direct impact on unethical behaviour. That is to say, money is not the root of evil. According to Kazem, unethical acts were related to how employees thought and felt about their salary, the CEO’s salary and, more generally, how fairly salaries were decided across the company. Rather than money itself, the love of money is in fact the root of evil. The love of money caused employees to be less satisfied with their current salaries. This in turn had a negative impact on the level of commitment that employees had to their organization, which had a positive impact on unethical behaviour which we can interpret as ‘evil’. Put differently, employees who thought they were inadequately compensated at their place of work were more likely to commit evil.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the study at most relocates the cause without exonerating money. If the love of money reliably produces unethical behaviour, and money is what people love, then money remains causally entangled with the harm rather than neutral. A single workplace survey of salary satisfaction cannot bear the weight of the sweeping conclusion that money is never the root of wrongdoing. And the original maxim already located the fault in the love of money, not the coin — so the finding restates the proverb rather than refuting the broader claim that the pursuit of money drives people to do harm.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] One correlational workplace study finding no direct income effect cannot establish the universal claim that money never causes wrongdoing; it measures a narrow salary-satisfaction pathway. [Rejecting P2] Showing that the love of money drives unethical conduct does not neutralise money — if money is the thing people covet, it remains causally central to the harm rather than exonerated by it.