Should profits come before humanity??

Answer:
Should the humanity of one nation come before the humanity of another?

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Ask Dick Cheney.

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I say no but I'm sure the rotten people getting fat off of the high gas prices would say yes.

Who truly needs to make 9 BILLION dollars in profit? By my standard anyone who makes 6 figures in one year is extremely wealthy.

OOOOO I better get off my soap box before Yahoo! suspends me.

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If you are a business man, YES, if not, NO. You learn this in economy courses, no man ever decide to become a business man, or to take any risk, without having some certainty that he`ll get profits, if he`ll not get profits, he won`t do it. So YES, for the person that chose this proffesion, profits comes first.

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They probably "should" not. There are a LOT of things that "should" not be.

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No. You have to set standards and have ethics. Some people would sell their gramma and their soul for money. Look at the Bush administration. He has not yet figured out he does not work for Halliburton.

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Your quesiton is rhetorical. It is based on an assumption that profits and humanity are mutually exclusive. One of the contributors has already jumped on the bandwagon and declared, in essence, that to be a businessman is to be inhumane. (So, the only way to practice humanity is to be a bum? After all, even if you work as a government functionary, you are still selling your services at a profit, however small.)

In any event, since the question appears in "law and ethics", I think the more interesting inquiry would be: Can you legally obligate people to be humane? But then, to what extent can you legislate morality before such laws become inhumane in and of themselves?

Is a society which outlaws profits humane by definition? I grew up in a country where profits were against the law. In fact, in many cases, profiteering was punishable by death. Nevertheless, it was one of the most INhumane societies the world has ever known.

What do you do about situations when people have conflicting interests? A case in point: I once worked at a law firm which had a 90-year-old secretary. She had worked for the same law firm for over 40 years. This secretary was wealthy (her husband had been a successful patent lawyer and left her a handsome fortune), so it's not like she needed money. However, one of her sons had died, the other was estranged and lived far away. She was extremely lonely, and work was the only thing in her life that still gave it meaning. One of the partners, who had known her all his life, since the Stone Age when she worked for his father, was willing to pay her a pension, but simply didn't have the heart to tell her not to come to work anymore. The problem was, unfortunately, that she was no longer competent: she made mistakes all the time, misfiled papers, messed up letters that were dictated to her in various ways too numerous to list here, lost files and evidence. I cannot tell you how many times she made messes so horrendous that it later took LAWYERS to litigate for months to correct her errors; and some errors, unfortunately, could not be corrected at all (and mind you, the ones who suffered most from them were the clients). So here is the dilemma: by keeping her on the job, the firm was certainly humane TO HER; but it was being inhumane to the clients, whose cases became compromised as a result of her working on them.