Is it moral to monetise on someone else’s loss?
When I ask a question like that - no. No one on this earth really would answer “yes” straight away. Even if you think it’s ok to monetise by advertising / putting videos on YouTube / photos on instagram / share pictures on WhatsApp (monetise need not be always related to cash, my take is basically anything to your advantage in cash or kind form) etc because of certain behavioural expectations while you are being social.
I was or am one of them. There I said it. Oh my god I’m evil. It’s a famous line that every individual has copied from the movies, “am I a bad person”? Well, when you phrase it like that you can’t expect any one with basic courtesy (I mean really basic, one who doesn’t burn down an entire country just because the intelligence couldn’t narrow down the living location of a guy to a city, who brought down a building by driving a plane into it) to say “yes”. When you say “no” you have the chance to be the nice guy, more inclusive, the soft caring human to that individual who asked this question, so it’s an obvious choice to say “No”. (Behind one’s back of course you will be formulating the same “am I a bad person” question in various forms and surprised god with your knowledge of synonyms to the word “yes” and how you said it to the face). After writing 2 paragraphs on something totally irrelevant to what I really wanted to write I think it’s time to converge the writing to the topic. Is it morally ok to take advantage / benefit from someone else’s loss (when it really doesn’t change their situation to better or worse)?
Two events in my life made me ask this question. Both happened in the same week of beautiful February. The first one started, by my wife, waking me up to a flashing blue light of a police car at 2 AM. The sense organ called eyes seems to be very powerful for my wife even when they are closed, woke up to the flash and very subtly in a very soft voice she said “everything we own is on fire and we could be burnt to death in next few seconds”. No she dint, she simply woke me up to check on what was going on. My nose has insomnia, doesn’t sleep as well as my eyes. I smelt burning and found my neighbouring apartment complex to be on fire, long story short, big fire 100s evacuated, no injury, millions of cash lost and more importantly billions of materialistic memories lost. We all moved back to our apartments with new set of memories being made along with our old ones and those who had lost their homes also got new memories with an added overwhelming flavour of pain which comes with the loss of loosing materialistic memories but in a temporary home or a hotel. The second event is of course well known to all my billions of readers spread across the world, the war which I term it as “the spy who attacked a comedian” - Bond vs Bean. If you still haven’t got it, for the benefit of my readers who use the internet or their only connect to civilisation is through this blog - the Russian war against Ukraine. Civilians dying, huge military spendings, people leaving their homes, walking 10s or even 100s of Kms with a shoulder bag and a plastic cover filled with their materialistic memories (my wife says I repeatedly use a word to cause an impact on people when I think that I have coined a very apt and appropriate new word for an event or a situation), prices going up as a precaution in other countries even if the supplies are not yet affected are some of the huge list of war impacts.
Touch wood (let’s make it extreme - hug a tree or grab an IKEA salesman/woman of your choice and kiss who sold that furniture you are touching - this must be happening so much to them I guess) I was or is not directly affected by these 2 events or at least I’m not in the first line of this wrath, did not loose my materialistic memories but stayed in an university auditorium for half a day and already started saving for the expected gas price increase due to the pain caused by a man drinking vodka martini and riding a horse topless on someone who goes up on stage and makes everyone laugh. If the rule is to show only things that are chiselled, some can go topless and I can only show my fingernail.
There is a YouTube channel which shows the city Center of Kyiv live, I have been viewing it time to time since 2 years. The viewers at any point in time have ranged anywhere between 10 to 100. After the war started it never came below 4500. As I’m writing this blog it’s 12000. News channels which used to repeatedly play Covid numbers or obviously fish for events started broadcasting with a bullet proof vest wearing, frantically running, reporter on-site answering questions from a guy who owns a grey suit and photo bombs when the camera is trying to focus a bunch of people trying very hard to work. In the middle of it, of course you need to be lured into buying the best cheese from the caves of France at 10% discount, generously the company donates another 10% of the earnings to the homeless of Ukraine upon you sending a code word “war” to 7555. We have a cafe in front of our flat, sells lovely cheese cakes, ice cream and very tasty coffee in black throwaway cups. Yes, the black throw away cups. The cafe started opening an hour earlier than usual and closes an hour later, chairs and tables are out, spring is here or is it because of the number of people who travel from corners of the state to get a glimpse of the burnt down houses, a sad smiley for their instagram get thirsty and fill the bins with black cups, who can tell when the temperature is still 1 degree, very confusing.
Still the question, is it moral to have fun, advertise, monetise, use the events which have harmed or still harming others to your advantage ? If you do it, or you don’t, the lives of the affected does not change, but how people perceive you gets influenced. Just because you don’t air an Ukraine live channel or drink no coffee or not get your family out to see the lost homes, lives just don’t get better. Should we be more sensitive towards others feelings and not take advantage when someone is suffering or take advantage of it, monetise it and share the benefits with the affected ? I mean come visit the burnt apartments, drink a cup of coffee and drop a penny or 2 to rebuild their homes, make more YouTube channels, air them, increase the viewership, take your earnings, go to Poland and carry out humanitarian work, transfer parts of your earnings to a certainly and already setup authentic Save Ukraine fund. All we need to do is be kind genuinely as there exists no space for just preaching moral behaviour with out setting a living example by oneself.