Understanding Moral Ambition

Is the purpose of life to be happy or useful, careless or responsible?

Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place through a potent mix of idealism and ambition. Last month, historian Rutger Bregman was at Harvard with a blunt message. “Every year, thousands of teenagers write passionate application essays about the global problems (hunger, poverty, inequality – you name it) they aspire to solve. But a few years later, nearly half work for firms like McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs and Kirkland & Ellis. My friend Simon van Teutem, who studied at Oxford, calls it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Talent’: consultancy, finance, and corporate law.

This isn’t just a waste of time. It’s a waste of potential on a historic scale.

Call it the paradox of ambition. We celebrate, cherish and cultivate it. We admire the startup founder who works 80-hour weeks, the young consultant with a six-figure salary, and the investment banker who pulls all-nighters. But ambition, on its own, is just fuel—it can power anything, from a rocket headed for Mars to a bulldozer razing a rainforest.

As the novelist Allen Raine once wrote: “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

What the world needs today is not just idealism or ambition – it’s both.

I’ve come to call it moral ambition.

Morally ambitious people don’t just ‘check their privilege’ – they use it to make a massive difference. They don’t gaze at their navel and wonder: ‘What’s my passion?’ They look at the world and ask: ‘What does the world need from me?’

Throughout history, societal renewal has often begun with a redefinition of success. And now seems to be a particularly good time to be morally ambitious. The US is currently ruled by its least moral leaders—those who shield predators, profit from corruption, bully the vulnerable and thrive on impunity. The antidote isn’t just ambition; it’s moral ambition.”

Ambition vs. Moral Ambition: Philosophical Roots and Societal Stakes

Amartya Sen argues that the true measure of progress isn’t GDP or personal income, but the freedom people have to live lives they value and have reason to value. Moral ambition expands our collective capabilities. It builds institutions, reduces suffering, and creates the preconditions for human flourishing. Plain ambition, in contrast, can be blind to whether its outputs serve meaningful ends.

Similarly, Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, warns that a society organized purely around elite credentialism breeds hubris at the top and resentment at the bottom. In such systems, ambition is rewarded, but only insofar as it conforms to narrow ideas of success: brand-name jobs, wealth, prestige. Moral ambition breaks this logic. It asks not, How far can I go? but Whom does my success serve?

The Moral Opportunity Cost of Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber’s theory of "bullshit jobs" crystallizes a painful irony: millions of bright, capable people spend their lives in roles that even they admit contribute nothing of real value to society. Think of the regulatory compliance analyst who processes made-up paperwork for made-up metrics. Or the lawyer whose main job is helping monopolies skirt taxes. Or the consultant who repackages PowerPoint slides on "synergy."

The problem isn’t just personal dissatisfaction. It’s what isn’t happening while this is going on.

• A brilliant coder could be working on open-source climate modeling tools.

• A strategist at Bain could be helping underfunded cities redesign their infrastructure to be resilient to climate change.

• A persuasive, charismatic thinker could be reviving civic trust and political participation instead of optimizing digital ad funnels.

Each bullshit job is a kind of moral counterfactual: a place where human potential is spent but not fulfilled, where brilliance is deployed without purpose.

Imagine if the intellectual horsepower currently locked up in optimizing hedge fund trades or litigating corporate mergers were redirected toward preventing the next pandemic, building affordable housing, or scaling mental health interventions. That’s not utopianism—it’s simply asking: What if we aligned the ambition our culture so richly cultivates with the problems our world urgently needs solved?

2000 Work Weeks is All You Have

A full-time career is about 2000 work weeks, so how you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life. This is how Bregman categorizes jobs:

The “Idealistic and Not-so-ambitious” quadrant is an interesting case study that demonstrates the insufficiency of social media activism. Having millions of followers who reshare your latest moral outrage is not the same as building an organization. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, says, “People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people or going to a protest or calling someone is not enough to make an actual change.”

Bregman makes a compelling case for morally ambitious work. Another set of people who have made similar claims is the Effective Altruists. According to them, the best way to make a difference is to earn a lot of money and give most of it to charitable causes. It is slightly more complex than this one-sentence summary. If you are interested, read our newsletter on the subject.

While we strongly endorse the clarion call for moral ambition, we acknowledge that there are scores of people who would like to work on causes they care about, but can’t because of constraints. Some need to pay off their loans, some need to pay for healthcare, some need to help aging grandparents. The list is long. For them, moral ambition could be a slow and steady journey.

The speed matters less than the direction. As long as moral ambition is something we care about, we will either steer clear of bullshit jobs or do them for just as long as necessary.

Thankfully we have thousands of morally ambitious peers on Network Capital. We can scale our efforts and ambitions together.