Morality of Outcome

I’m reading a great book, Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, whose theme can be determined by this excerpt:

“Ironically, by denying charity the tools of capitalism while allowing the for-profit sector to feast on them, we place charity at a severe disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every front and at every level. The hands of charity are tied, while the for-profit sector scoops every penny off the economic table. Charity is segregated from the rest of the economic world. And this apartheid is the result of its own ideology. It is in the name of charity that capitalism is banished. Indeed, charity could not be undermined with more homage paid to charity. But the principal beneficiary of this charity is the for-profit sector. The poor are left to take some solace in the fact that charity observed all the discrimination with great frugality.

“It is a further irony that we prohibit charity from using the tools of capitalism to rectify the very disparities some would claim capitalism creates. We allow people to make huge profits doing any number of things that harm the poor, but prohibit anyone from making a profit doing anything that will help them. Want to make a million selling violent video games to kids? Go for it. Want to make a million funding the cure for childhood leukemia? You are a parasite. The illogic is breathtaking. The ramification is even more so: if free-market ideology could rectify the disparities some claim are created by free-market practices, isn’t the nonprofit ideology that obstructs it the problem in the first place? (p. 9, italics in original)