When I was in college, I took a throwaway course on ethics and ethical relativism one summer to avoid needing an extra semester for a double major. It actually ended up being my favorite class I took during all of my time in college, even though it was wildly unrelated to my majors. 

The idea that people and cultures draw moral lines in radically different places is relevant to our community, too. There’s quite a gulf of opinions in between “opening a card issued by a Fortune 50 company for a sign up bonus is morally wrong” and “anything the compliance department fails to stop is implicitly permitted.”

Much like another contentious topic in the community, I am not a professional, and I’m not giving you any advice. If you do want advice, just like the aforementioned topic, talk to a professional (in this case, a therapist). But let’s be real, plenty of ink is spilled arguing about these things, so it’s time to add another one to the pile. 

As you all know, there is a think piece every six months or so from a big paper like the WSJ or NYT proclaiming that reward maximizers are being subsidized by people that carry balances and pay interest. It’s true that the US has a fairly “unique” system that both provides outsize value to savvy spenders and harshly penalizes many others. 

I’m nowhere near educated enough on the subject to say if there’s any merit to the argument or not. But even if it doesn’t feel good to say, said financial system is going to carry on – the major banks have too much lobbying power, and it doesn’t feel like Durbin-Marshall has much of a chance. 

On the flip side of it, you can make the opposite rationalization that it’s in everyone’s interest for you to extract as much value as possible from the big banks as a form of protest. I’m by no means a fan of the big banks, but I’ve always thought this was hard to rationalize. You’re not Robin Hood unless you’re donating your MS profits to charity (and not just for a metric ton of AA miles). 

Banks aren’t the only institutions that we’re dealing with. A lot of our favorite platforms and levers are great for us, but maybe not the best for society as a whole. I love gambling as much as y’all do, but what we do is so wildly different compared to how the US at large is using Draftkings and Kalshi. 

I think even the most hardened sweepers amongst us can agree that things are looking bleak when FanDuel is paying an unwitting Bryce Harper to make Cameo videos for somebody in a seven figure hole and George Santos found a way to out-George Santos himself by betting on his own SOTU appearance on Kalshi. 

This isn’t to say not to take advantage of opportunities – I had just as much fun during the Super Bowl as you did. I’ll always take some free VC money. But I think it’s worth acknowledging that some of our profit centers are also companies we wouldn’t choose to support otherwise. It scares me when I’m around IRL friends who should not be gambling talking about how they want to start betting rainfall markets on Polymarket. 

While we’re on the subject of VC money, it’s time to revisit an all-time MEAB article on discerning the cost center on the flip side of your MS profit. While the original post concerned the volume strategy based on who’s paying, it’s also interesting from an ethical perspective. 

I think one thing that everybody reading this can agree on is that taking a collective nibble out of Amex’s mid-ten figure marketing budget or partaking in the VC-backed Pepperdome is taking a piece of the pie that would have just been spent on a bottle of Ace of Spades at a corporate retreat in St. Barths otherwise. 

But what about when it’s the operating budget of a small credit union instead? The original big moral quandary I remember in the hobby was the guy on /r/churning who was gonna report everyone to the CEO of a credit union that he knew because somebody had shared bank bonus info in a thread. Nevermind the fact that the person saying that was, if I remember correctly, an active participant in plenty of other shenanigans. 

How far is too far? That’s probably a question for ethical relativism and every churner you ask will have a different answer. I still chuckle thinking about people that think there is an issue opening a business card for an eBay reselling business. But there are also hypotheticals that make my eye twitch when I realize someone has probably tried them.

Now that we’re back to the people in the community instead of the businesses, let’s tackle one more aspect of ethics in churning. 

In a hobby where blind trust is really all you have to go on, acting in good faith is extremely important. Sometimes people get blinded by the amount of money involved (or the possibility of losing it) and convince themselves that it justifies treating another churner unfairly. As we discussed a couple weeks ago, you can burn your reputation extremely quickly. 

Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to be a bummer, and my long list of shutdowns can affirm that I’m far from a moral paragon. But I do think that being honest and realistic with yourself about what you’re ok with and what you’re not is useful for setting your own MS strategy and accepting the ones of others. 

You’re not required to take every opportunity you get, and you probably shouldn’t. You’re also entitled to not take it to heart when a columnist is demonizing you for participating in a system. 

Everybody will have a different line in the sand of what’s ok and what’s not in this hobby. It’s important for you to understand your line and be honest about the self-interest behind it. A lot of us wouldn’t consider ourselves gamblers or crypto dudes/dudettes, but our transaction logs beg to differ. 

When I thought about what some of the philosophers I learned about in that class would think about this at a high level, they’d probably hate it. But hey, Kalshi didn’t exist in ancient Greece – who knows what Aristotle would have thought if he could have bet on rainfall.

Εβίβα!

Pictured: the cover of seminal vaporwave album Flower Shoppe by Macintosh Plus, and perhaps how the artwork’s subject, Helios, would feel about being able to bet on high temperatures in Rhodes that day.