Citadel founder Ken Griffin pledged more than $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University on Sept. 30, the largest individual gift in the history of higher education. Much of the money will finance a new CMU campus in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood, expected to enroll its first students in 2028, pending regulatory approval—the next milestone to watch before the campus can open. Griffin framed the challenge facing universities as how to "reignite both the belief and the realization of the possibility of the American dream."

The pledge is an extraordinary act of philanthropy—yet a Fortune commentary published Oct. 11, less than two weeks after the announcement, argues that it also surfaces a question philanthropy by itself cannot settle: must stewardship wait until a fortune has been given away, or should conscience help shape how the fortune is made in the first place?

The columnist's answer is that it should—and that the question goes unasked largely because too much has come to be expected of Adam Smith's invisible hand. An economic mechanism, the argument runs, is being asked to perform a moral function it was never designed to perform: supplying a conscience.

Recalling an undergraduate course taught by Dr. Michael Smith, the author describes a lifelong engagement with Adam Smith's famous idea: that individuals pursuing their own interests in a free market can, without intending to, advance the interests of society as a whole. But Smith, the commentary notes, was a moral philosopher before he was an economist. Seventeen years before publishing The Wealth of Nations, he released The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book about sympathy, virtue, and people's obligations to one another. Its central figure is the "impartial spectator"—the imagined observer within each of us who judges our conduct as a fair-minded stranger would. "That is as good definition of conscience as I know," the author writes.

Smith understood that markets do not operate in a moral vacuum, the commentary continues. They depend on trust, on restraint, and on people who measure themselves by more than what the market will let them take. The invisible hand explains how self-interest can generate prosperity; it cannot say when enough is enough, or what successful people owe those who helped make their success possible.

The author emphasizes a strong belief in capitalism, crediting it with rewarding ingenuity, hard work, risk, and ambition, and with producing extraordinary prosperity. Yet the defense of economic self-interest has always carried an implicit bargain: if individuals are free to prosper, society prospers too. There are reasons to wonder whether that bargain is under strain. Federal Reserve data from the second quarter of 2026 show the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households holding roughly 69% of household wealth, while the bottom half hold just over 2%. And in a 2025 Gallup survey, only 15% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in big business.

No one builds a fortune alone, the commentary argues. Every great business rests on a foundation it did not create: schools that educated its employees and customers, courts that enforced its contracts, and the roads and networks that carried its goods and ideas. That foundation is inherited, not built from scratch. Many successful people have earned what they have, the author concedes; the harder question is whether benefiting so greatly from that foundation creates a responsibility to leave it stronger for whoever comes next.

Philanthropy usually arrives near the end of the story, once the fortune has been made. Conscience, by contrast, belongs earlier. It appears in how a business owner treats employees, how widely opportunity is shared, what an investor chooses to back, how a company treats the environment it draws from, and what values a family passes along with its money.

Some companies have tried to build that idea into the way they operate. Costco reported an average U.S. hourly wage of about $32 for hourly employees in 2025—roughly $46 once benefits are included—even as the company earned $8.1 billion in net income. Publix took a different route: founder George Jenkins believed employees should hold an ownership stake in the company they helped build, and today Publix remains the largest employee-owned company in the United States. Neither firm is a charity, and both are successful businesses. The point, the author writes, is that sharing prosperity need not be the enemy of creating it.

For those fortunate enough to accumulate far more than they will ever need, the commentary poses questions no financial statement can answer: What did I build? Whom did I help prosper? What did I return to the society that made my success possible? What did I leave stronger than I found it? Those questions, the author argues, take wealth seriously, recognizing the power it gives a person to improve the lives of others. Government cannot supply that conscience, and neither can the market—it has to come from within, precisely where Smith placed his impartial spectator.

The piece closes with a request to every executive, founder, and investor: add one question to the financial ones already being asked—"If this decision succeeds, who besides us will be better off?" Ask it when setting compensation, allocating capital, choosing investments, and deciding how employees share in the value they help create. Not every decision will benefit everyone equally, the author acknowledges, but the question itself belongs at the table.

Capitalism does not need to apologize for producing winners, the commentary concludes. But those who benefit most from it might ask more of themselves than capitalism asks of them. The invisible hand can help create extraordinary wealth; it cannot tell people what they owe one another. For that, it needs a conscience.

Fortune notes that the opinions expressed in its commentary pieces are solely those of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.