This comment puzzled me at first. I agree with the principle behind it, but I don’t think the conclusion follows.
The principle seems to be: if everyone had full knowledge of the utility they owed to every other person’s actions, and there were a mechanism for frictionlessly negotiating a sort of blackmail (I’ll stop doing it unless I get compensated exactly for the utility I give others, out of principle), then what people end up getting paid is in some ideal sense the proper amount. I feel like this probably represents some sort of optimality under an implied expressed utility. I may have mangled my economics significantly here.
So, saying that someone is receiving money to do charitable work ought to be underpaid if they want to feel any part of the charity is morally due to them, just means underpaid in the highly theoretical sense I tried to outline above. Their moral credit should probably equal the amount by which they’re underpaid.
I don’t think it makes sense to argue that you should avoid being funded (well enough to be comfortable financially) if you do work that’s thought of as charitable. But I suppose you should be suspicious of your own self-serving bias about how much good you’re doing, the higher your stipend.
This comment puzzled me at first. I agree with the principle behind it, but I don’t think the conclusion follows.
The principle seems to be: if everyone had full knowledge of the utility they owed to every other person’s actions, and there were a mechanism for frictionlessly negotiating a sort of blackmail (I’ll stop doing it unless I get compensated exactly for the utility I give others, out of principle), then what people end up getting paid is in some ideal sense the proper amount. I feel like this probably represents some sort of optimality under an implied expressed utility. I may have mangled my economics significantly here.
So, saying that someone is receiving money to do charitable work ought to be underpaid if they want to feel any part of the charity is morally due to them, just means underpaid in the highly theoretical sense I tried to outline above. Their moral credit should probably equal the amount by which they’re underpaid.
I don’t think it makes sense to argue that you should avoid being funded (well enough to be comfortable financially) if you do work that’s thought of as charitable. But I suppose you should be suspicious of your own self-serving bias about how much good you’re doing, the higher your stipend.