On Writing for Pay
Some philosophy professors, on top of all the work they do for the universities at which they’re employed, write public philosophy, and sometimes such writing is on the Substack platform, with some or all of what they write available only to paid subscribers. Is there anything wrong with this?
Walter Veit (Reading) thinks there is something wrong with it, and makes his case here.
Richard Chappell (Miami) responds here, arguing that we shouldn’t criticize philosophers for paywalling their writing.
I’d go further and say, not only is there nothing wrong with it—it’s great!
If you can convince a whole bunch of people that, of all the things in this world they could otherwise be spending money on, they should spend it on reading your philosophical thoughts, good for you.
Your subscribers, in virtue of paying for your writing, are probably going to pay more attention to it than they otherwise would, and this attention begets further attention to you and your interlocutors—and to philosophy—in self-reinforcing ways. That people are paying for your writing is an easily legible signal to others that what you’re doing is valuable. You’re doing philosophy, so it’s a signal that philosophy is valuable, that philosophy is worth paying attention to.
Further, a culture’s valuing of philosophy, and so the cultivation and maintenance of a public constituency for philosophy, is helpful for the continued existence of philosophy programs (which are often under threat in part owed to the perception of their lack of value), which is generally good.
“But,” you might say, “philosophy isn’t the only thing that’s valuable. These writers could, as Veit suggests, charge a subscription fee and donate it to an organization that, say, saves lives. That would produce even more good.”
It might. But, while sometimes it is wrong to choose to act in way that will produce less good than one otherwise could, you probably do not really believe that it is always wrong to do so. You’d need to make a case for why this “suboptimal” choice is wrong, and that is going to be quite hard to do without thereby condemning many other kinds of actions you think are perfectly morally acceptable.
“But,” you might say, “what if everyone did this? Then there’d be no freely available public philosophy for people to read!”
I’m not saying it would be good if everyone did this. But “x is permissible only if it would be good if everyone x’d” is not a rule anyone really believes.
“But,” you might say, “isn’t it unfair that some people won’t be able to afford to pay for some of these subscriptions?” Yes. But we typically do not think acts which produce goods that are unfairly inaccessible to some are thereby wrong. Both the distribution of medical care and food around the world is unfair, but we don’t think this makes it wrong for doctors to doctor or farmers to farm.
Now you might not like how, in my responses to the foregoing three objections, I relied on what people tend to believe. But keep in mind that philosophers are people, too, that we are discussing professional ethics or norms here, and that for any tenets of professional ethics or norms there has got to be sufficient consensus among those subject to them.
Discussion welcome.
I don’t object that paywalls must always be bad. However, if academics insist on them, I argue that philosophers ought to donate this money to charitable causes, lest it diminish the reputation of academics as profit-rather-than-knowledge-seekers. That it might be better to have a paywalled blog than none at all is only true if this doesn’t damage the reputation of academia. And I think it has. The reputation of academia and academics is fragile as it is, and we should not harm it further, we should strengthen it.
See here
https://walterveit.substack.com/p/is-it-unethical-for-academics-to?
How is this insistence compatible with this from your original article:
“I would have no problem if professors in tenured positions asking for paid subscriptions made plainly clear that they are keen to supplant their university income. At least that would be honest.”
(I have a lot of time for the view that it is immoral to say or imply that you need the money to life, if in fact you have a comfortable academic salary already.)
That statement came in relation to asking for paid subscriptions in the absence of paywalls (case 1). Anyone could still read your public philosophy for free in that case. Still a bit problematic, but at least no that blatantly damaging to the imagine of academia, since we’re not deceiving the public here about requiring the money to write blogs.
In case 2, I discuss paid subscription in combination with paywalls, which I think sets the bar higher.
Thanks, that makes sense (not sure I agree, but I see the distinction now).
The original posts, and Justin’s comments, mostly seem to treat this as a matter of individual morality. But I actually think it’s something you need to raise with your employer. At least in the US, academics are generally full-time salaried employees (at least September-May) and will be bound by a contractual conflict-of-interest policy that will require them to declare, and get approval for, other paid work they carry out. I’m fairly sure writing on Substack counts.
Now, at least in my experience universities usually have a generous policy of allowing faculty to do fairly large amounts of consultancy work, and I would anticipate that they would be similarly lenient towards Substack. (Though I haven’t actually tried, since I don’t have a Substack and don’t plan to get one.) And I am legalistic and libertarian enough to think that if your employer is content that your Substack activity isn’t getting in the way of the teaching, research, and service that they actually pay you for, there’s nothing wrong with your being paid for it. (There might well be something wrong with you falsely creating the impression that you need the money, if you’re already well paid.)
But equally, if your university decides that it isn’t happy with you creating paywalled material, I think that’s a defensible call for them to make. As some level, this is the price we pay for not having fixed hours.
How is receiving income from Substack substantially different from receiving royalty income from a book publication? I don’t think most faculty in the US require prior approval for the latter.
Interesting question. Immediate thoughts:
(i) the books academic get royalties for are usually (not always) explicitly understood as part of the research output you’re being paid for, so the work you do writing it is something your university supports. (I don’t think anyone is saying that universities actually pay academics to write paywalled substack posts.)
(ii) at a more legalistic level, royalties are explicitly excluded from CoI rules at places I’ve worked, whereas subscription income from a website isn’t.
(iii) if I was a bestselling novelist who received meaningful royalties and/or advances from my novels, I think I would declare that on my CoI return and estimate the number of hours I spent on it.
Academics who work for state colleges and universities in New Jersey are free to do paid work when they are acting in their “scholarly capacity”. So this includes getting royalties for scholarly books, getting paid to appear on podcasts, and (usually) getting paid to speak.
Exceptions are triggered if you’re being paid in a way that generates a conflict of interest (e.g. the payment could be perceived as quid pro quo). And there are some other prohibitions wrt gambling and cannabis. E.g. I helped develop a cannabis certificate program at my school after NJ legalized adult use cannabis. This implied that I couldn’t get paid for speaking at events sponsored by the NJ cannabis industry. Other conflicts might occur if a philosopher writes a paper arguing that some medical thing is ethical to use, and then gets paid by the company developing that thing to give a talk. There are pretty strict constraints on paid consultancy work (e.g. you can’t as a state employee get paid by a company seeking a state contract, etc.)
So there are a bunch of rules, which are usually pretty clear and common sensical. A paywalled substack would probably fall within scholarly capacity.
But you need to declare the payments you get for your outside scholarly capacity work each year.
“But,” you might say, “isn’t it unfair that some people won’t be able to afford to pay for some of these subscriptions?”
Yes. But presumably these subscriptions are cheaper than any non-open-access papers people might occasionally publish!
The public does not read journal articles. The comparison class is other work in public philosophy. In any case, academics object to paywalls of journal articles, why suddenly be in favour of paywalling PUBLIC philosophy?
loooking forward to sci-substack-hub and lib-stack-gen helping out the financially challenged …
I’m thankful for Walter writing his post, as it reflects thoughts I’ve had myself for a while. The position that paywalling your substack as a tenured academic is unethical seems to be in the minority, so I’ll add some further considerations here.
As Walter writes, “And this is even more true for professors asking for money from people that sit in far more precarious financial situations than themselves.” – This is probably my biggest bone to pick with this practice. Philosophers who paywall their articles regularly appeal to the underpaid nature of philosophical work. As Manne wrote in her latest post: “Currently, fewer than 8% of you are paid subscribers, which places me in the large percentage of female and feminist contributors who are, to be candid, not getting enough support for our labor.”
But this appeal strikes me as being in bad faith, because the authors (again, constraining this criticism to only those authors who are tenured academics at notable institutions) are exactly of that rare group who are being supported for their labor, via their stable academic position + full-time salary. Why don’t these authors donate their subscription revenue to those philosophers who are actually contingent, underpaid, and insecurely-employed, of whom there are a tremendous amount? There are so many incredibly talented people, including women and feminists, who have either left the profession entirely or labor on in incredibly precarious, part-time positions, who would actually benefit, perhaps significantly, from additional funding to give them increased security.
There also seems to be an additional irony here, that those precariously-employed academics are the ones producing public philosophy without any compensation, fully publicly available, in the hopes that it might enhance their CV and job portfolio, all to help them get the kind of job tenured Ivy league profs have. (They need to have all their work publicly available, so that committees can peruse it, etc.)
My last contention is somewhat related to Justin’s point: “That people are paying for your writing is an easily legible signal to others that what you’re doing is valuable. You’re doing philosophy, so it’s a signal that philosophy is valuable, that philosophy is worth paying attention to.”
Isn’t it a better sign of the value of universities that professors who are granted secure, adequately lucrative employment, create publicly-accessible analysis that helps the public think better and more deeply about the world? Shouldn’t we want better public support for universities as institutions – precisely on the grounds that what the general public often sees as bloated salaries and needless expenditure actually provides public goods – rather than encouraging private support for philosophical heroes? I actually think many people in the general public already think that “philosophy” is valuable (see how successful Ryan Holiday’s books on Stoicism here, or the popularity of philosophy among Silicon Valley types), but they think that universities are a waste. I think having people pay already-well-known philosophers for their work contributes to that sense.
Finally, note that I say all of this as someone who does pay for Kate Manne’s substack, precisely because I think her work is interesting and worth reading. (Also, I think both of the things I’ve said hold, despite that Kate often clarifies that she’ll provide free access to those who specifically tell her they can’t afford to support her work. I don’t think that policy adequately mitigates the criticisms I’ve made, but it does deserve to be mentioned.)
(I clearly have too many thoughts about this, but one final one — to summarize and put together the two considerations I’ve raised above, I feel it’s at the least very sad that the most successful members of our profession see their production of public philosophy as somehow not part of the job for which they’re already paid.
I’ve always thought one of the coolest things about being a very successful academic was that people knew your work, and that you were able to share it with them – rather than being a ‘side quest,’ I’ve thought of it as a natural extension of the profession, and a way to share the exceptional good fortune you have as someone with one of the best jobs in the world with many people who aren’t as lucky.)
To borrow from Matt Brown’s question to me: what do you think about academics who write bestselling books and get substantial income from them? (Not many philosophy examples, but Dennett would qualify, for instance.)
In such a hypothetical scenario, do said academics typically crowdfund the money to get a stipend to write those bestselling books, trading on the sense that writers exist in financially precarious positions and need support?
The point is not just about asking, in abstract, if philosophers ought to be able to get paid for our work outside universities. To my mind, what is ethically quesetionable is the premise, loosely offered by some academic Substack writers (or at least, implied), that one’s labor is somehow unsupported without a paywall.
But to some degree, maybe the premise is true. Maybe academics would feel less inclined to paywall their work and treat it as a side gig if universities would properly recognize public work on CVs for tenure promotion, etc.
Almost all academic philosophy is funded in a manner that is worse than paywalls: taking the money away from taxpayers, without their consent. This includes many taxpayers whose life would clearly be better if they had a larger share of their income available for their primary needs, at the expense of a little academic philosophy. Surely, it is preferable to be paid by consenting individuals.
This may not refute the position that paywalling public philosophy is unethical, but those who hold this position should think a little more carefully about how they want to get paid for their work: exclusively by non-consenting individuals? (If they do want to get paid – there may be a few heroes who are willing to self-fund their work in its entirety.)
Of course, it is a clear ethical violation if you write your paywalled public philosophy during hours funded by taxpayers. But that issue seems to be separate from Walter Veit’s argument.
Taxpayers express consent when they vote.
Sometimes, for some people, perhaps. And you still haven’t justified taxing non-voters for philosophy.
Surely that’s just the general issue of how to think about taxation of nonvoters. They didn’t get a say in funding philosophy, to be sure. But they didn’t get a say in renewing the US’s nuclear deterrent, either.
I don’t see how it’s much different from the big general issue of justifying taxation of voters. But maybe we don’t have the space here to rehearse 400 years of political philosophy on the topic.
My point is that regardless of your justification of taxation in general, it’s clearly not a good way to fund everything, especially if a more ethical alternative is available (direct funding by individuals).
The options are not (as Richard Chappell suggests): Either paywalled public philosophy or no public philosophy at all. There is a 3rd option: write freely available public philosophy. The point that struck me most about Walter’s piece is the hypocrisy of some on Substack who claim that they need the subscription fees to ‘build a community’. Well, the community would be bigger without paywalls. Don’t we as writers of public philosophy wish for an audience that is as wide as possible? The argument: make people pay, then they will value it (philosophy) more, belongs in the “How to make sales” manual. This is just another instance of the neoliberal malaise: monetize everything (Trump is a great exponent, so is his friend Infantino). Socrates didn’t charge for his services, but the Sophists did. Schopenhauer said: Some live off philosophy, and some live for philosophy. If you are precariously employed, then, by all means, use paid subscriptions. But for a well-off philosopher to claim to their subscribers that they need the money is shameless greed.
[Walter mentions a 4th option: you only rise in the rankings at Substack if you have paid subscribers. But why use Substack? You can use other platforms (WordPress). So, I’m ignoring the 4th option. BTW, all my public philosophy is freely available.]
Huh, not sure how you got that impression from my post. (I thought I was pretty explicit in multiple places that I think writing public philosophy for free is ideal — but supererogatory.)
I do think there’s something odd (and funny) about an author who believes that their work is very important for justice issues using a paywall, e.g. Manne. Perhaps these authors don’t actually believe their work is important? (This is probably true—that their work isn’t important—with the exception of Singer. Maybe there’s a couple more philosophers to toss in there, but he’s Singer’s the most obvious exception.)
Is the concern about (1) the paywall itself, or that (2) academics are generating income from a side-revenue, or both? Those are distinct issues. (I assume these issues aren’t aimed at only philosophers, as if we have a special obligation here.)
On (1) paywalls:
I know many academics, incl. philosophers, have published in Wired, The Atlantic, and other publications that have paywalls. We don’t usually get any payment for that, though I suppose some articles might be commissioned (but not mine).
Those articles can have special, targeted reach given their subscriber demographics, e.g., tech leaders and policymakers. So, there could be some justification for that, e.g., those readers might not pay much attention if it were a random free article on Substack, Medium, whatever.
Personally, I’d favor non-paywalled publications for maximum reach, which is why I try not to write for Wired et al. anymore. The Conversation is exceptional in that regard; they publish under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can republish their stuff for free, which amplifies reach by at least an order of magnitude.
On (2) side-revenue:
You don’t know the financial situation of different academics, who also have different work situations, e.g., at a public school vs. private vs. think tank or other kinds of orgs in different legal jurisdictions around the world. So, I’m skeptical we can make any broad conclusions here.
Maybe some writers really do need the money, given their life situation. Or maybe they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of extra writing if not for some financial benefit. Or maybe they want to target a specific audience that’s behind the paywall. And so on.
I suspect that at the bottom of this ethics “debate” is a claim that academics shouldn’t earn any more money than is necessary to keep them in the job, and that they should be selfless and do a lot of extra work for free, like public writing. If so and given how the world is, that’s just nuts. As a wise person once said, “Worry about yourself.”
My near daily substacks are freely available not behind a pay wall. Only if you want to comment below my post do you have to pay membership. And that works as intended; my time otherwise devoted to thread moderating has been freed up for scholarship.
Bioethicist here. I get paid for my consulting services by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, federal grant review panels. I don’t see much difference from the topic at hand.
Exactly. Academics can wear “different hats” throughout the day.
But some (or many?) academics take their university job as their whole identity, whether it’s a point of pride or unhealthy obsession or overdeveloped sense of one’s mission in the world, etc. And this can make them insensitive to how many others see the same job.
Also, what about part-time or adjunct academics? Should they also be barred from side-income via public writing? If not, what’s the principle that explains where the line should be drawn, where it’s ok to put the “integrity of academia” at risk (if that’s really at stake)?
If the principle is connected to money, even the pay for full-time tenured positions varies wildly, and some may have a legitimate need for extra income. For instance, they may live in geographies with higher costs of living, or they may have more dependents to care for, or any number of reasons in the private lives of people we know nothing about…
I want to throw another consideration into the mix that is peripherally related to this. I’ve noticed a bit of a split between Americans and Europeans on such issues. Quite often, I don’t think Europeans understand the extent to which Americans are subsumed by the massive debt economy here in the USA. Even American professors, if they aren’t from wealthy backgrounds, are often juggling payments due on a number of different things. So yes, while it might be noble to offer all thoughts to everyone free of charge, asking academics (especially in the USA) to comply with a university paycheck-only livelihood is, in my opinion, too ascetic a demand in practice. Financial needs are a very personal thing that affect everyone differently, and if someone is charging to read their Substack then they may need the extra money, and it’s not for us to speculate as to whether they are using the money for frivolous luxuries or something we might be less inclined to wag our fingers about.
Don’t professors in the US earn, on average, much more than their European peers in real terms?