On Writing for Pay

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). i need to hug a horse. for some reason when I came to this thread this was the first comment I saw and without any context and before I look anywhere else I just want to concur in advance “ lest it diminish the reputation of academics as profit-rather-than-knowledge-seekers” Not following you. I make them pay me a salary, rather than working for free. So I guess that makes me a profit seeker, but I don’t see how that’s contradictory to being a knowledge seeker. It’s both – I like to do philosophy, and I get paid to do it. The two don’t contradict each other. Physicians want to heal the sick, but they also get paid – does this reduce them to “profit-seekers”? Of course not. They are both seeking to heal the sick and to make a living doing so. Profit and medicine can go along but they can evidently come apart. We wouldn’t want financial incentives alone to determine medical treatments. So it is a question of degree and where exactly things can come apart. Fine, but I don’t see how asking other people to pay you to write for them makes things come apart. Do you think Manne is writing false things in order to get paid? If not, then I don’t see the conflict of interest. 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. At least at Toronto (I know, not US), you only need prior approval (we all need to fill a form for all our paid activities at the end of the year) if it is a “Major Paid Professional Activity” in which you are dedicating more than 20 (full) days of the academic year for a single project or more than 45 days combined. Prizes, royalties, or other external rewards for your regular research activity are not considered paid activities (I think honoraria for lectures are excluded as well). I really doubt that one could build here a plausible COI case against someone who charges for some part of the content or for some perks at their Substack (though I have never navigated much on Substack, and never been a paid subscriber for anything). My recollection is that UNM policy was not very different when I was there, but this was a long time ago. I don’t actually think there is a CoI in most cases. But I think it’s sensible to err on the side of declaring things and making sure your employer actually is okay with it, especially if you’re actually getting a significant income from it. The whole point of CoI policies is that if in doubt, you disclose and get a neutral party to make a call – you don’t just self-police. 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? I don’t like paywalled journal articles because the money goes to the publisher, rather than the author. Substack paywalls go to the author. 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. I doubt that anyone seriously thinks Kate Manne is using Substack subscriptions to pay the bills. People know tenured professors make money 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). Could you give an argument for this? I find the claim literally extraordinary 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.) That seemed very clear to me from your post fwiw. 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.” As a point of interest, I’ve seen professional journalists actively object that it’s unethical for academics to write for free. (https://yasminnair.com/scabs-academics-and-others-who-write-for-free/). 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… “what’s the principle that explains where the line should be drawn,” It’s your employer’s conflict-of-interest policy (which is probably fine with it). 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? Yep, they do. They make more than double. And far more than double on the high end. So the above post is rather tone deaf. Europeans, especially UK, make chicken feed compared to Americans, and are also bogged down with admin far, far, beyond American academics’ admin. Would you mind linking to a source? (Not because I think you’re wrong: I’m completely confident you’re right and was about to look for a source myself before I saw your post.) As mentioned above, Europeans don’t face the massive loan debt that many American Ph.D.s do. You’re right about there generally being more admin for European academics, but the issue we’re discussing here is money. Sure, after often racking up well over $100,000 in loan debt for graduate school and sometimes facing medical bills that Europeans don’t have to deal with. I can’t speak for continental Europe, but the funding situation for grad school in philosophy is substantially worse in the UK than in the US. Since Kate Manne responded with a defense of her paywall in her latest post and several commentators questioned if there should be any limitations on monetizing public philosophy, I wrote a follow-up piece here, arguing that this amounts to what feminists have called trickle-down feminism that ends up harming women. I am happy to endorse that there are difficult edge cases about more precarious jobs, but do we really endorse it in the most extreme cases, where people write about oppression? I think we should act like Peter Singer in those cases and donate it, lest we look hypocritical. https://walterveit.substack.com/p/how-kate-mannes-feminism-hurts-women Thanks, I do find this case disgraceful. there seem to be a significant number of people up there that are just ew/ick This post is now missing and the other post has been anonymized. What happened? This thread is baffling. Philosophers aren’t wealthy. They do research and teaching, largely as a life of service, and plenty of them are sharp enough that they could have made far more money elsewhere if they’d gone chasing it. They didn’t. And now they’re being lectured for making a few quid on Substack? Walter Veit writes that philosophers “ought to donate this money to charitable causes.” That’s true only in the dull sense in which we all ought to hand everything over to Oxfam. If there’s anyone who gets to keep what they earn through a bit of industriousness, a philosopher scraping together beer money on Substack is very near the top of the list. The pile-on against Kate Manne is worse. She’s done a ton for feminism and social justice, and she’s getting slagged off over a small side hustle. Would the world be marginally better if she gave the proceeds away? Probably. Is she wrong to keep them? No. Is a diatribe about it warranted? Not remotely. Relative to what they could otherwise be doing, or people with similar amounts of education or expertise in their society, or whatever, this might be right. But if we’re restricting ourselves to people who work as philosophy professors for a living, my impression is that they are typically richer than almost all human beings alive today. I take it this is not a very interesting point for you, given your reference to “the dull sense in which we all ought to hand everything over to Oxfam.” But I don’t think there’s any cause for pretending the extreme wealth inequalities in the world don’t even exist and acting as if philosophers of all people are particularly poor. We aren’t. This. It’s important to point out, though, that compared to the vast majority of members of the animal kingdom, philosophers are very wealthy indeed. It’s true that we tend to carry more debt than other primates. We are more altruistic than the average animal, although we lag far behind male Hymenoptera (who have a kind of moral luck in this regard, in respect of their ploidy). Abstracting away from any single person and discussing the general case (and working in US dollars): (a) a full professor at an Ivy League university is going to be earning well into six figures ($200K-$300K on average, according to univstats.com, and anecdotally that sounds right). $200K p/a is in the top 5% of individual incomes in the US. I would call that ‘wealthy’. (b) a Substacker with “thousands of paid subscriptions”, which the top 20 or so philosophy blogs on Substack have, is getting a six-figure return, which is a bit more than ‘beer money’ or ‘a small side hustle’ – it would put the Substacker in the top 25% of individual US incomes (and the top ~10% of individual UK incomes) even without other employment. I have no problem with academics having Substack paywalls (again, unless their university does, which they’re unlikely to), nor indeed with successful academics being well paid, but we may as well be clear about the numbers if we’re going to discuss this issue. I’m not sure what to make (yet) of the more general issue about doing public philosophy behind paywalls, but Professor Veit is surely right that the only plausible sense in which Professor Manne’s substacking depends on subscribers is that she is only willing to continue doing it if there is sufficient economic return. To be clear, I’m not sure that’s a strike against Professor Manne–public philosophy is hard work, and why should she work for free?–but it makes no sense to pretend that she belongs to the class of substackers who write to make ends meet. A few pieces of information: as I often state, I comp anyone who asks with great pleasure, no questions asked. Low-income and student readers and some salaried academics on a tight budget take me up on this on a daily basis. I spend inordinate amounts of time working on my newsletter at the expense of other sources of income, such as taking on speaking engagements, so the opportunity cost is considerable. As to why I went paid after initially having decided not to for as long as I was salaried, I’ve explained this many times before. In my case, I have very little faith that my job protections will survive the Trump era given what I work on and teach. Taking on a demanding second job to protect my family in that scenario is not, in my view, unethical. A lot of this reads to me as how very dare a woman get paid for her time and expertise and labor, and honestly, it’s a predictable bore. Again, I don’t think it’s ethical for ANY tenured professors to monetize Substack for their own financial gain. Opportunity costs are real, but why should academics be expected to get rich of their knowledge, rather than share it freely given that they are already paid by their university? That harms the reputation of academia and all academics. And it creates harmful incentives among academics to pursue research that can make them personally rich. It’s more than “a little tasteless” as Quill Kukla described it. That you are funneling away money from actually undersupported women is especially distastefull, given a full-time Ivy League Professorship, and the description of your own income as undersupported. It’s upper-class white feminism that is ignorant of class and intersectionality, which has been frequently criticized as trickle-down feminism by other feminists, as I described in my criticism of your defense. Whether one hands out comps is irrelevant to my argument that it’s unethical to profit off writing for the public. I fully support creating a financial safety net, of course. Especially with a family in mind. I very much hope your job is secure! No doubt the current political situation is very unpredictable and stressful. But one should pledge in such situations to use the money for charitable ends instead if nothing happens. I think that would be the ethical thing to do. What evidence is there for the assertion that a professor putting some of their non-academic writing behind a subscription paywall “harms the reputation of academia and all academics”? I doubt very much that there is such an effect, but if you have evidence for it let’s see it. “but why should academics be expected to get rich of their knowledge” Are any academics actually getting rich off of Substack? I’d expect the ceiling to be equal to or less than what one might earn on philosophy book royalties– a few hundred here, maybe sometimes a few thousand there. There isn’t a large readership for much of what philosophy professors do. It’s a little more than you might think. The top 100 Substacks listed as “philosophy” (granted, not all are academic philosophy as we would define it) all have “hundreds” of paid subscribers; the top twenty have “thousands” of paid subscribers. A year’s subscription to a Substack is typically ~$60-$80, so 150 subscribers is around $10,000 per year, 1500 subscribers is around $100,000 per year. On this account a tenured philosopher who uses his weekends creating a “philosopher’s sculpture garden” at considerable cost to themselves as a place to reflect among artworks that inspire their philosophical thinking and making them an even better philosopher and then decides to either (a) charge an entrance fee to the garden or (b) sell their property must donate any profit from either options? From where do you derive this duty Walter? It’s not clear in the example whether the entrance fee or sale would cover the maintenance or construction of the garden. The question boils down to me on whether something is seen in conflict with one’s dedication to truth-over-profit. That is, public perception. And so I’d partly insist that this is an empirical question. I detail my view in more detail here: “In part, I view tenured professors as somewhat analogous to priests, who dedicate their lives to their religion, but instead to the pursuit of knowledge. If a priest chose to pursue ends in direct or indirect conflict to that, it damages the reputation of the clergy as a whole. Something similar could be said, perhaps, for members of the police. You are not technically “off the clock” even when your official work-time ends. You are are symbol for an institution. If some individuals of that institution act in ways that goes against that, which I think profit-seeking does since it has little to do with the search for truth, then the institution is harmed as a whole. And given the current rise (and probably historically common) of anti-science and anti-academia sentiments, I think that this would be really problematic.” https://walterveit.substack.com/p/why-richard-yetter-chappell-is-wrong Thanks, Walter—let me stipulate the case more precisely and do a bit of economics in the meantime (which you are familiar with). The entrance fee covers three things: (i) maintenance; (ii) what I give up by spending my weekends and holidays on the garden rather than on bike rides, friends, or writing a philosophy paper; (iii) on top of both, a surplus that I keep. None of this goes against my search for truth. In fact, it may be positively correlated with it. I take joy in my sculpture garden, have great ideas there, and so does everyone else who visits. It’s sort of inspirational. So on your own criterion—whether the activity is seen as conflicting with a dedication to truth over profit—the garden passes, and passes while profitable. Which already suggests your criterion isn’t tracking profit. If that is permissible—because I built the garden on my own time and on my own land, and the fee first recoups what it cost me—then Kate Manne may keep hers, since her defence is exactly that: her own time, and the speaking engagements she forgoes in order to write (instead of bike rides). Indeed her case is stronger than mine. I am asking you to treat forgone *pleasure* as a deductible cost; she is asking only that you treat forgone *income* that way. If mine counts, hers counts a fortiori. You cannot allow the deduction in my case and refuse it in hers. If instead the surplus must go, tell me which feature of the case generates the duty to give it up. If it is that a garden is not knowledge, then the cost-recovery point you raised in reply to me was beside the point from the start—costs would be irrelevant, and the duty would attach to knowledge sold at any price. But then it falls equally on book royalties, paid lectures, and commissioned columns. Do you condemn those too? If so, that is a much larger claim than the one you have been defending. If it is that a garden costs something to admit one more visitor whereas a post costs nothing, then the duty tracks marginal cost rather than academic employment—and being a professor drops out of your argument entirely. It would bind every seller of a non-rival good—music, ebooks, software—and exempt every seller of a rival one, tenured or not. And if it is reputational, note what follows. The wrong then scales with what is publicly visible—and Substack displays its rankings and its paywalls—rather than with anything the writer actually does. My garden with twelve visitors a year would have to be permissible simply because nobody sees it. Worse: on that ground, concealment discharges the duty exactly as well as donation does. A quietly monetised Substack, on your own account, does no reputational harm at all. If your principle is satisfied by discretion, it is not a principle about profit. Consider too the Substacker paid by a foundation on condition that the newsletter stays free. Same money but I don’t see how you can object—which locates the wrong in the visible paywall rather than in the income. And now suppose no patron steps forward, but there are readers who want the essays. On your view they should go unwritten, and those readers unserved, to spare us a reputational harm you have not yet shown exists. Note, finally, what has not once figured in your argument: the person who cannot pay. If access were the ground, that reader would be the whole case—and Manne’s practice of comping anyone who asks, that is, giving a free subscription on request, would be a full answer to you. Nobody is excluded. But you told her comps were “irrelevant to my argument.” So you have certified it yourself. Your reason is the standing of the institution, which is a different claim, and an empirical one that you have so far only asserted. In this thread, Regular Reader asked you for evidence of the reputational harm and has not received any. Which brings me to the priesthood. What would generate a duty to divest is a vow of poverty—and mendicant orders do take one. I have not. In Germany I have twice sworn oaths as a professor of philosophy (Bavaria, Hamburg), both to the state: to discharge my civil service duties, and to uphold the constitution and the laws governing my appointment. Neither mentions poverty, and neither ordains me. And the state that administered those oaths has already ruled on this question. German Nebentätigkeitsrecht regulates outside earnings by professors in some detail, and it treats *schriftstellerische und wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit* far more permissively than your analogy would allow—writing is precisely the category it declines to fence in. My employer—the City of Hamburg—has thought about what my salary buys and what it does not. Its answer is not the one you give. So: from where do you derive the duty? Thanks Matthew! Great examples. Part of the question, of course, is whether the activities actually take place outside of regular work hours. In practice, it’s hard to know for blogs. Easier in a case like a garden, but all involving great uncertainty. Given the empirical evidence from the comment section that many find it unobjectionable, I’m no longer confident there is an ethical duty. As several people have attested, they do find paywalls for public academic writing distasteful. Not necessarily immoral. But not great either. Thus, I’ve changed my confidence on how likely it is for academics visibly seeking profit outside of academia to undermine the reputation of academia, rather than perhaps particular individuals. For a utilitarian, like myself, it still seems somewhat unethical, but I was appealing to more general principles we could all formulate and indepently agree upon. If there is a risk here – of reducing the legitimacy of academia as a whole – it should probably be handled in the form of stricter forms of university regulations, how strict these constraints would be and so forth, especially given new forms of monetization in the online world, but now pragmatic considerations enter these processes that I am unable to comment on without detailed knowledge of existing regulations. Walter—thanks for your generous reply. Without any theory, I would say I side with you on the “taste” issue; I just do not see the impermissibility. The issue is close to my heart. I have been toying with various public philosophy initiatives, including a Substack. Together with a few others, we are trying to set up an actual public philosophy event space outside of the Uni Hamburg campus. Discussions with business leaders was that we are providing a public good and therefore it should be free and we need a financing model based on voluntary donations to cover costs and fees etc. but no one should be excluded because of a price. That defeats the purpose: we end up in our own educated elite echo chambers again. We were encouraged to find patrons who can use the space and events to further brand awareness etc. And the money we should try and bring in should also cover incomes and compensate us for our spare time. The main point was that sustainable public education requires a sustainable revenue generation model and that must be incentive compatible. I am really struggling to see how the discussion reads “as how very dare a woman get paid for her time and expertise and labor.” The post and discussion so far has not been about women getting paid to write and expertise and labour, but academics in general. This whole discussion is a demonstration that everything is so much simpler if you’re a centrist capitalist. You want to produce some good or service that someone else wants and sell it to them, without harming anyone else in the sale? They want to buy at a mutually agreeable price? You either have defined work hours so that it’s clear you’re doing this on your own time, or your employer is happy with it? Good for you. If after the transaction you feel you have too much money, try Give Directly. (You don’t have to be a centrist capitalist. The broader point is that this whole conversation seems to turn on very broad political-economy questions rather than anything specific to academics on Substack.) I agree. But most philosophers who have a public profile don’t promote centrist capitalism. They take the high road, demanding more equality and solidarity from society at large. Capitalizing on one’s supposed moral superiority, raises ethical issues, imo. While I don’t think that the broader public loses confidence in philosophy when you get paid for public pieces (the opposite is as intuitive, given the widespread distrist in any public institutions: look a philosopher who doesn’t need public subsidies, who plays our game), the double standard does: I profit personally from lecturing you to become less egotistical. Let us call this the donkey problem (after the symbol of the Democratic Party): I claim to carry the burden of the oppressed but have actually been living in a sanctuary my whole life. It is this hypocrisy that enrages many people, especially from blue collar backgrounds, who have a tough time making a living. I agree that Singer makes it right (although I disagree philosophically with a lot of what he argues for). If you want to be the moral voice of society, you need to act like it too. There is of course an irony in writing ‘public philosophy’ that is behind a paywall. Aren’t these (well-paid) professors aiming to be ‘public intellectuals’, sharing their knowledge and understanding with the public? If so, they should remove obstacles (paywalls) that stop people from reading their work. The problem is all the work academics do but aren’t paid for, while publishers profit handsomely from it. This seems a way to circumvent the cartel. If a philosopher writes a philosophical column for a newspaper/magazine, should they also reject any royalties? Or is it unethical even then, unless the newspaper/magazine is free? It seems to me that the answer in both cases is generally ‘no’, and I’m not sure what makes that situation different from the paid Substack case, but I’d welcome some argument to the contrary. I take the the idea would be: if the philosopher had the option to publish in the same venue without a paywall but without royalties/payment, then they should do that. not endorsing it. So maybe the resistance people have has to do with whether the choice to make it paywalled is downstream from the venue I’d just like to plump for a position that is kind of the opposite of Justin’s, though I find his compelling. There the idea is, if you can get people to read it for free, great, if you can get them to pay, even better. Permissible either way. I personally think it’s permissible either way but distasteful of kind of weird, even, perhaps bigheaded, to put it behind a paywall. It rubs me the wrong way. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Unless you really need the money in which case say so. But if you don’t need the money, go ahead and charge people, but know I’m judging you for not just giving your thoughts away. It’s something to do with the ethos of philosophy I think. Maybe I read too many stories of Socrates. The people I look up to most are the best writers who also make their work available to everyone. I’m not saying you are acting wrongly if you do that, but I will judge you. There’s already a lot being debated about the ethics of paywalling. I want to talk about economics and hopefully help outsiders make good financial decisions. Personally, I did subscribe to some Substackers but eventually stopped because they were being repetitive and banal (at least for an educated person like me). I want to question whether paying for multiple Substacks is better than buying an anthology with articles having passed peer-reviews. Let’s say you pay $250 a year for a few experts on Substack. That $250 could get you multiple anthologies containing more scholars’ articles on a topic you’re passionate or interested about. What about the benefits of accessible language? There is that benefit but many people I notice who subscribe to Substackers are already at the educational level where they can read journal articles anyway. Many paid subscribers are middle class people who have a college degree. There are also great secondary sources like some anthologies dedicated to the being accessible. I don’t see the epistemic worth in paying for a subscription as a layperson or a precariously employed scholar on Substack when there are better options. Unless you got the extra money to give away, then sure go ahead pay if you want. No offense to scholars but these are people’s hard earning money they could use to pay their bills or save for root canals instead. I like to also see the worth of philosophy being displayed when people are reading a philosophy book on the train or bus or at the airport and not just privately scrolling where nobody knows what you’re reading aside from a small community of Substackers or internet followers. These days (depending a bit on subfield) you can read a huge fraction of philosophy journal articles free on PhilPapers or PhilSciArchive in any case. The notion that the academy has a reputation for seeking knowledge rather than profit is just plain false. In fields where academics have economically valuable knowledge, professors routinely make lots of money as consultants to industry or government. (Consider computer science, mathematics, engineering, medicine, economics, business.) And it would be impossible for universities to hire people in those fields if they didn’t allow them to collect outside consulting fees. Professors create start-ups based on their research, and their universities are often partners. Moreover, universities often make partnerships with established corporations in lucrative fields, and universities often monetize patents etc. (Generally, I find that humanities professors have one view about how universities work, while other professors have a very different view. Unfortunately, the humanities professors are usually not tracking reality.) Absolutely; but of course when we start to get to serious money (think patents or start-ups, not consultancy fees) most universities do have policies to make sure that they get a good share of the return, given that the work was done on their dime. I actually don’t think it would be unreasonable in principle for a university to want a share of an author’s royalties on the same basis – I wrote Emergent Multiverse on Oxford’s (and Balliol College’s) salary, why shouldn’t they get a share of the income? – but of course in practice the amounts are too trivial to worry about in most cases, especially given how unpopular it would be. So far, this thread has focused on taking money for “public philosophy.” Following on Alyssa’s excellent remarks, I think the scope of the discussion should be expanded. In particular, I’d like to know why the thousands of (“well-heeled”) philosophers who consistently read and learn from the Dialogues on Disability series of interviews that I conduct with disabled philosophers (yeah, I know who many of you are) do not support it/me monetarily. Why do they feel entitled to read the interviews for free when they c/should compensate me for the labour that I put into it? How do they square doing so with their professed progressive or radical politics, especially given my situation with respect to employment in the field? Here is the blurb that appears in the conclusion of each interview and is included in every single promo for the series: “From April 2015 to May 2021, Tremain coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling Tremain to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.” Please feel free to pay me for the knowledge that I make available to you by subscribing to the Dialogues on Disability Patreon.