How is this different from any other profession? If a doctor practices in a poor community, is she ethically obligated to not buy a nice house?
Hi, I don’t think there is a Universal Rule. In a free market, the purchaser of the goods, or in this case, the patient, will have to decide the degree of offense taken at someone’s personal lifestyle and financial choices and then decide how to act upon that offense. You might not approve of the purchases made by the only available doctor who buys the most expensive home in a poverty stricken area. I would then consider this a costs/benefits analysis. Assuming the doctor – the only health care provider in my area – is a good medical provider, my question then would be: “What personally benefits me more? Seeing this offensive doctor and knowing she makes financial choices that are thoughtless at best and ethically reprehensible at worst, or caring for my health?” If it were me, I would see the doctor, although I think their personal financial choices a tasteless show of wealth and also to be personally offensive. But you can’t legislate taste. To risk my health would be more offensive to me than the doctor’s evidently callous use of her earnings. One final question. Does this physician do anything at all to redeem her poor choice in exhibiting luxuries to a patient base that can’t afford the same luxuries? Does accepting a job in an area in which no other doctor would practice earn this doctor any goodwill? Thanks for your discussion with me. P.S. I wrote this response framing the dilemma as having only one doctor available in a underserved, poor community. If there’s another doctor available, there would be a healthy competition. That’s also part of a free-market. It can help weed out incompetence and the market decides who is worthy of support.
Hi Bexwhitt, If I’m reading your statement correctly (and I may not be interpreting it precisely) it sounds as though her keeping two houses is, as far as you’re concerned, not good. What about that do you find unacceptable, if that is indeed what you’re conveying.
Patreon is a good thing as it helps creative types do their stuff and have money to live as well. in my opinion, she is rubbing her wealth into the kind faces of the people who give her Patreon money. I’m not actually familiar with this lady from what I gather she’s a great talent but so what.
Thanks for your reply. I see what you’re saying. But how is it that in living her life in the manner she wishes, that her life then becomes an affront to people who also live their lives as they please? Since you must also have a source of income which allows you to use the web via a computer, could that not also seem to be “rubbing” your wealth into the faces of people who could not do the same? In a free market, we all support each other: For example: I bake bread, and then you offer your chosen skill as a marketable profession, and we then trade skills, via a commonly agreed upon unit. The common unit is merely a representative token; in the Western world the agreed upon value is usually represented in the worth of the “dollar.” When viewed abstractly, aside from our emotional attachments, we begin to see that nothing has really changed since trading in cave-dwelling days. Every monetary transaction is a contract: You and I exchange objects of value according to what we agree is fair. Nothing is forced and each transaction is viewed as mutually agreeable. I don’t know of another system whereby all parties are able to represent their own interests in such an equitable way. I believe that this is what Ms. McConnell is doing. Thanks for discussing this with me.
*Terms and conditions apply. Only valid for a small part of the western world. Other currencies are available.
I would query whether this is the case with patreon. As you asked earlier do artists have any obligation to patreon givers or other patrons?
Is there any right to an expectation on the patrons’ part that the artist will do anything particular or anything at all in ‘return’ for the money provided?
I would suggest that there is not. The patron provides the artist with funds for the artist to do with as she wishes on the basis that the patron likes or is at least intrigued by the artist’s work and wishes to provide the artist with means to produce more works but without any intention to create an obligation on the artist to in fact produce any work.
If there is such an expectation I would suggest that is a different category of relationship, more akin to commissioning works from an artist.
The place for that sort of thing would seem to be kickstarter.
The patron is of ourse free to choose to no longer support the artist if they don’t like the direction the artist’s work takes or feel the artist isn’t producing sufficient work.
None of that is intended to argue with your point that whether McConnell has sufficient money to buy and support two houses is irrelevant to her eligibility to seek or receive funds via Patreon - just to point out that not all monetary transactions are contractual or at least not contractual without going into extremes of reinterpretation of legal theory to the point where we might as well be speaking different languages.
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Point taken. My use of “contract” would actually lend itself to your definition, in that the patron provides funds and the artist uses them to practice art. However, this contract is limited; there are no expectations of a preconceived end point or product or even a return on the patron’s investment, for that matter. Another example of a “contract” represented in a monetary exchange could be something as superficial or simple as my buying a bottle of water from you for a dollar. In essence, we have “contracted” or agreed to that exchange. I can walk away with the water, legally. The acceptance of the dollar on your part is representative of our agreement and you will not have an expectation of either me drinking the water or perhaps watering a plant with it. Our obligation ends with the exchange. Similarly, a patron is, by agreement, providing funds to further the artist’s work. The nexus of our debate was that we all have to have some means of survival and if the artist, in their means of surviving, should be held to a standard that is not offensive to their patrons, in essence extending their artist’s obligation to the patron, beyond the patrons’ monetary support. In discussing that point, I agree with your statement “The patron provides the artist with funds for the artist to do with as she wishes on the basis that the patron likes or is at least intrigued by the artist’s work and wishes to provide the artist with means to produce more works but without any intention to create an obligation on the artist to in fact produce any work.” Or to limit the amount of real estate they own. Thanks for discussing your ideas with me.
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I agree with your statement: “*Terms and conditions apply. Only valid for a small part of the western world. Other currencies are available.” The dollar is a symbol of a certain amount of labor which is used to produce it. It’s a fluid unit of measure which can be easily converted to other units, which also represent the amount of labor it takes to assign the other units their value. For example, if you are able to lift 150 pounds of bricks in one hour and your coworker can lift only 50 pounds of bricks in one hour, you will likely command a higher wage than your co-worker since you can produce more labor (more productivity) in the same amount of time. The dollar will remain a static representation of labor generally and competition will determine your higher wage. That is also a free market’s goal. Competition produces incentive for improvement. The 50 pound lifter might be a genius. And they may decide that instead of remaining tied to a low wage and life of toil, they will invent a teleportation device to move thousands of pounds of bricks in one hour with zero carbon output. And then, they reap the rewards of their brain power and buy a house, unseen, all the way across the country.
Well, no. It wouldn’t. That is a change of definition in that you are now stating that the artist uses the funds to make art. My point is that there is no such expectation or requirement. The artist may or not use them to make art.
Such an exchange is of course a contract. What makes it a contract depends on your legal requirements. In common law jurisdictions, to quote trite law, one needs offer, acceptance and consideration. So you offer to buy my water for a dollar, I accept your offer and you give me the dollar which constitutes consideration.
Other jurisdictions do without the consideration and require only reciprocally binding obligations - in the dollar water case, I agree to give the water if you give me a dollar, you agree to give me a dollar if I give you the water. We are then both bound to fulfill our promise if the other fulfills theirs.
Such legal systems make life a lot easier for themselves even if less romantic - no peppercorn rents, for example.
But in either case, at least one requirement for a contract is mutual obligation. No mutual obligation, not a contract (may be all sorts of other things but not a contract).
The reason I’m being pedantic about this is that there are people who appear to genuinely want to reduce all human interaction to some form of contract or other.
Contracts have their place but they are not the only form of human interaction.
I concede to your well-defined thought. I do thank you for pointing out that I ventured in judicially treacherous seas. I will try to find a term* that doesn’t hold so much legal water. *Would calling the exchange is a “non-binding mutual agreement” work? That might remove any implied actionable penalties that the word “contract” might imply, should some future obligation not be met.
I don’t know. Is there any mutual agreement? I don’t think there is. I have no idea what Patreon’s terms are but if the situation is as we posit it, i.e. no obligation on the artist’s part to do anything in particular with the money, then it would seem to be a straightforward gift.
In any event whatever it is, we’re agreed that people making cool stuff can use money made available to them to do with as they wish to buy nice houses if they want to.
Now I should probably go see what cool stuff this artist makes.
What I was trying to say was that it’s not the western world where the dollar is universal but only the US. The rest of us deal in Euros, Pounds, etc.
Ditto.
Got it, thanks.
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