Paywalls are OK

You don't have to do supererogatory work for free

Walter Veit thinks it is unethical for academics to monetize Substack:

I do not believe paywalls for the public writing of professors are ethical. They violate many of the values that most of us academics usually stand up for.

The very point of being a public intellectual in academia, of public philosophy or popular science, is to educate and inform the public. One of the biggest debates in academia concerns the problem of paywalled journals. Almost all of us oppose the profit-driven nature of this enterprise, which prevents the widespread distribution of knowledge, especially in developing countries. Research, academics almost universally agree, should be freely available. For knowledge is a common good that humanity should share.

It’s good to find a way to see our research freely shared, e.g. via open-access journals or repositories like PhilArchive, especially when it costs us nothing.¹ But we aren’t obliged to record and share our classroom lectures, conference talks, or philosophical banter over drinks. Nor is it generally considered unethical for professors to give paid talks, to write op-eds for paywalled newspapers, or to publish a book commercially. So we aren’t obliged to freely share our every academic output. Walter suggests that “using one’s paid university time to write a blog that one then asks others to pay for” amounts to double-dipping. But then why isn’t the same true of writing a trade book?²

Personally, I am (like many academics) a big fan of open-access publication. I do think it’s better to make one’s writing freely available, which is why I personally paywall very few posts (and none that I consider important). I’d encourage other academic bloggers to do likewise. But since they don’t have any obligation to blog at all, I don’t see how it could be “unethical” to do something better than baseline, like writing a post and making it available only to those who consider it worth paying for.

The argument in short:

1. It’s supererogatory for professors to blog about their areas of expertise.

2. Paywalled expert blogging is better than not blogging at all.

3. If an act is optional, and charging for it is better than not doing it at all, then charging for it is permissible.

4. So paywalled blogging by professors is permissible.

Beware Prohibiting the Imperfectly Good

Criticizing Kate Manne in particular, Walter continues:

I cannot shake the feeling that there is something deeply problematic about placing articles on feminism behind a paywall when lower-income women, who are even more likely to suffer from discrimination, are less able to afford access to them.

Here’s a possible method for shaking that feeling: Reflect on whether there’s anything deeply problematic about failing to write articles about feminism at all. Assuming that’s permissible (I’ve never seen anyone criticized for this), next reflect on whether feminists should prefer that there be paywalled articles on feminism over nothing. If so, it seems rather incoherent to selectively criticize just the option that you regard as better!

Now there are some cases with this curious structure, as seen in Horton’s “All or Nothing Problem”. It would be wrong to gratuitously save only one of two children at the cost of your arms if you could have saved both for the same cost, even though it’s permissible to refuse to sacrifice your arms at all. (It’s a nice case for showing that avoiding wrongdoing isn’t the most important thing in the world. We should prefer that the agent wrongly save one rather than permissibly save none, after all. Though it would, of course, be better still for them to permissibly save both.) But the paywall case doesn’t seem anything like this. The suboptimality is not gratuitous,³ and no one can seriously claim that they’ve been grievously wronged by their lack of access to our writing.

Again, I do agree that it’s (even) better to make supererogatory efforts for free. But it’s a dangerous practice to criticize people for doing something that is imperfectly good, if they could instead avoid criticism by doing nothing at all. It perversely incentivizes the worse option.⁴ (Compare how billionaires are subject to more criticism if they donate to charity than if they don’t. Or how critics of “price gouging” punish entrepreneurs for turning a profit while remedying shortages.)⁵ As I explain in ‘Utopian Enemies of the Better’, removing options for supposed inadequacy while failing to guarantee better alternatives risks just making things worse. So until we have a plan for getting more philosophers writing on Substack for free, let’s not discourage what writing we can get.

1. Part of the objection to commercial journals is that they don’t contribute any real value compared to open-access alternatives, so the extra costs seem entirely gratuitous. I think it would be quite different if the profits went to compensating the journal editors, referees, and authors for their efforts. (Though I’d still prefer open access regardless.)

2. If anything, one’s Substack writing seems more likely than a trade book to be happening “off-the-clock” in one’s role as a private citizen rather than one’s role as a university employee. It can be a bit artificial to delineate what counts as “work hours” in academia, given how much flexibility we have over our schedules. But for what it’s worth, I think of my blogging as something I do in my leisure time, not part of my employment. (As far as I can tell, my employer doesn’t value my blogging in the slightest. If I used too much work time to do public philosophy instead of publishing research papers, the university might reasonably complain that I was not doing the job they hired me for!)

3. See also Slater’s Objections to Satisficing, esp. his “ratio” solution to the problem of determining when a slightly-more-expensive better option should be regarded as obligatory.

4. The key questions to consider: If forced to choose between acting perfectly or doing nothing, how many people who previously did some good will now instead do none? In order to outweigh this loss, how many would we need to have instead switch to acting perfectly? And should we expect enough of them to do so?

5. For the same reason, I think we should be very wary of objecting to mutually-beneficial “exploitation” unless we also regard it as impermissible to do nothing to help. But if you disagree with me on this point, you could restrict my third premise with various “anti-exploitation” conditions that the paywall case will easily pass. Claude suggests something like: “Where the good is non-urgent and substitutable, where the buyer has no prior claim to it, where the seller holds no monopoly, created no vulnerability, and did not engineer the need — there, charging for an optional good is permissible.”