In Search Of Moral Justification For My Wealth

The book Uneasy Street contends that trying to be a “good” wealthy person adds, insidiously, to the problem of economic inequality

This week I read Rachel Sherman’s 2017 book Uneasy Street for which she interviewed fifty affluent New Yorkers about their moral struggle to justify their wealth in a brutally unequal economy. Reading the book made me re-assess the morality of my own wealth.

I was embarrassed to read the verbatim quotes of the anonymized interviewees in Uneasy Street because I recognized the sophistry of some of my own attempts at moral justifications as follows:

• I “deserve” my wealth because I worked hard––the idea of the meritocracy. ¹

• I can claim we’re not extravagant or “flashy” by comparing ourselves to a carefully curated selection of other, wealthier people.

• We’re charitable and treat people well regardless of where they are on the socioeconomic ladder.

In other words, I’m among the “good rich.” It’s those other rich people who are the “assholes.”

Rachel Sherman’s prose in Uneasy Street is fluid, and the book is both well researched ² and well organized. Rachel includes appropriate caveats about the limits and possible pitfalls of her methodology. Caveats do wonders for credibility.

You can buy her book here.

Personal myths and the meritocracy

In November I wrote a post about my Personal Myth which questioned how much of my own merit and agency I could claim for the privileged life I lead.

Here’s the opening of my November post. I’ve bolded what I’ve changed my mind about.  

The stories we tell ourselves form our personal myth. 

Mine is as follows:

I was born with great privileges and then blessed with great luck in career and family and friends. Even considering these advantages, I’ve earned and can claim responsibility for my successful, well-balanced life. I’ve worked hard and made skillful choices, including acting with appropriate gratitude by helping others. 

My concern back in November was whether I was the true hero of my own life story or whether instead I was swept along by circumstances of birth that made the course of a greatly privileged life highly likely. The answer, inevitably, is an indefinable proportion of skill and luck.

But that’s a surface question of causality, the answer to which can make me feel more or less individually satisfied depending on how much agency I can claim. Whatever the answer, however, doesn’t change my circumstances or my behavior. Or change anything else in the wider world.

My November post ignored the moral question of great wealth and systemic inequality. In contrast, this essay addresses the moral question head-on, sparked by my reading of Uneasy Street

Attempts to justify the morality of wealth

First, my attempt to define morality: In stating what I mean by “morality,” I can do no better than the famous biblical verse of the Prophet Micah: “Do justice, love goodness, walk modestly with your God.” ³

My question is whether it is moral, i.e., “just” and “good” and”modest,” for anyone to possess the wealth and influence I have and then to pass those privileges down to children and grandchildren in the context of such wide inequality.

And here’s where I can fall into the trap of one of the moral justifications used so frequently by the affluent interviewees in Uneasy Street. My wealth and influence is insignificant compared not only to the obvious multi-billionaires like Gates and Musk and Buffet but to families we know personally.

I can point to that other family over there, the ones who are really wealthy because they have their own plane while we fly first class. Or that family there who has a vast property in East Hampton, an actual compound of many houses, while we have just the one “normal” house on a “normal” sized lot. Or I can point to our co-op stacked with billionaires making us the riff-raff of the building.

In Uneasy Street, Sherman calls this rationalizing tactic “looking upward.” You use a ridiculously skewed comparative set to position yourself somewhere in an illusory middle.

The people Rachel Sherman interviewed for Uneasy Street have an endless supply of rationalizations, or stories, all with the aim to be seen as a “good” wealthy person. In restrained, precise prose, Rachel skewers these stories on the basis that they are attempts to avoid the systemic issue of wealth inequality and instead focus on individual stories justifying individual wealth. 

You can wrestle with extravagant consumption, but you’re still going to buy the expensive organic raspberries. You can applaud the egalitarian ideal of public school, but you’re still going to send your child to private school. You may be nice to everyone who serves your needs from waiters to pilates instructors to deliverymen. You may give back through philanthropy or be proud that you’re conscious of your privilege.

But these are all individual choices, mostly performative, and they do nothing to address the moral issue of extreme unequal economic distribution.

Here’s a stark example of individual behavior vs. systemic issues. I was part of a small group of wealthy people, wealthier than most of the people Rachel Sherman interviewed. One man spoke about the joy he was deriving from engaging in real, substantive conversations with his doormen and his office security guards. In his mind, he was bestowing upon them the recognition that they were people just like him.

A bit later in the conversation, the subject turned to taxes. The same man complained bitterly about a “war on the rich,” meaning that his taxes might go up. He was already unhappy, he said, with what he was “getting” for the taxes he paid. I asked him for an example. He didn’t give one.

Most of Uneasy Street’s interviewees were against higher taxes. Most of the wealthy people I know are also against higher taxes.

I believe America should have a much higher and broader tax system and a far more generous social support system, closer to what most European countries offer. But it costs me nothing to write those words.

And when it comes to taxes, while I’ll pay what I owe without complaint, I’ll employ legal and non-controversial strategies to minimize my tax bill. That behavior is somewhere between inconsistent and hypocritical.  

Adrift in Peter Singer’s shallow pond

If you really want to challenge the morality of your wealth, you must grapple with Peter Singer’s thought experiment.

You see a young child drowning in a shallow, swampy pond. You’re wearing a few thousand dollars of shoes and clothing that you will ruin if you wade into the thick water to save the child’s life. What do you do? Everyone answers without hesitation that they would plunge in to save the child.

If so, then why would you ever buy anything that is more expensive than a basic necessity, knowing that instead you could give away that incremental money to save lives? Or at least to alleviate hunger and disease that ruins lives. If you’re wealthy, why not give most of your money away, keeping only what you need to live a comfortable, average middle class life?

The easiest and laziest justification for not giving most of your money away is that your contribution alone won’t make a systemic difference. It’s the same argument one could use about not voting or not doing anything to combat injustice.

The slightly more nuanced justification I might give is that I have responsibilities to my family, my wife and my children, who have gotten used to a certain lifestyle. To pull away that lifestyle suddenly would be unfair to the people I love.

The raw truth, however, is I like my conveniences and luxuries. I don’t want to give them up. ⁴

“Giving back”

My wife and I are philanthropic. We give about 20% of our pre-tax income, before the benefit from the charitable tax deduction. We seek out grass-roots organizations who receive substantial donations of volunteer time and various goods so that the impact of our dollars is significantly leveraged. These are organizations where we know and trust the people and where we can see the results.

That’s all well and good, but Peter Singer would dismiss our giving as woefully inadequate. What we give makes us feel good and helps to shield us from moral guilt about our wealth and privilege.

But our giving is an individual action and does nothing systemically. And it can sometimes feel like the old, corrupt Indulgences of the Catholic Church where payment could be made to gain heavenly absolution from sins, both mortal and venial. ⁵

From a Peter Singer perspective, what’s perhaps worse is we don’t sacrifice personal spending as a result of our giving. We recently went on a trip. My worst extravagance may be my love of the world’s best hotels and of their special and spacious suites, which have a main bathroom as well as a powder room I can call my own.

Each night during our recent trip, my hotel extravagance––getting that special suite rather than just a nice room–– cost the equivalent of 1,000 meals at a food bank. I’m using the Robin Hood Foundation math I deploy to show my subscribers what their paid subscription can do (a $30 subscription buys 15 meals).

Deflection as a strategy

I caught myself deflecting the issue of unequal access to green spaces, i.e., nature, when I responded to a post on that subject by Sarah Fay on her Substack, Less And Less Of More And More. I copped to being someone who enjoys easy access to the beaches and green, wide open spaces of East Hampton as well as living across from Central Park. 

My confession done, I then wrote about restrictive zoning and the history of redlining and racial residential covenants. And which neighborhoods suffered when chosen to put highways through or factories in.

My deflection tactic was to cite the historical forces that created unequal access to nature, including the lesser quality of the air that’s breathed by those with less. My comment implied that I’m a “good” wealthy person because I’m aware of these problems, much like my friend who “saw” his doormen and security guards as people. But what does our awareness actually do?

Normalizing Inequality

My most important takeaway from Uneasy Street is that by trying to be a “good” rich person, I represent a more insidious barrier to systemic change to inequality because not only am I a rich guy who it’s possible to like, I also am seeking individual rationalization for my wealth. That allows me or anyone else in my position to sidestep the question of systemic change to an unreasonable system.

Said differently, I protect an unreasonable system by making reasonable statements and acting morally to a point.

I’m left with the uncomfortable conclusion that I can’t rationalize the morality of being near the upper end of a vastly unequal distribution of wealth. An unequal distribution that is stubbornly linked to race, to unequal education, and to unequal access to social capital.

I’m not going to sacrifice my luxuries and ease. I will probably increase my philanthropic giving and try to make every dollar as impactful as possible, but that comes from my sense of noblesse oblige. Which is another, old fashioned way of saying I’m entitled. 

Note: You can buy Uneasy Street here.

Question For The Comments: Let’s assume you view great inequality as morally wrong. Could you countenance the existence of billionaires if our tax and social support systems matched that of the Scandinavian countries?

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The Prophet Micah Exhorting The Israelites by Gustave Dare

1. After her conclusion to Uneasy Street, Rachel Sherman includes a twenty page appendix about her methodology and potential critiques thereof, another twenty pages of footnotes, then ten pages of references, and finally a ten page index. This is a serious book by a serious scholar.

2. The concept of a pure meritocracy is that people rise or fall based on their talents despite varied circumstances of birth, including race, gender, or social class. The term was first popularized by Michael Dunlop Young in his 1958 dystopian novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, which imagined a society of extreme stratification according to intelligence. The point being that a society whose hierarchy is harshly stratified according to any inherently random and unequal criterion would be inhumane and cruel and hard to change.

3. “Do justice, love goodness, walk modestly with your God is from the Book of the Prophet Micah 6:8. Here’s a good short essay on his famous verse. This line from that essay stood out: ‘Walking modestly for the prophet is walking with eyes wide open to the presence of anyone in need, waiting to perform acts of mercy, justice, and lovingkindness.” 

It reminded me of a conversation my wife and I had this week with Marit Molin, the executive director of Hamptons Community Outreach. Marit told us about how she recently saw a man in line at her grocery store buying only a banana and a Red Bull.  She knew he needed help, she approached him, and bought him what he needed. Marit’s eyes are always “wide open to the presence of anyone in need.”

4. The other philosophical challenge to inequality and inequity is John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance,” in which he asks us what sort of society would we want if we knew that we would be born randomly into any circumstance. How might an American man’s view on abortion change, for example, if he had an equal chance of being born as a woman? Or how would a wealthy American person’s view change about the current system of American capitalism if they didn’t know whether they’d be born into wealth or poverty. On the capitalism question, my view would change.

5. The abuse of Indulgences where money rather than acts of penance was used to forgive all sorts of sins and make the Church richer was a factor leading to the Protestant Reformation.

Here’s an all purpose Indulgence authorized by an extravagant Pope to be sold in the early 1500s to help finance the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica.

"...[I] absolve you ...from all thy sins, transgressions, and excesses, how enormous soever they be...and remit to you all punishment which you deserve in purgatory on their account and I restore you...to the innocence and purity which you possessed at baptism; so that when you die the gates of punishment shall be shut... and if you shall not die at present, this grace shall remain in full force when you are at the point of death."

Source for the above.