Charity is morally neutral. I believe that being good means making the most of your own life.
If you want to help someone, or even a lot of people through charity, that's fine, but it should not earn you any moral credit.
Moral credit should only come from what you've truly achieved, and that means creating value somehow (invention, scientific discovery, beautiful art, and honest work of any kind). Anyone can give away fifty million dollars, but not many can actually earn the same sum in their lifetimes.
Charity is not morally neutral. One part of being good means making the most of your own life. Another part of being good means helping other people.
No one can give away fifty million dollars that they don't have.
There is no inherent moral good in earning fifty million dollars (Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs, AIG, your local arms dealer, etc. etc.) There is often significant moral good in earning far less than fifty million dollars (teachers, nurses, etc).
Bernie Madoff earned his money by stealing it. The same could be said for many people that aren't sitting in jail and who aren't generally/politically believed to have done anything that should cause them to be sitting in jail.
I did not equate Jobs to Madoff (or AIG or arms dealers), I simply stated that being in possession of fifty million dollars does not provide any indication of moral value of the possessor.
This is a contradiction in terms. To earn something means to trade for it honestly, exchanging one value for another. To steal something means something altogether different (taking something by force or fraud). These two words do not mean the same thing; they are, in fact, opposites.
Nonsense. To earn: obtain in return for labor or services.
Honesty has absolutely nothing to do with the definition of the word.
And in any case, selling heroin to high schoolers fits your new definition of "earning". I surely see no moral good that comes from that. As such, earning fifty million, or five dollars has zero correlation to morality.
Selling heroin to people who aren't even adults is immoral. It's not a trade to sell death to someone that can't possibly be aware of what they're "buying".
Earning is inherently a profoundly moral action, because values are things that advance human interests (not to be confused with desires) long-term. People don't generally pursue lower values over higher ones (unless they are mistaken about what is actually valuable to them).
Values (such as food, clothing, or abstract ideas) are earned, honestly by free minds through great conscious effort. There is no other way.
Certainly, selling heroin to kids is immoral. But it is the process of earning, even by your new definition of the term (an honest, i.e. no cheating, trade of goods/services, both parties know what they are trading). That is my point. Money is readily earned through immoral activity. Which is exactly why money is not in any way an indicator of morality.
You appear to want to redefine "earning" once again so that the definition now means: a moral trade of goods/services. As such, your argument boils down to this: a moral trade of goods/services is moral. Yes, yes it is.
But that also roughly translates into meaninglessness. Good things are good and bad things are bad. Yes. Ipso facto. That's the way it works. There is indeed no other way. But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether money is itself moral (it isn't) or whether helping other people is moral (it is).
Here's a zen story I'm going to mangle that will surely blow your mind:
A father in a small village gave a boy a horse of his own for his fifteenth birthday. All the village were happy for the boy, "how lucky he is" they said. One villager asked the old monk, "isn't it good that the boy got a horse?", to which the old monk replied "maybe it is, maybe it is not". They ignored the old monk and congratulated the boy on having a horse. A few days passed and then one day the boy fell from his horse and broke his leg. All the village were worried for the boy. One villager said to the old monk "you were right, isn't it a shame the boy broke his leg", to which the old monk replied "maybe it is, maybe it is not". Again the villagers shook their heads and walked away from the old monk. Two weeks passed and soldiers from the nearby town rode into the village. All the villagers gathered around and the soldiers said "every abled bodied man must come with us to fight for the Emperor so that the Emperor can conquer more land". All the women cried and all the abled bodied men rode off with the soldiers to fight a war they had no stake in. One of the women turned to the old monk and said "isn't it fortunate the boy broke his leg so he does not need to go die to conquer more land for the Emperor" ... maybe it is, maybe it is not.
I'm not interested in debating such a thing. Let's just say (agree?) the labor/services Madoff performed were not the labor/services his investors had hoped for. And since his labor/services were in opposition to agreed upon contracts, he is sitting in jail.
I have already provided at least 2 other examples of people immorally earning (per your new definition) money, you have ignored both to focus on semantics involving Madoff.
My point remains. Your original post and overall point is invalid. In fact, it is 100% backwards. Money is morally neutral. It's how you get money and what you do with it that determines morality.
The question, rephrased is: does anyone have a right to exist as a free person when there is suffering anywhere in the world? I say yes.
Need is not a valid claim on anyone else's life. I didn't make them poor. My moral responsibility lies with making my own life the best. In doing so, I'm not harming anyone, because it's not in my interest to sacrifice others to myself (just as it is not in my interest to sacrifice myself to others.) Instead of begging or stealing, I advocate trading.
If you witness a car accident, do you ignore it because you didn't cause the crash? Do you walk up to the shattered window to yell "I'm not responsible!"?
Or do you help them out of their current situation so that they can better help themselves in the future?
That depends on the context. (Do you pick up hitchhikers? If so, when?)
If I have to choose between something I value more (say my wife is in anaphylactic shock and needs to be driven to the hospital), and someone I see in a car wreck on the way to the hospital, I'm going to choose my wife, because she's a higher value to me than anyone else.
However, if I don't have something that pressing to worry about, and I physically come across someone is injured in this way (so this is an emergency context, which is by definition something that doesn't happen frequently), I'll help. The sight of someone suffering from an unforeseeable emergency is an awful thing, and if I happen to come across it, I'd do what I could to help, so long as it wasn't a sacrifice for me (didn't leave me significantly poorer, less able, etc.)
None of this means that I should drive around town looking for people that are stranded or injured, or that I need to give my money to people that I'll never meet.
Low pay is a pricing signal. A surplus of teachers and nurses are disregarding other kinds of work society is announcing a greater unmet need for, in favor of what they feel driven to do. While they are entitled to say "to hell with whatever society values most from me", I wouldn't call it noble.
Doing something that you're good at and that you enjoy is great, but it's not necessarily enough if you want to get paid. You also have to do something that other people want enough to pay you! Fortunately, humans are conceptual beings, and everyone is capable of doing at least some variety of things.
There is no right of stagnation. No one should be forced by law to pay anyone against their will, or to pay more than they agree to privately.
No they can't. Giving away money is incredibly difficult for most people regardless of how much they have. So yes, it is is an act of good will and speaks of one's character.
That being said, I don't believe you have to contribute to random charities to be moral, as long as the cash is helping (or will help) in some other way at some point, and not being used purely for selfish motives.
So much of our lives are guided by chance. One who has a lot hasn't earned everything they have, and a person who has nothing hasn't necessarily earned that nothingness. We live in an unfair world and assisting those with worse luck in certain parts of their life is good will.
What doesn't make sense is for someone to judge someone else for either giving or not giving in any particular moment (or even 14 years).
I totally agree with this. A lot of people don't realize how much they are helped by their society because they've never seen how bad it can truly be. Here's an example of I mean (and a worthwhile read to boot): http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50799
You aren't going to be able to develop your skills if there is no society or infrastructure to support that development, if transit is difficult and dangerous, if all money and energy is being siphoned to a few corrupt people at the top. Of course charity isn't the only solution to breaking this cycle, but it certainly helps more than a $1500 laptop.
I'm not responsible for anyone's lot in life but my own. I pay taxes which keeps the government going, which keeps each of us from robbing the other. Having already paid to keep order (and for a whole lot of additional stuff that violates my rights), I owe nothing.
Steve Jobs pays a hell of a lot more in taxes than I do.
Given his $1 salary, his effective income is all capital gains, which is taxed at 15%.
In any case, taxes are (in theory at least) paid in return for services provided to you and your country, whereas charity is paid in return only for the feeling you've contributed to a greater good. It's best to not confuse the two.
So I (or anyone else, including Steve Jobs) somehow owe society something just for being born, or just for living? If that's what you mean, I absolutely do not agree.
One of the things I liked about Microsoft was the company's gift matching policy - they'd 100% match your donation to a charity up to <SOME LARGE NUMBER>. I found myself being more generous because of it, what with each of my dollars worth two.
I'm surprised Apple doesn't have a similar policy - sure, it didn't make or break my decision to join MS, but it was an awfully nice compensation bonus.
That doesn't follow. Objectivism has no problem with charity (Rand: 'it's good and proper'), just with this moral-blackmailing/guilt-tripping schtick. I think many Objectivists believe that (private) charity would be larger overall in the sort of society Rand envisioned.
One could say that they are giving something back, by using those profits to develop ways to make computing more accessible and useful, something they're better at and more willing to invest in than anyone else.
Let me repeat that back to you as I understood it.
What you are saying is Apple (and their work) is $deity's gift to the world so they don't owe anything else regardless how many billions of dollars they make from it.
People in parts of the world that need help to survive or thrive more than a meager existence, aren't helped by Apple's pretty software UI and hardware design.
US society has already decided what Apple owes back each year, via the IRS. I don't see why it's fair to expect them to dispose of more of their shareholders' money than some other companies in the same position. It's not as if their shareholders would reach a consensus about an unrelated social problem to solve, much less make an empty gesture towards solving (charities can't fix the free rider issue, which is why they almost never get enough resources to actually succeed and shut down).
Personally charitable & publicly charitable are two different things. Unless you know something the rest of us don't, I would be careful passing judgement on someone you only see in keynote speaking environments.
What a silly excuse to give nothing back - both Apple and Jobs individually are sitting on ridiculous amounts of money regardless of what their shareholders do with their own money.
The headline is completely incorrect - Wikipedia does NOT say that "Apple has not made any significant donations to charity since 1997".
What it actually says is:
"Jobs has not reinstated a philanthropic division at Apple."
So, he hasn't hired a bunch of people to sit in an office, giving someone else's money away and feeling pretty good about themselves. I'd say that is A GOOD THING - you don't need full-time staff in order to give money to good causes, that's just more overhead that stops money getting to the people who really need it. Jobs also got rid of the Apple Museum when he returned to Apple in 1997 .... because it was irrelevant ego bullshit and completely unnecessary.
Wikipedia says absolutely nothing about how much money Apple has donated and I know for a fact that it has aided progressive causes that other corporations would be too nervous to assist for fear of conservative backlash.
I hope that the submitter of this, ck2, realizes that, with one rotten headline, he is now part of what is wrong with media reporting - distorting the truth in order to sensationalize.
I think it's at least reasonable to concede that it's possible that Apple does more good in empowering not-so-tech-savvy-individuals than it would in donating money to charities.
As a case-in-point, my girlfriend and I recently gave her old MacBook to my grandmother. Ever since - she's been more engaged with facebook than anyone my age - and it shows in her mood and general well being. I can't help but glow every time I get off a FaceTime call with her!
Not sure who downvoted you instead of explaining this:
There are plenty of popular "knee-jerk" charities like the Red Cross that squander their donations. However there are also plenty of smaller, more focused charities that give a huge percentage of their donations directly to their causes and are extremely efficient. The catch is you have to research a charity before donating and most people cannot be bothered.
These days with the internet, there is no excuse for not researching:
If you want to help someone, or even a lot of people through charity, that's fine, but it should not earn you any moral credit.
Moral credit should only come from what you've truly achieved, and that means creating value somehow (invention, scientific discovery, beautiful art, and honest work of any kind). Anyone can give away fifty million dollars, but not many can actually earn the same sum in their lifetimes.