101–110 of 259 posts
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The Bible teaches this too.
Yes, but it's tied up in a bunch of other bits like not eating pork and worshipping a particular deity. The secular quip raises the same questions about human motivations without the other baggage.
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It's called reading with a critical eye. They talk about OxyContin, then talk about the hundreds of thousands of opioid deaths. If you're not paying attention, you'd think OxyContin caused all of them.
OxyContin was certainly a catalyst to this entire epidemic.
I’m no expert on this & have seen enough oxy abuse to be skeptical but saying it’s a certainty seems unfounded in the face of the argument.
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I’m more of a consequentialist; I consider a larger philanthropist who cares about public attribution to be more admirable than someone who is a smaller philanthropist but doesn’t care about public attribution. Personally, I would absolutely like to have my name on something if I were to donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars towards it. In my opinion the intention or ego of a philanthropist is approximately…
It's not about doing "good," they're both doing "good." It's about milking the charity like you can't give money away without getting something in return.
So we have a few possibilities:
- Is demanding attribution in philanthropy bad? If it’s bad, how does it decrease the concrete “goodness” of the philanthropy?
- Is it not bad? Then why is it undesirable?
- Is it neither bad nor undesirable? Then why is it relevant?
People have (normative) reasons for personal admiration, and they can’t really be right or wrong. I’m interested in digging at the normatives.
Generalizing this further, we can say that people are easily offended by grandiosity and vanity, or at the very least find it distasteful. As a philosophical question I consider it interesting to wonder why that is the case, in a scenario where that person is not doing anything “bad” from a consequentialist perspective. As it turns out, anonymity and attribution in philanthopy seem to be a good real-world setting for this question, because narcissism appears to become invalid as a signalling heuristic.
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Everyone reading the article knows the source of the fortune. The millions of people who have interacted with Sackler supported cultural institutions likely had zero idea of where the money came from, myself included.
This also raises an important question. Do these museums have a responsibility to disclose the source of the Sackler family's wealth?
In my experience with local philanthropy, there are donors who have no interest in "naming opportunities" and those for whom it is all about the name. To me it says a lot about the character of the donor if they specifically want as little fuss as possible about the donation, and especially if they do not want something named after them. It is the cause they support, not their own egos. Personally, the more often I s…
Cf. the Peter O'Donnell building at UT Austin. (https://research.utexas.edu/acesit/aces-building/)
I love how the article switches between OxyContin and opioids throughout the article, particularly when talking about deaths. It's a clever way to include drugs like heroin, fentanyl, etc in the numbers to inflate them and make the story more gripping. Of course it's silly to hold OxyContin's manufacturer responsible for all opioid deaths.
Do you have ties to Purdue or the pharama industries? You seem super defensive about this/not open to discussion and your submission history seems to be pharma related.
... Medical Advertising Hall of Fame... This is a real thing.[1] They really give out awards for medical advertising. Typical writeup: "Ambien dominated the insomnia market like few products ever have. Our goal was to introduce a new way of thinking about sleep, and to introduce Rozerem as a new option for the treatment of insomnia. In order to take down Goliath, Rozerem needed to spend BIG. $200 million in broadcast…
Ick! This reinforces my belief that direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs should be illegal.
In my experience with local philanthropy, there are donors who have no interest in "naming opportunities" and those for whom it is all about the name. To me it says a lot about the character of the donor if they specifically want as little fuss as possible about the donation, and especially if they do not want something named after them. It is the cause they support, not their own egos. Personally, the more often I s…
I agree, and I feel the same way about other public figures. Anytime I see a famous actor/actress that live a mostly private life, I immediately start thinking of them in a positive light.
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Everyone reading the article knows the source of the fortune. The millions of people who have interacted with Sackler supported cultural institutions likely had zero idea of where the money came from, myself included.
This also raises an important question. Do these museums have a responsibility to disclose the source of the Sackler family's wealth?