The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics (2015)

It's also interesting that it wouldn't even solve the "wage gap" that is often talked about.

At least in the comments, someone goes down this rabbit hole, points out that the generally talked about wage gap (IE the "women earn 83 cents for every dollar men earn" ones) is, at least as being published by BLS/etc an overall one, not an individual one.

IE they are calculating median annual earnings of all women working full time, year round, and then calculating median annual earnings of all men working full time, year round, and seeing what the gap is.

So in fact, even if you pay men and women equally (which 100% agree should be the base case) for the same job, that gap wouldn't get closed because of the effect of job choice, etc.

Equal pay is a necessary but not sufficient condition to close the overall wage gap because of this (in fact, you'd still end up with a wage gap that was quite large, IIRC)

The argument that we can profit from the poor by giving them a small amount of money that is better than the nothing they usually get, and still be criticized because it is not enough reminds me of the ultimatum game.

Here we have two players, the first player has a plan to win a a million dollars, but for the plan to work, the second player needs to cooperate, if he doesn't everything is lost. The plan is perfectly safe, legal, and requires almost no work on the second player part.

In order to ensure the second player cooperation, the first player suggests splitting the earnings.

In theory, the first player only needs to split $999999/$1. $1 is better than nothing for the second player, so if he was perfectly selfish and rational, he would accept the offer. In practice it is not how it works, the proposal is usually fair (close to 50/50), and proposals less than 70/30 are often refused, even though a refusal means no one gets to earn anything.

So it show that we are not completely rational and selfish here.

There is also some game theory going on there. The second player is also offering the first an ultimatum. In theory, if the second player says they would only corporate for a 1/99 split, the second player should accept that deal (assuming the 1% is still greater then the effort that the first player needs to put in).

In essence, there is a range of splits that is mutually beneficial, and it is a negotiation to decide which of those splits to take. As anyone who regularly negotiates knows, a key asset in negotiations is the credible ability to walk away. If people have multiple negotiations, then the ones who are willing to let slightly profitable deals fall through will often do better in net because the deals they do make will be even more profitable then they would otherwise be.

Much of economics can be seen through this lenses. For instance, monopolies can be thought of as the monopoly holder playing an ultimatum game with all of the consumers. Since the monopoly holder has a much higher ability to walk away from a deal they are able to force the trade at a price point that allows them to capture more of the net benefit.

It doesn't "miss" that, it rejects it. And what does moral responsibility mean? If I toss $1 in a beggar's cup, am I now responsible to feed him for the rest of his life? More so than if I cross the street and avoid him?

That's a lot of speculation and assertion confidently claimed as fact.