That is a massive leap of faith to believe that a person that works for a large international non-profit is someone who automatically behaves justly and morally. It is often a prestigious and above average paying position. There are certainly people who go into non-profit work for all the right reasons. But there are plenty that do not.
I recall someone hired at Baylor University as a part of dealing with sexual assault investigations (before the big scandal) believed it would be a good job because ... they thought there would fewer such problems at a Christian university.
I was bit shocked that someone tasked with investigations like this would even think that (wondered about qualifications).
In the end, people are people. No job or role really makes them any more or less anything. It's about who they are, and their choices, not the job, title, or etc.
> That is a massive leap of faith to believe that a person that works for a large international non-profit is someone who automatically behaves justly and morally.
In some circles its trendy to work for non profits and sometimes even benefits are much better than working for a regular organization where $$ return of investments are monitored closely. It's basically do good porn for some.
NGO jobs are not better paid than equivalent jobs in industry. I have plenty of friends in those jobs, and each one of them could easily triple their salary by, for example, going to McKinsey instead.
To give more than anecdotes: it’s self-evident that more prestigious work can afford to pay less than competitors that are boring and get you spit at by your friends.
>It is often a prestigious and above average paying position
Incorrect. Furthermore, the salaries are often public, so this is provable. Look up our 990 if you don't believe me. You can also review via GuideStar[0] or Foundation Center[1]. I work with a lot of fellow non-profits, on average our positions pay about 80% of market. Perhaps you are only looking at CEO pay? On average, that is also below market, but there are some outliers which I'd have to guess you are basing your incorrect assertion on.
By "above average" I meant it was above the median income as opposed to above average for the position. I should have made that language a bit clearer.
From there I would say that the status and prestige of working at a large and powerful NGO can make up for the difference in pay one might make elsewhere. There are obviously many people who go into non-profit work for purely altruistic reasons. I only meant to state that there are plenty of people who do not. Therefore using the position as a signal of the quality of a person's character is not valid.
Ehhh, the signal can be pretty valid even if it's not so in 100% of cases. And I imagine that it's less correct at the top: rank and file NGO employees are likely to have made significant sacrifices in terms of pay or lifestyle to support their org's mission, but I don't know for certain that applies to the C-suite equivalent at the top.
Can’t you just admit you were wrong, instead of moving the goalpost to some (also wrong) median vs mode argument, and then repeating your other impossible-to-disprove opinion on NGO worker’s character flaws?
Hey Matt, seems like you really got offended by my clarification. I'm certainly not trying to upset you and my apologies if I did.
I was in fact using "above average" as meaning they tend to be more white collar jobs that pay more than the median salary.
With that said, this really seems like something that is upsetting you and I really want you to know that I'm not trying to play a game or trick anyone. Either way, it's just a web forum. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. There is no prize. Just making internet conversation since I'm a little bored today.
Please don't get too worked up about it and I wish you well.
No. The argument was, specifically, that these people are not taking a hit in pay by working for an NGO, and that they are therefore not acting altruistic.
The comparison with similar positions is the only one valid, because those are the better paying job they did not take even though they were qualified.
Absolutely anecdata: all of the NGO workers I've met were "spoiled rich youngsters" wanting to get meaning in their lives. Then most NGOs seem do more harm than good IMO, particularly the bigger the badder (local support associations and organisations are almost always fine OTOH).
It should be noted that some questions have been raised about the underlying theory of "moral licensing" and there have been replication failures of key studies:
https://psyarxiv.com/wynjb/
The article imho does a poor job of evaluating how reliable the research that it quotes is.
> The all-male charity, the President’s Club, which raised money for causes including children’s hospitals through high-valued auctions, was forced to close after the Financial Times uncovered sexual assault and misogyny at its annual dinner; executives of Oxfam, a poverty eradication charity, visited prostitutes while delivering aid in earthquake-stricken Haiti, and were allowed to slink off to other charities, rather than being castigated for their actions; and ex-Save the Children executives Brendan Cox and Justin Forsyth stepped down from their roles at other charities, after allegations of sexual harassment and bullying toward junior female colleagues resurfaced.
Maybe I just lack the context but I don't really understand how sexual harassment is in the same vein as visiting prostitutes. What is morally wrong about seeing prostitutes? Did it somehow interfere with their jobs? Or were they using charity funds?
>executives of Oxfam, a poverty eradication charity, visited prostitutes while delivering aid in earthquake-stricken Haiti,
Hmmm to me it seems like a pretty shitty thing to do. You're an executive at a charity there helping people after a natural disaster....paying one of those people for sex seems just ya know...like a bit of a shitty thing to do. Even if it was their job. I think it's more the context and timing of the situation that's the problem.
Again...these are executives in a charity...in a disaster stricken country....supposedly there to help out...having sex with local prostitutes. I'm sure if it was during their own free time, possibly while not in a disaster stricken place it would likely be less of a big deal.
Especially because as an executive at a charity devoted to ending poverty you should probably be trying to help these women find other means to live rather than encouraging them to sell themselves...especially right after a natural disaster. Just saying...seems real shitty to me.
They're basically taking advantage of people in a desperate situation despite supposedly being there to help.
The huge power imbalance involved is what makes that gross to me. I may be wrong I don't imagine Haitian prostitutes to have many other options, especially during a disaster.
Do you also refuse to have your trash taken due to the power imbalance between the garbage men and their employer? I don't imagine garbage men have many other options.
My garbage man lives in the same country as me and had similar opportunities. For years my garbage man made much more than I did, only in the last few years have I made up the difference. So no.
The "it's just a job" rationale falls apart when there's no alternative to having that job. When you have no other option, you'll say yes no matter what, so you have no agency and can easily be exploited. It's likely the case that these women had no real option for survival, which is why the third world recent disaster part is an important detail, and why the comparison to Vegas/Amsterdam isn't super accurate.
It would be shitty to drive from your city (where a car wash is $10) to the neighboring tent city and give them only $1 to wash your car, because you know they won't have another option.
Sticking to the car washing analog: If you decide to stay local and pay $10 for a car wash so you can feel better about yourself, realize that you haven't improved the lot of the person in the tent city at all. They would probably be better off if you'd "exploited" them...
None of that makes sense to me. Sure it sucks to be in such a shitty place that you just have to take whatever pays, but that's the reality for a lot of people and I don't see anyone being all morally outraged at people who hire construction workers or whatever.
It's like you're saying that having sex is so terribly bad that it's better to let people starve instead, but that's a bizarre idea considering the fact that sex actually feels really good.
What would you do in the car washing example? Drive back to your city and pay $10 because paying someone who's willing to do it for $1 is exploitative? Surely the people doing it for $1 would rather do it for $1 than not do it for $0.
I'm wondering if you and the others who replied just below are serious or if you're trolling?
The charities should instead hire people who aren't predators. People who don't take advantage of the vulnerable people at the catastrophe site.
What if you had a child or sister, who got kidnapped. Then the police came, and said to your child or sister: "Ok, we'll rescue you, if we can have sex with you."
Based on your reasoning, this would be fine to do, to your child or sister. Because if it wasn't for those hero policemen, she'd remain kidnapped, right.
However, the make-sense approach, is to fire those policemen and instead hire others, who took the job because they want to help victims and society, rather than wanting power so they could abuse vulnerable people.
>What if you had a child or sister, who got kidnapped. Then the police came, and said to your child or sister: "Ok, we'll rescue you, if we can have sex with you."
What? That's a completely different situation. The person in the story was doing his job just fine, no blackmail involved. He just decided to spend his free time paying for a sex service.
Hiring a prostitute in your free time is not abusing people.
Ok it's not a totally accurate comparison. However it's also not a completely different situation.
I get the impression that you have in mind hiring a prostitute, in a well functioning society with no poverty, and with a well fare system that people can fall back on.
Actually I read about someone in the country where I live -- he was working as an artist, made okay with money, and decided to quit his job and work as a prostitute instead. After doing that, he made about as much money as before, and he liked being a prostitute, better than his previous job as an artist. I think he and his customers -- it's fine, I see no problem with that. He also did not have a traumatic childhood or anything like that.
However that's different, from an earth quake disaster site. There, people are struggling for survival and food and shelter, and some of them will do things they don't really want, to stay alive.
I want the aid workers who did not become aid workers to help anyone, but instead to take advantage of vulnerable people, to be fired. And replaced with others who are genuinely interested in helping people -- I think the latter will do a better job. And b.t.w. I think these two groups of people: men looking for cheap sex with vulnerable women and children, versus genuine helpers, are non-overlapping.
>I get the impression that you have in mind hiring a prostitute, in a well functioning society with no poverty, and with a well fare system that people can fall back on.
OK, fair. I might be assuming the best, but is that really unreasonable? We don't have any details, but I think it's most likely that the guy used protection, wasn't violent and paid properly. My issue in these discussions is just that everyone seems to go on a moral panic and assume the worst whenever sex is involved. Informal jobs in a poverty-stricken country with no legal oversight are an issue I agree, but there's nothing special about the ones that are sexual in nature. Now do you think people would be talking about it at all if what the guy had done was pay someone to carry his luggage for a couple hours?
Having sex, or getting raped, is different from carrying luggage.
Sex is a maybe-death thing.
If the woman gets pregnant, there's a relatively high risk that she'll die, during delivery. Or, if there's no man there to help her, when she is pregnant and vulnerable and cannot find her own food, she's at risk of starving and dying.
Maybe / probably those "aid workers" used contraceptives, however, the feelings part of the human brain doesn't understand contraceptives. Those parts of the brain are still in the stone age. The feelings involved, for a woman who gets raped or has sex because otherwise she might starve to death, is not "I carry bags", instead it's more "I might die from this".
(For a man, the feelings can instead be "I'm reproducing, great. No risk for me, I don't get pregnant".)
> I'm wondering if you and the others who replied just below are serious or if you're trolling?
No-one here is trolling - this is part of a contentious philosophical debate. It does not help to assume bad faith on the part of your opponents: there are strong points on both sides of the argument, and it is a difficult issue.
To sum up what I understand the reasoning to be:
On the one hand, there's the basic "utilitarian" approach. Essentially, regardless of moral values or rules, in which instance would more people end up better off? Between sex with people you don't really want to, and death, if you prefer the former, then the world in which you end up doing so is the preferred world. Taking your example, if the alternative to exploitative policemen were NO policemen, then she'd just end up dead - I'd rather someone were exploited than dead (though obviously I'd also prefer they weren't exploited at all).
Now, on the other hand, there is your argument, well-formulated, that exploiting someone in this way is a pretty crappy thing to do, to put it mildly. You are correct - the approach we would take is to fire policemen who would do such a thing, and instead aim to hire to those that would do their job properly without exploiting people. We have the ability to do so - there are enough people who are good enough and willing enough to become policemen that we are able to make this decision, so we definitely should.
Now, there are some cases where we don't necessarily have this alternative option. Let's take unwilling prostitutes. I think we can agree that it's terrible that there are people who have to have sex in order to get enough money to live. Now, let's say there's someone near the prostitute, with enough money to help her out of her plight, you feel he should give money to her, but he doesn't, and he walks on. How harshly do you judge him? Now, there's a second person with enough money to help her, he instead decides to pay her to sleep with him. Do you judge him more harshly than the first? Why? She's ended up in an overall better situation after her interaction with the second man, than the first, even if her situation overall is still terrible.
Yes, it would be better if the second man gave her the money and went on his way, just as it would be better if the first man did so, but in the absence of being able to convince either of them of doing so, do we win anything by chastising the second man's action as awful? The prostitute is making a choice between unwanted sex, and death, a bad choice to be sure - but taking away that choice is equivalent to forcing upon her the choice of death.
> I'm sure if it was during their own free time, possibly while not in a disaster stricken place it would likely be less of a big deal.
So there is a question of why this would be the case? What is the difference?
Now, of course, I don't feel that those taking part in the disaster relief are absolved. It doesn't sit right with me either, and I also feel like it would be better to have people there who were purer in their intentions. And I would take the fact that they did this as evidence that they might not be as moral in other aspects of their life / job.
The point is - I think that this is a difficult moral question, and just because your moral intuition is strongly repulsed by a certain action does not necessarily mean to say that it is wrong (though it very well might be) - our moral intuition is largely shaped by our society. People in other societies, as well as people from older times in our own societies, judge actions very differently to the way we do today, yet their moral intuitions feel just as strongly.
I think deciding on what is Good requires a combination of feeling and logical reasoning, as well as some discussion and debate. I'm not suggesting that you should change your opinion regarding this specific instance, or even this general moral value.
Prostitution in Haiti, during a major crisis, is bound to involve morally dubious or illegal things such as underage prostitutes, women being forced into it, and inadequate health care. Even in a best case scenario, it is debatable how free the decision is, when the alternative may well be abject poverty.
It's less about the act itself (though they'd be called out for that too) but the immoral aspect is the fact that this is sex tourism.
You can ethically justify going to a Vegas or Amsterdam brothel under the pretense that the workers choose to be there and you're paying a fair wage for the service; it's a fair transaction and nobody is being exploited.
Shopping for prostitutes at a time and place where people are doing anything they can to survive in the wake of a disaster is exploitative.
> I don't really understand how sexual harassment is in the same vein as visiting prostitutes.
I think the implication is they visited underage ones. But you'd have to look at the details. I know there was the controversy about labelling Haiti unfairly, but I don't think it's that controversial to suggest it's not exactly like Western European countries which are supportive of this type of work with all the proper safeties, enforcement and legislation in place.
Oxfam workers can use prostitutes. It was specifically in their code of conduct.
It's societies normal colonialism of disallowing what's legal at home for the natives and allowing what's illegal at home, minimum wage and child labour issues to let the natives make us sneakers.
The context is, the article is garbage, they quote 3 random headlines the got from the news and think they have a theory.
For the Oxfam 'story' if you bother to get to the real bit (read original reports) it's much more nuanced.
In part it involves whether a girlfriend of staff who might also be a sex worker should be allowed to Oxfam functions. There is no clear answer.
It's certainly true that when I work out, my default response is that I should "reward" myself with bad food. Of course, it's important to ignore that impulse.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadI recall someone hired at Baylor University as a part of dealing with sexual assault investigations (before the big scandal) believed it would be a good job because ... they thought there would fewer such problems at a Christian university.
I was bit shocked that someone tasked with investigations like this would even think that (wondered about qualifications).
In the end, people are people. No job or role really makes them any more or less anything. It's about who they are, and their choices, not the job, title, or etc.
In some circles its trendy to work for non profits and sometimes even benefits are much better than working for a regular organization where $$ return of investments are monitored closely. It's basically do good porn for some.
To give more than anecdotes: it’s self-evident that more prestigious work can afford to pay less than competitors that are boring and get you spit at by your friends.
Incorrect. Furthermore, the salaries are often public, so this is provable. Look up our 990 if you don't believe me. You can also review via GuideStar[0] or Foundation Center[1]. I work with a lot of fellow non-profits, on average our positions pay about 80% of market. Perhaps you are only looking at CEO pay? On average, that is also below market, but there are some outliers which I'd have to guess you are basing your incorrect assertion on.
[0] https://www.guidestar.org/Home.aspx [1] https://foundationcenter.org/
From there I would say that the status and prestige of working at a large and powerful NGO can make up for the difference in pay one might make elsewhere. There are obviously many people who go into non-profit work for purely altruistic reasons. I only meant to state that there are plenty of people who do not. Therefore using the position as a signal of the quality of a person's character is not valid.
I was in fact using "above average" as meaning they tend to be more white collar jobs that pay more than the median salary.
With that said, this really seems like something that is upsetting you and I really want you to know that I'm not trying to play a game or trick anyone. Either way, it's just a web forum. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. There is no prize. Just making internet conversation since I'm a little bored today.
Please don't get too worked up about it and I wish you well.
Simply put, they are better off than most.
The comparison with similar positions is the only one valid, because those are the better paying job they did not take even though they were qualified.
Those people are not taking a hit working for an NGO because they would never have the equivalent roles in the business world.
Some people (men) become aid workers so the can use their power, as aid workers, to rape refugee women and children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43206297
"Syria conflict: Women 'sexually exploited in return for aid'" -- the United Nations and other charities, hire them.
Why don't they just hire women instead, to distribute the food, please.
From the episode of "Canada on Strike": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN_h_HBzZnc
The article imho does a poor job of evaluating how reliable the research that it quotes is.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/01-the-lady-vanishes/
Maybe I just lack the context but I don't really understand how sexual harassment is in the same vein as visiting prostitutes. What is morally wrong about seeing prostitutes? Did it somehow interfere with their jobs? Or were they using charity funds?
Hmmm to me it seems like a pretty shitty thing to do. You're an executive at a charity there helping people after a natural disaster....paying one of those people for sex seems just ya know...like a bit of a shitty thing to do. Even if it was their job. I think it's more the context and timing of the situation that's the problem.
Again...these are executives in a charity...in a disaster stricken country....supposedly there to help out...having sex with local prostitutes. I'm sure if it was during their own free time, possibly while not in a disaster stricken place it would likely be less of a big deal.
Especially because as an executive at a charity devoted to ending poverty you should probably be trying to help these women find other means to live rather than encouraging them to sell themselves...especially right after a natural disaster. Just saying...seems real shitty to me.
They're basically taking advantage of people in a desperate situation despite supposedly being there to help.
Why? There's nothing wrong with sex work, it's just a job. Would it be shitty to pay them to wash your car or whatever?
It would be shitty to drive from your city (where a car wash is $10) to the neighboring tent city and give them only $1 to wash your car, because you know they won't have another option.
It's like you're saying that having sex is so terribly bad that it's better to let people starve instead, but that's a bizarre idea considering the fact that sex actually feels really good.
What would you do in the car washing example? Drive back to your city and pay $10 because paying someone who's willing to do it for $1 is exploitative? Surely the people doing it for $1 would rather do it for $1 than not do it for $0.
If there's no alternative, doesn't that mean they'd starve? Are you saying death by starvation is preferable to sex work?
The charities should instead hire people who aren't predators. People who don't take advantage of the vulnerable people at the catastrophe site.
What if you had a child or sister, who got kidnapped. Then the police came, and said to your child or sister: "Ok, we'll rescue you, if we can have sex with you."
Based on your reasoning, this would be fine to do, to your child or sister. Because if it wasn't for those hero policemen, she'd remain kidnapped, right.
However, the make-sense approach, is to fire those policemen and instead hire others, who took the job because they want to help victims and society, rather than wanting power so they could abuse vulnerable people.
What? That's a completely different situation. The person in the story was doing his job just fine, no blackmail involved. He just decided to spend his free time paying for a sex service.
Hiring a prostitute in your free time is not abusing people.
I get the impression that you have in mind hiring a prostitute, in a well functioning society with no poverty, and with a well fare system that people can fall back on.
Actually I read about someone in the country where I live -- he was working as an artist, made okay with money, and decided to quit his job and work as a prostitute instead. After doing that, he made about as much money as before, and he liked being a prostitute, better than his previous job as an artist. I think he and his customers -- it's fine, I see no problem with that. He also did not have a traumatic childhood or anything like that.
However that's different, from an earth quake disaster site. There, people are struggling for survival and food and shelter, and some of them will do things they don't really want, to stay alive.
I want the aid workers who did not become aid workers to help anyone, but instead to take advantage of vulnerable people, to be fired. And replaced with others who are genuinely interested in helping people -- I think the latter will do a better job. And b.t.w. I think these two groups of people: men looking for cheap sex with vulnerable women and children, versus genuine helpers, are non-overlapping.
OK, fair. I might be assuming the best, but is that really unreasonable? We don't have any details, but I think it's most likely that the guy used protection, wasn't violent and paid properly. My issue in these discussions is just that everyone seems to go on a moral panic and assume the worst whenever sex is involved. Informal jobs in a poverty-stricken country with no legal oversight are an issue I agree, but there's nothing special about the ones that are sexual in nature. Now do you think people would be talking about it at all if what the guy had done was pay someone to carry his luggage for a couple hours?
Sex is a maybe-death thing.
If the woman gets pregnant, there's a relatively high risk that she'll die, during delivery. Or, if there's no man there to help her, when she is pregnant and vulnerable and cannot find her own food, she's at risk of starving and dying.
Maybe / probably those "aid workers" used contraceptives, however, the feelings part of the human brain doesn't understand contraceptives. Those parts of the brain are still in the stone age. The feelings involved, for a woman who gets raped or has sex because otherwise she might starve to death, is not "I carry bags", instead it's more "I might die from this".
(For a man, the feelings can instead be "I'm reproducing, great. No risk for me, I don't get pregnant".)
No-one here is trolling - this is part of a contentious philosophical debate. It does not help to assume bad faith on the part of your opponents: there are strong points on both sides of the argument, and it is a difficult issue.
To sum up what I understand the reasoning to be:
On the one hand, there's the basic "utilitarian" approach. Essentially, regardless of moral values or rules, in which instance would more people end up better off? Between sex with people you don't really want to, and death, if you prefer the former, then the world in which you end up doing so is the preferred world. Taking your example, if the alternative to exploitative policemen were NO policemen, then she'd just end up dead - I'd rather someone were exploited than dead (though obviously I'd also prefer they weren't exploited at all).
Now, on the other hand, there is your argument, well-formulated, that exploiting someone in this way is a pretty crappy thing to do, to put it mildly. You are correct - the approach we would take is to fire policemen who would do such a thing, and instead aim to hire to those that would do their job properly without exploiting people. We have the ability to do so - there are enough people who are good enough and willing enough to become policemen that we are able to make this decision, so we definitely should.
Now, there are some cases where we don't necessarily have this alternative option. Let's take unwilling prostitutes. I think we can agree that it's terrible that there are people who have to have sex in order to get enough money to live. Now, let's say there's someone near the prostitute, with enough money to help her out of her plight, you feel he should give money to her, but he doesn't, and he walks on. How harshly do you judge him? Now, there's a second person with enough money to help her, he instead decides to pay her to sleep with him. Do you judge him more harshly than the first? Why? She's ended up in an overall better situation after her interaction with the second man, than the first, even if her situation overall is still terrible.
Yes, it would be better if the second man gave her the money and went on his way, just as it would be better if the first man did so, but in the absence of being able to convince either of them of doing so, do we win anything by chastising the second man's action as awful? The prostitute is making a choice between unwanted sex, and death, a bad choice to be sure - but taking away that choice is equivalent to forcing upon her the choice of death.
> I'm sure if it was during their own free time, possibly while not in a disaster stricken place it would likely be less of a big deal.
So there is a question of why this would be the case? What is the difference?
Now, of course, I don't feel that those taking part in the disaster relief are absolved. It doesn't sit right with me either, and I also feel like it would be better to have people there who were purer in their intentions. And I would take the fact that they did this as evidence that they might not be as moral in other aspects of their life / job.
The point is - I think that this is a difficult moral question, and just because your moral intuition is strongly repulsed by a certain action does not necessarily mean to say that it is wrong (though it very well might be) - our moral intuition is largely shaped by our society. People in other societies, as well as people from older times in our own societies, judge actions very differently to the way we do today, yet their moral intuitions feel just as strongly.
I think deciding on what is Good requires a combination of feeling and logical reasoning, as well as some discussion and debate. I'm not suggesting that you should change your opinion regarding this specific instance, or even this general moral value.
All I'm sayi...
You can ethically justify going to a Vegas or Amsterdam brothel under the pretense that the workers choose to be there and you're paying a fair wage for the service; it's a fair transaction and nobody is being exploited.
Shopping for prostitutes at a time and place where people are doing anything they can to survive in the wake of a disaster is exploitative.
I think the implication is they visited underage ones. But you'd have to look at the details. I know there was the controversy about labelling Haiti unfairly, but I don't think it's that controversial to suggest it's not exactly like Western European countries which are supportive of this type of work with all the proper safeties, enforcement and legislation in place.
It's societies normal colonialism of disallowing what's legal at home for the natives and allowing what's illegal at home, minimum wage and child labour issues to let the natives make us sneakers.
The context is, the article is garbage, they quote 3 random headlines the got from the news and think they have a theory.
For the Oxfam 'story' if you bother to get to the real bit (read original reports) it's much more nuanced.
In part it involves whether a girlfriend of staff who might also be a sex worker should be allowed to Oxfam functions. There is no clear answer.