Can you elaborate on this? Should the amount of money not matter because the alleged misconduct is ultimately not very important? Or should the amount of money not matter, no matter what?

Neither one’s opinion as to what Viswanathan did or didn’t do, nor one’s opinion as to the ethics of what one thinks she did, should be affected by the size of her advance.

Not that these are entirely unrelated things, but it seems to me that the advance is less important than the fact that the book has sold a LOT of copies. That seems to be what makes people care more.

Although, maybe it's just that this is a hot topic in the culture right now. Brad Vice's collection hadn't even come out yet (nor, likely, garnered a big advance), and a big deal was made anyway about relatively similar issues with some of its stories...

I can pretty much guarantee you that the Harvard Crimson would care just as much. (They drove a lot of the outrage about an admitted student a few years ago who was found to have plagarized material in columns she wrote for her hometown newspaper, writing that may not even have been paid, much less paid well. That student's admission offer was withdrawn.)

I admit to having a little bit of "oh, that poor kid" sympathy, but mostly, eh. Whether it was conscious or unconscious, she screwed up. And I'm not sure she's really taking enough responsibility for that.

And almost as soon as I posted that, I regretted the phrasing. She's taking responsibility, I know. I just... I just think this -is- a problem regardless of the amount of her advance, and there's something kind of slippery in my mind about trying to defend her using that as an argument.

I’m not nearly as interested in defending her as I am in attacking folks like the guy who posted on Scalzi’s blog that “the plagiarism . . . worries me much less than the fact that a high school student is being assisted in writing a novel and handed half a million for it.”

(Who, admittedly, does not seem to have been more bothered by the plagiarism because of said worry. But I’m too lazy to find a more carefully targeted example.)

P.S. I also, as you may have noticed, tend to get pissed off when people bitch about how much money J.K. Rowling is making. Or Stephen King. Or professional athletes.

I'm uncertain on this questoin. (And I'm thinking about this more as an abstract question and less with regard to an individual case.)

Consider the often-mentioned experimental result where a monkey was trained to perform a task in exchange for a cucumber slice, but upon seeing another monkey rewarded with a grape for doing the same thing, refused to perform the task for the cucumber slice anymore. This suggests that it is a natural reaction to feel aggrieved at economic inequities; what relationship should that have with our ethical judgments? For most of us, money matters; when should it matter, and when shouldn't it?

I don't imagine that there's a simple answer, but I'd be interested to hear more about how people analyze this question.

I can imagine, without too much difficulty, systems of ethics in which intentional plagiarism, if you get paid a lot for it, is either more or less morally reprehensible than if you get only get paid a reasonable amount. I can even imagine systems of law in which unintentional plagiarism, if you get paid a lot for it, is considered either more or less of a crime than if you only get paid a reasonable amount.

I don’t think any of those systems are the ones we as a society claim to subscribe to, but that’s beside the point. What I can’t imagine is a rational model of human psychology, based on conventional notions of causaility, in which plagiarism, if you were later paid a lot for it, is more likely to have been intentional than if you were only paid a reasonable amount.

Well, if we're going to talk about the particulars of this specific case: my understanding is that the author wrote the book after she'd been paid the large advance, not before.

Well, then, I still think it’s a little weird (and likely to proceed from uncharitable motives) to think someone who was paid a lot is more likely to have then plagiarized something than someone who was paid a little, but at least it doesn’t posit a causality violation. :)

Are people actually saying that they believe the author committed plagiarism because she was paid a lot of money? I haven't seen that, and it's not how I interpreted the remark you quoted from Mary Anne.

Well, of course they’re not saying it.

Let's be clear: I interpret your original post as saying there is causation between the size of the advance and the amount of complaining by observers, and that this is unjust. If this is not your claim, if you're saying that the observers erroneously believe there is causation between the size of the advance and the author's alleged misconduct, then I think your original post is not as clear as it could have been.

Personally, I'm more interested in the first claim, which I think is related to inequity aversion and how that should or shouldn't play a role in our ethical judgments. Maybe that's off-topic.

I think there is causation between the size of the advance and the amount of complaining by observers. My probably non-disprovable hypothesis as to the mechanism, is that the size of the advance seems to make many obvservers think she is more likely to be guilty.

(Or, at least, it makes many observers more likely to think she is guilty. But if the observers are rational, isn’t that the same thing?)

But let’s stop talking about that. What’s the question you’re interested in? Whether plagiarism is less ethical if you get paid for it, or whether plagiarism is less ethical if you get paid a lot for it than if you get paid a little? Or something else?

My subjective reading of the situation is that observers consider her guilty because of the textual similarities that have been cited in news reports, and that the size of the advance makes them more upset than they would otherwise be.

As for the question I'm interested in discussing, let me approach it from another direction. Suppose you find out that a co-worker, with the same job title and responsibilities as you and many others, is being paid twice as much as anyone else. Many people would feel some unhappiness about this.

Suppose you then find out that a co-worker has been doing a bad job, claiming to be on schedule while actually surfing for porn and doing no work. People would feel unhappy about this no matter what that co-worker is getting paid, but I suspect most people will feel more unhappy if they find out it's the person getting paid twice as much. (Let me know if you disagree.)

Are these reactions justified? Given the observations of monkey behavior, it seems that inequity aversion is deeply rooted in our nature; is that something we should be trying to overcome?

A lot of people cite the free market as a defense for getting whatever money you can. If an executive can get a $50 million compensation package, why should he not try? The market is efficient, right? Unsupportable business practices will disappear for business reasons. And if the executive winds up committing some offense in the course of his job, some would argue that our reaction should be the same whether he got paid $50 million or $500,000.

On the other hand, many of us still feel that compensation and performance should be correlated, and that being paid more implies a responsibility to do a better job; some people have actually been known to feel guilty about getting rewards they feel they don't deserve. I think this is another aspect of our instinctive inequity aversion. Is this naive idealism in today's free market?

Employers will tell you that every salary negotiation is a unique situation; publishers say something similar about book advances. People are often discouraged from talking about how much they're getting paid, which tends to keep them from discussing the inequities that are a part of every business. Accepting these realities is undoubtedly a useful coping strategy; the ethical implications, however, are unclear to me.

Anyway, this is what I was thinking about when I read the original post.