On a scale emerging from such questions, people in the tobacco industry would tend to fall at one end and people in philanthropy would tend to be at the other. The social esteem accorded to those in the philanthropic activity would compensate for lower salaries, perhaps; those in the tobacco industry would assuage their lower self-esteem with higher salaries.

Do such thoughts lead us into the trap of thinking that people who create wealth are somehow morally less worthy of our esteem than those who dispense it?

Or do we believe that the work we do is morally "cleaner" than the work of most other people? Mine may not be much of a job and I may not do it very well, but I'm closer to heaven than they are with their efficiency and their profits because the goal of my work reflects a higher aspiration than theirs. They're serving themselves; I'm serving humankind. ("Writers can be guilty of every kind of human conceit but one, the conceit of social workers: 'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.'" (W. H. Auden, quoted by Noel Timms in Social Work Values).

If that is the case, helping people to help themselves is the best goal at which to aim, and creating jobs for people can claim a high place in the social order.

Not all jobs are alike, however, and certainly not in any moral sense: Producing wheat for sale to the public is not the same as producing cigarettes for sale to the public. An "externality" of producing and selling cigarettes is the unintended effect that some customers may develop cancer because they have been persuaded to smoke cigarettes. The advocates of "safe energy" (one of the demands of the "economic bill of rights" reprinted elsewhere in this essay) seek to reduce to the minimum possible the externalities associated with all commercial sources of energy.

To what extent do the unintended harmful consequences of economic activity bring moral discredit to the people engaged in it?

Or, to shift direction once more, to what extent does the structure of the philanthropic relationship result in abuses of power by the professional who wields it?

There is the power implicit in making grant judgments, and there is an overtone of arbitrariness about the grantmaker's discretion. The more discretion, the more personal judgment, the more possibility for abuse. There is an implicit understanding that applicants for grants are sincere in their intentions to carry out the work they propose to do; there is an implicit understanding that the grantmaker will be guided by his or her own guidelines and will act fairly within them. Doubts and anxieties about the discretionary power lead to calls by not-for-profit organizations' spokespersons for more precise constraints upon it. Grantmakers, on the other hand, tend to narrow their guidelines and to make them ever more precise: Artfully designed guidelines will protect grantmakers from ever having to make a decision on their own.

J. Irwin Miller, a gentle person, and Irving Kristol, an acerbic one, each spoke to meetings of philanthropic professionals about what Kristol called "the sin of pride." It is virtue by association. It is not simply the arrogance so often criticized among grantmakers; it is the self-righteousness and sanctimoniousness that is common if not rampant throughout the sector, on both sides of the table. It tends to inflate the moral worth of those engaged in philanthropy and to deflate the moral worth of those engaged in other forms of work, especially work that is explicitly self-interested. If we are to examine our own motives and understand their complexity more clearly, we should ponder long and hard Weber's distinction between living for what we do and living off it.