I suspect you're looking at it from either a nihilistic "let the world burn, I just want to get mine" perspective, or (probably more likely?) a perspective heav

I suspect you're looking at it from either a nihilistic "let the world burn, I just want to get mine" perspective, or (probably more likely?) a perspective heavily influenced by consequentialist ethics ("is the good I can do by being able to talk about these things worth more, in a net-good-in-the-world kind of way, than $40K? I'm not sure enough that it is, to justify turning down the money"). Or maybe a blend of the two (most folks get a bit selfish and let their ethics slide at least some, when sufficiently-large dollar values start to get thrown around, after all) There are other perspectives, though. Here's a starting point for one of the big categories of thinking that might lead one to turn down $40K essentially just on principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics