When do career warriors of social issues reduce to white-collar mercenaries?

 What is one's responsibility with respect to these problems

• Fight against poverty 
• Fight for affirmative action or diversity 
• Fight against environmental degradation 
• Fight for minimum wage or wage increases
• Fight for preservation of cultural and religious beliefs

Let's distinguish four potential distinct perspectives from which one might need to take a stand on the above: 

1. It is an issue that you personally suffered from and are not financially benefitting from the fight 
2. It is an issue that you personally suffered from but are financially benefitting from the fight  
3. You didn't suffer from it but you are financially benefitting from working on it and you need the money - the "career warriors"
4. You didn't suffer from it and you are not financially benefitting from working on it - the philanthropists and donor class

#1 Such people are authentic even if biased and should have the greatest voice. As to whether their ideas should be accepted unquestioningly is not so obvious. For instance, some solutions they propose might impose costs on some that might also not be fair and cannot be treated as collateral damage outright. Think reparations for descendants of slaves financed by raising taxes on all not just those who benefitted the most from it.  Or think affirmative action that hurts deserving but poor white (or in the case of my original home country India the upper-caste poor) from the best public education or jobs.

#2 Such people are also authentic and deserve a lot of voice but the solutions they advocate need to be examined a little more carefully because of the financial conflict of interest.

#3 These are people who choose to dedicate their professional career to these causes because they want to be altruistic. They do not have the authenticity of #1 and #2 because they did not experience those issues but have empathy. However, they also stand to gain financially and psychologically and  have an incentive to make the problem seem larger than it is.

#4 These are the funders - philanthropists and donors who support a cause they care about and support people in category #3. They obviously should not have too much of a voice just simply because they finance it (as to why I suggest Rob Reich's book Just Giving or Anand Giridhardas's Winners take all). But given what and who they choose to fund, they end of having a lot of voice through their agents.

I myself fall under #3, a career warrior although I am anything but a warrior for I cannot take anything too seriously and when I do, it is not for too long before I am bored of it. I heard Freeman Dyson say that about himself in a different context but my level of Math is nowhere close to his .And being employed at a public university I am financed by the taxpayer and while this frees me from the need to be kind to Business or Philanthropy (although my record of winning public grants is poor) this should not mean I can say what I like simply because it can get published or because I have brand name recognition behind me. For people in this group, fighting for other people's problems makes us feel good about ourselves, but when the problems are complex such as the above and we don't have full information or capacity to process all the information available, is it responsible to do the feel good thing or the popular thing? Is it is right to say imposing costs on some for the benefit others is worth it simply because one thinks those who are harmed can bear the costs.

I can say for myself that among the above problems, my entire career has benefitted from society's concern about environmental degradation. The way I have been to escape it is by living in leafy part of a city in wealthy country which outsourced a lot of pollution to the rest of the country which has outsourced a lot of the pollution to rest of the world. Of course, while I worked really hard right through and came out of a pressure cooker environment, I also had the benefit of good luck (being born into a stable middle-class family that valued and invested heavily in good schooling), and benefitted from massive public investments in college education by a poor country (my parents paid a total of about $500 in tuition for a four year Engineering degree in one of the  most competitive and prestigious engineering schools in India). 

And sitting from a lucky yet hard-earned position, if I simply join the bandwagon and preach how capitalism is destroying the planet (which is what discussion on environment gets reduced to often) or alternatively subscribe to how enlightened capitalism can save it (the B-school variety of delusion about cliches like the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit), what does that make me? Either I dont have the guts or the intellectual capacity to call out the hypocrisy or am part of a cult.  Should putting solar panels on one's roof, driving EVs, eating organic food, and buying carbon offsets for flying 50000 miles per year, voting for higher taxes and preaching about the issue absolve one of all blame and make them feel superior to the people who are skeptical of this whole enterprise? 

We call someone who gets paid to fight other people's battles a mercenary. So aren't well-to-do people (including academics like myself) who benefit from the persistence of an issue that doesn't really affect them materially and economically not simply white-collar mercenaries? In fact aren't we worse than mercenaries? At least mercenaries put their lives on the line. What are academics sitting in western democracies with full protection for their free speech and safety and having economic security risking when they pontificate how bad the world is and keep indoctrinating their students that the system they themselves benefitted from is rigged or for that matter even those who spread optimism that everything is achievable through enlightened capitalism or more scientific progress? 

Does mere belief in a cause make us different from mercenaries? And if this too extreme, because we are getting paid to do what we like, should that not make us have less of a voice and not more? Isn't that what we ourselves want when we vote in elections?