Freelance Writing Jobs | Today's Articles | Sign In

Staying Employed, Staying Ethical

Should You Sacrifice Your Morals?

Jan 23, 2007 KC Morgan

When you work for yourself, at some point you'll be asked to do a job that might go against the grain of your beliefs. Should you sacrifice your morals...for money?

Does everyone have a price, as the saying goes? Self-employed professionals, people who work from home, often learn things the hard way. There are few coherent guides to self-employment are far too few resources for work from home professionals. Some problems, like buying individual health care, can be taken care of easily. Others, like being asked to perform a task that you consider unethical, are not so cut and dry.

What about the work from home writer, for example, who is asked to do a project on the merits of capital punishment but who is completely against it? The graphic designer who is asked to create a pornographic page? Can staying employed and staying ethical be the same thing? In other words, should you sacrifice your morals if it means getting the gig?

Self-employment and working from home can be tricky. Things don’t always go smoothly, and people don’t always come through with their promises. Work may be scare, times may lean, and money might be tight. Doing a project that seems a little unpleasant, perhaps even a smidgen morally reprehensible, may sound like an okay trade-off when starvation seems to threaten. But in the end, all ethics and moral judgments aside, the choice has to be a personal one. Everyone has their own personal code of ethics and morals – some bars are set higher than others, and some ideas are more easily broken. Personal ethics is always an interesting topic of discussion.

Should you sacrifice your morals? Only you know how badly you need the assignment, the job, the money. Only you know what your ethics mean to you. But if you’re ever asked to do something that you absolutely and truly do not wish to do, then simply don’t do it. Money may be a little lean, but you’ll no doubt thank yourself in the future. Misplaced morals have a way of coming back to haunt you in the future.

For more philosophy, check out the Mind & Soul section.

The copyright of the article Staying Employed, Staying Ethical in Self-Employment is owned by KC Morgan. Permission to republish Staying Employed, Staying Ethical in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.