Moral Decision-Making for a Job Search

Norman Schultz wonders when working is wrong.

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Back in 2018 I found myself in an interesting spot. I had decided to leave academia and education to pursue something new in my working life. Despite the downsides, it's easy to feel morally comfortable with being a teacher, but many other jobs can give pause. The timing and my background placed me in a near perfect position to think about how ethics factors into choosing a career. So on what criteria does one base the moral legitimacy of a job? I realized that:

1. Many people take jobs they aren’t morally comfortable doing.

2. There probably are some truly immoral jobs — by which I mean, perfectly legal jobs no one should take.

3. People use a common set of reasons to justify morally questionable employment.

I suspect most people don’t look at the job market this way, probably due to personal preference — “I don’t judge others, but I wouldn’t feel right doing that for a living.” But in the interconnected world, one’s work can affect an enormous number of people. So if a job is immoral, performing that job could do quite a lot of harm. I want us to explore these matters here.

What Do I Mean by ‘Job’?

One might think that the subject simply reduces to a more general consideration of moral theory, in that I’m really asking on what criteria we correctly judge right and wrong at all. But there are relevant particulars to employment that weigh in on making a moral evaluation there. The fact that most people must work and each worker is often just one player in a large industry complicates matters. But first and foremost, I must clarify what counts as ‘employment’.