Parents paying for education

Thanks to the full financial support of my parents, I recently graduated from an expensive private college in the Northeast with no student debt. After graduation I secured a salaried job with benefits at a large publishing house. I found the work thoroughly soul-crushing, so I quit and began working a number of minimum-wage jobs that do not set me up for any sort of “future.” While I enjoy my current lifestyle, I fear I might be violating an obligation to my parents, since my college degree is irrelevant to these jobs. Do I have an ethical duty to find a better job even if I’m unhappy with the work? NAME WITHHELD, BOSTON

Every family is unique, so it’s difficult to place this kind of problem into a clear context. If you directly asked your parents to finance your college experience with the explicit intention of pursuing a specific career, that would be like a contract; if your parents’ willingness to pay your tuition has been dependent on your willingness to pursue the best possible job it afforded, you would have essentially agreed to a familial form of indentured servitude. But in all likelihood, the real situation is not that straightforward. Your parents probably paid for your education because they could afford it (and felt it was their responsibility). You probably accepted their support because it seemed like the obvious thing to do (and because you were broke). Your current predicament wasn’t really considered by either party, despite how common an occurrence it now seems to be.

Your parents have a moral burden here as well: They can’t demand that you take a job that makes you hate yourself simply because they spent money in order to put you in that position. They’re not venture capitalists, and you’re not an investment opportunity. That said, there’s a reason work is called “work” (as opposed to “wall-to-wall awesomeness”). I strongly suspect your soul-crushing publishing job might have seemed significantly less soul-crushing if you were also receiving the soul-crushing bills that accompany soul-crushing student loans.

Still, you are not ethically obligated to live your life in a way you dislike just because someone else willingly subsidized the means by which you achieved that unhappiness. You might feel a personal obligation to do so, out of respect for your parents. But there is no ethical framework that requires you to be miserable as repayment for their investment in your future. Moreover, the purpose of college is not solely to get a high-paying job when you’re finished. If the experience made you a more complete person, it wasn’t a (total) waste of their money.

The first thing that calls my attention in the question is the fact that tome it seems more like a moral conflict within the asker than an ethical conflict. Of course it is important what his parents feel in relation to his career choices, however, the problem is that he does not know whether he can allow himself to disregard the fact that his parents want him to make money. It is more about what he as an individual thinks and feels about the situation.

The ethical thing to do in this person's situation is apparently to fulfil his parents' expectations, but he is in a dilemma because he does not have his moral values defined enough to the point of understanding how he feels about guilt and family disappointment. Maybe he feels like his parents' desires shouldn't dictate his future or maybe his parents have put in a lot of money into his education on the condition that he follow through with his career choice and in turn he is just lazy and trying to find a moral and ethical argument to justify this laziness. Who knows?

Enough about the asker. Now I want to talk about the ethicist's point of view on the situation and the examples he gives. He says that although the asker might feel obliged to live up to his parents' expectations just because they financed his education. However, I want to point out the fact that ethics is a term that describes any set of rules imposed by a group of people, be it family, a company, or a country. So where do we draw the line? Why can we say that a workplace's ethical values are a certain way but that this family does not provide enough of a "framework" and that therefore violating the parents' expectation is not violating the family's ethical values?

It is certainly hard to pinpoint exactly where the ethical values have to be set aside and where the moral values have to kick in. This guy has to choose between braking his family's ethical framework in order to fulfil his own destiny and follow his own moral values or to conform to his parent's rules and live a life he might not really want to (at least in the beginning).