Ethics

I am married to a man who earns a considerable amount of money doing a job he enjoys. It is possible for me to earn a similar amount of money, but I now feel considerable discomfort in the profession that over the years has allowed me to do so. My preferred work (writing fiction) will bring in no money in the short term and has little chance of a lot of money in the end. Is it ethical to choose to earn less, and yet to share the rewards of my husband's salary - the big house, nice car, holidays and so on?

Comments

I would have thought that this sort of decision was one to be made by you and your husband jointly. How your household earns its income is for the two of you to decide, and it is also for the two of you to decide how that income will be used. I can well understand that there might be emotional costs to writing full-time and so not making much (if any) money doing it. The concerns you express already reveal some of those costs. But they can be mitigated in various ways. If your husband were to be truly supportive of your writing and believed in what you were doing, that would presumably go a long way. You could think of yourselves as investing the income you could otherwise earn in your writing. Perhaps that will pay off financially and perhaps it will not. But perhaps there are more important things than money, and you are really investing in them.

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