Question Is it immoral to spend your days playing World of Warcraft, just eating and sleeping at your parents' house? They have an extra bedroom and plenty of money so the food is a non-issue--they already have to feed 4, so 5 is not much different. Is it any different than playing golf every day trying to go pro when the likelihood of doing so successfully is very remote. Nothing else really interests me and I don't see why I have to live the way everyone else does if I don't want to. I could work and pay some rent but it would have a negligible effect on the overall finances and I can't find a job anyway.

Accepted:
December 30, 2010

Comments

Your rent-free lifestyle does not wrong your parents who can easily afford you and are apparently willing to do so. And there's also nothing wrong with refusing to live like everyone else does -- some of the most admirable people in human history did just that.

If everyone in this world were as well-off as you are, then there would be nothing immoral about your way of life. It would merely be lackluster, irrelevant, and boring for everyone but yourself. Pretty much everything worthwhile and interesting in this world is there thanks to human beings living with more than your level of ambition.

But then not everyone in this world is as well-off as you are. And in this case, I think, your lifestyle does qualify as immoral. There are lots of people in this country and even more so abroad who are vastly worse off than you are, and you have a moral responsibility to do your share to fight these deprivations -- as many others are doing, through volunteer work, donations, and so on. If you had a job, you could spend a little of your income to help people who have lost their homes in the recent financial crisis, to help children abroad suffering from malaria or unable to obtain even a minimal education. Even if you were really unable to find a job (how hard are you looking?), you could do some volunteer work in your community or by writing letters in behalf of political prisoners.

Now you may say in response that it might be good for you to do such things but that it would not be wrong not to. Many people are very badly off, but you have not contributed to their problems and so you have no responsibility to help fix them.

Let me make two points in reply. First, even if you didn't directly contribute to the burdens others are bearing, as a citizen you share responsibility for what we together do through our government. As citizens, we empowered the government that led us into the financial crisis, and as citizens we should work to ensure that those families hit hardest by it (domestically and abroad) can get through the crisis without too much hardship and lasting damage.

Second, it is not through merit -- even your parents' -- that you are as well off as you are. Income is very unequally distributed in this country and in the world. Your parents have "plenty of money" -- others are desperately poor, especially abroad where many families live on a few hundred dollars a year. Such huge disparities did not arise historically through differential work habits or even through luck. Rather, there were severe injustices -- such as slavery, colonialism, and genocide -- involved in the evolution of the existing distribution. As it happens, you are a beneficiary of these historical wrongs. To be sure, you bear no responsibility for these wrongs. Even if your ancestors were deeply involved in them, you cannot inherit their sins. But you should ask yourself whether it's right for you to claim the fruits of these crimes: the vastly superior start in life you and your parents have enjoyed while others grew up without adequate food, water, shelter, sanitation, education, medical care, and electric power. You should not simply take advantage of this extremely uneven and unjust distribution of starting places, but should use some of your privileges to protect others who had so much worse a start in life.