So basically you're saying you don't believe God exists and therefore my point is stupid. Which is kind of exactly the point I was trying to get across. In order to debate whether something is ethical, the parties involved must have some base level agreement on where ethics even come from to get anywhere in the discussion. We don't. So you simply dismiss my viewpoint because you don't agree with where my viewpoint comes from and demand an argument based on your own viewpoint. It's silly to have this argument on a board about writing. What you want is a college ethics class, I think.
I do believe in God, actually. But I also believe that morality exists because you should not hurt someone. Wrongs hurt someone or something, or else they're not wrongs. Why would they be wrongs if they don't hurt anyone?
How could they be wrongs if they don't hurt anyone?
If all you wanted to do was interject with a "because God says so", then that's fine, but don't pretend like I'm dismissing you because I'm questioning you.
If you don't want to debate it, then that's fine, too, but that's also on you, not me.
You're the one who brought up God's morality, after all. Not me.
I'm looking for consequences on how a persona effects the person reading your book.
If I call myself John Robert III and say that I'm writing this steamy gay romance from my beach house in California where my husband and I farm succulents with our four freakin' poodles but really I'm just a lady from Saskatchewan, who's snowed in, living a silly fantasy to get her through the winter, how does that effect literally anybody?
Begging for donations under the persona? Sure. Immoral. You're stealing from people. You're tricking them into thinking this person needs money when this person isn't even real. You're a fraud. You're conning them.
Asking for their personal information and taking advantage of them under this persona? You're catfishing them. You're just being nasty. You're defrauding their friendship in a way. You're conning them out of something that they probably wouldn't have given up otherwise, even if it's a little naive of them to have done so.
Pretending to be black and have black experience and speaking from authority about blackness when you're not black and interacting with "other" black people and asking them for donations and support. That's wrong. That's a big fat lie. You're conning them. You're taking advantage of them. Catfish.
But creating a little persona in your author blurb to match a specific genre so the reader has a nice little cherry on top of their entertainment, so the whole package comes together nicely and looks complete.... Who's that hurting?
I think the other issues are not so much about the persona, but the actions taken after. I don't think that this is about personas, I think this is about con artists.
The VAST majority of people who create fake little blurbs for there pen names are not con artists looking to take advantage of people, so I don't think that it's unethical or immoral to do so.