Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 6350858" data-attributes="member: 3887">Short answer: you are wrong, but I admit I'm being unusually a) laconic and b) interrogatory today, because I'm busy at work (but still want to participate in this thread because it's interesting). Right. "How to be an ethical consumer?" is an important question. My wife and I think about it a lot. It's also a terrifically complicated question in a contemporary consumer economy. I don't have a good answer for how to do it (merely the answers I'm using for now). Which is why I asked you questions. I'm curious how other people answer them. Maybe I can improve/refine my answers, or at least come to a better understanding of how I go about answering the question. Let me switch gears and make a statement: participation in a contemporary consumer economy involves an unavoidable amount of complicity in actions I find unethical. Leaving art aside, I own Apple products. I know where they're made, but own them anyway. I still purchase things from Amazon, despite believing many of their labor practices  are atrocious. But I've sworn off Chik-fil-A for good... I'm trying to figure out where I draw the line, or perhaps just make peace with the fact the line is arbitrary. That's fair. I doubt he will. He's stating, in the most hateful way possible, what sure look like deeply-held religious beliefs. Which raises another troubling question: let's say I boycott Card's books (which I effectively have), on the grounds he supports policies/positions I find immoral, am I also ethically bound to boycott his church, which makes far larger monetary contributions to political action groups I think are evil, and, then, by extension, businesses owned by members of his church, whose contributions provide the money?</blockquote>

Verification