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"Black and White Ethics"

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism

This sugar-coated cowardice assaults me nearly weekly.

Let’s look at the underlying assumptions that allow us to digest this nonsense:

1. Almost everything you buy causes problems for someone, which means actually all of them, even if it’s not actually all purchases.

2. Since everything does some harm, any two purchases are just do ‘harm’, because thinking about the difference between buying a plastic and a wooden chopping board doesn’t interest me.

3. I don’t care.

I wouldn’t complain about someone just skipping to 3. I can’t argue with a blank stare, and when people tell me about how the oils used in Peanut Butter damage the rainforest, I probably look like a mannequin. But I’m not about to start lecturing people that the asphalt on the roads sometimes contains trace amount of animal parts, so we may as well eat battery-chicken eggs, and someone once killed a cow, so now we’re all polluted by vegan-original-sin forever.

I want everyone who says this to know that anyone with a braincell left alive can hear is ‘we can’t do everything perfectly, so we can’t do anything at all, so I’m not a bad guy, I’d like to help, but it’s the system, and I can’t, but I’m not a bad guy’.

Also, there’s no such thing as capitalism[a]

[a]