The ethical oxymoron

Imagine your typical day as a consumer. Because that’s what you are, isn’t it? Imagine also, if you will, that I’m an instantly annoying friend of a friend who, at the end of your day of consuming, has cornered you at a party or sat next to you in the pub. Yes, you are a consumer, admit it! You buy manufactured products of all descriptions, some of them outrageously ostentatious status symbols, some of them little luxuries you think you deserve, almost all of them utterly useless and unnecessary. You use energy in prodigious amounts to get you around, keep you warm and do all those daily tasks that you’re too busy and important to do yourself. You eat foods that you enjoy or that might make you feel guilty or virtuous or indulgent or just plain sick.

You drink drinks when you go out that give you a failsafe and socially acceptable excuse for saying things you’d otherwise be too hesitant to say or for doing things you might otherwise feel too grown up to do. Then to ‘offset’ the cirrhosed liver tissue and dead brain cells you’ll drink some health giving water from your local water company, or maybe some mineral water bottled up and shipped over from Fiji, where a lot of the population don’t have access to mains water. Or perhaps some fairly traded coffee (because you want to feel like you’re actually doing good by consuming something), or maybe even some overpriced herbal infusion stiff with antioxidants to stave off the inevitable cancer (which will be brought on by the endless torrent of toxins you pay to stuff through your digestive system or take into your lungs). Any of these options will almost inevitably have been packaged in plastic made from valuable oil resources and shipped around the monopolised supermarket distribution system in huge polluting lorries. Have I made you feel guilty? Probably not; maybe you refute many of the accusations I’ve thrown at you or think I have no business to accuse you of them in the first place.

The whole concept of ethical consumerism is rife with this sort of conflict and paradox. You could argue that the term itself is an oxymoron. To ‘consume’ is unethical; indeed the word itself has immoral implications. Perhaps this is just something we need to come to terms with. Maybe the ‘ethical consumerists’ should stop wringing their hands over their vain attempts to maintain the tokenistic sham of a lifestyle, and just accept that there are too many people in the world for us to be able to treat each other and our planet fairly. In a way, that’s quite an understandable, if irresponsible, stance to take if we accept our own short sighted human nature.

It often feels like we ignore the negative aspects of a consumer culture by trying to do it ‘ethically’. I was in a branch of a well known café chain recently, one that takes enormous pride in their ethical and sustainable products. We’re supposed to feel positively radiant when we walk out of the door, and not just because of the exquisite coffee and delectable squishy cakes - oh no - because we’ve really done some good for the world. After a few cups of coffee in here, vast tracts of lush, rain drenched tropical forests have been replanted, herds of gorillas are leaping joyfully from tree to tree in their rediscovered wilderness, contented polar bears lounge blissfully in their untouched Alaskan ice, and generations of hearty Venezuelan villagers sit contentedly around their communal fires laughing about the old times when nasty exploitative farmers used to pay them peanuts for their coffee beans.

So I’m being just slightly facetious here, but my point is that the increasing obsession with being able to do everything fantastically ethically is, at best, unnerving, and, at worst, sinister. It is extremely dangerous to attach so much value to our token efforts at ethical consumerism. It is a sobering thought that a return flight to the US will add more to your carbon footprint than heating your house for a year. These raw facts are easy to gloss over by ostensibly living ethically, but there are so many examples in which ‘consumers’ bust a gut to put on an ethical or ‘carbon neutral’ front in public, which fails to compensate for their actual total impact. To use the example of our carbon footprints, however much we try to justify our actions, people have to accept that “everything they do involves carbon emissions, and not just flights and heating their homes," (Euan Murray, strategy manager at the Carbon Trust).

But isn’t trade the way to development? Isn’t the fair trade movement a sustainable way for people in economically less developed countries to become more empowered? Possibly it is one way that we can work towards this seemingly impossible goal, but one of the arguments against ‘fair trade’ is that it is an artificially created system that is interventionist rather than a natural process. It is therefore much more important that we accept the huge negative impact we have on the global community and make changes that reduce this impact in a more sustainable way. The waste of energy, food and natural resources in the most economically developed nations of the world is currently nothing short of an embarrassment.

We need to question our lifestyles more deeply. If we are really to live ethically, it must be a state of mind that is a part of every aspect of our lives, not just how we choose to spend our money. As societies across the world change ever more rapidly, we must think carefully where our values come from and how we decide to live our lives. Religion gives us guidance, supposedly on how to lead a ‘good’ life; should we live ethically to please God? Science is showing us how we can understand the impact of the human race on the planet; would a pragmatic approach to sustainability save us from ourselves? Human nature has inherent values that have evolved to generate sustainable communities; how do we make these work in a global community?

But, come on, let’s be practical. It’s going to come down to a series of decisions. Now a decision might be: ‘should I buy (or perhaps I ought to say consume?) product or service x, or should I not?’ But more realistically, now that we have become accustomed (or should I say addicted?) to consuming a lot, it is probably: ‘where should I buy x?’

So the challenge is then to see through the fog of tokenism, hearsay, marketing and politics, to discern the actual realities - the hard facts - of our personal impact. It will be difficult to measure, it will be debatable and there will be pros and cons for each option. What we need is a better understanding of how the artificial fog and the hard realities actually work.

Consider a popular cut price clothing store. What do you think of these statements?

• “They use cheap foreign labour to keep prices that low”
• “Other high street chains use just as much cheap labour”
• “They don’t waste money on advertising”
• “They minimise staff costs and store overheads (cheap and cheerful!)”
• “Their clothes are rubbish and fall apart”
• “They make low cost clothing available to people on low incomes”
• “They encourage people to forget brand image”
• “They encourage a ‘throwaway culture’”

These statements are different in terms of reliability and in terms of their relative importance to different people. I’m beginning to feel that the most concerning, and the most personal, is the last one, because it links to our underlying consciousness as human beings, and the way we consider our power to have what we want. Indeed, I would even go as far as to say that this is a fundamental part of a growing consumer culture in which people start to feel like either clients or their providers, in just about every aspect of their lives. For example, political apathy is because politicians are increasingly seen as being there to serve rather than to represent; increasing litigation is a result of consumers always needing someone to blame.

“So cheap clothes lead to political apathy do they?!”, I hear you say. Well, not directly, but one of the crucial things about trying to consume ethically is to remember how everything joins up at the back in mysterious ways. Part of being a responsible global citizen is not only to appreciate that our actions affect more vulnerable people everywhere, but to understand how.

Unfortunately, the inconvenient truth is that there are simply too many of us on the planet to consume ethically as a species, and we should not believe that we can solve the problem by spending money differently. While a guilt mentality is no way to live, it is vital that we realise how much of an impact we do all have on the environment and on other people around the world, just through what we have come to expect as a normal standard of living.

Tom Wilmot