Consumer pressure is the other option. We have the option of buying
fair-trade coffee, for instance. If consumers were able to find out which
corporations are producing things in an environmentally sustainable way and
which are not, or, for that matter, which ones are protecting their workers from
sexual harassment or whatever, and if they then make an effort to buy from
ethical businesses, they can perhaps have an impact. It is difficult, of course.
It depends on being able to trace a product’s origins. You need to be able to
work at each level: the consumer, the stockholders and at the level of
government policy. Like the starving people on the other side of the world, victims of unethical
trade are not real to us the way a child playing on the railroad track is.
Individuals, no matter how powerful, can do only so much, and governments have
too many strategic and economic interests to set policies by principal alone. Well, it is a lot to ask, but as one of the wealthiest and most powerful
nations, the U.S. is in a better position than most to do something. We say one
of our founding principals is that we are ruled by law rather than by people,
but it seems we do not want to apply this concept to the rest of the
world. It is hard to prove that ethical rules will serve self-interests. If you run
a corporation that is saving money by buying a product that can sell at a low
price because the manufacturer is not paying for waste cleanup, and as a result
polluting the environment in China, it is hard to say that it is not in your
self-interest to do that. But maybe it is in America’s self-interest to enforce
ethical trade rules, because it will help our workers retain their jobs.
Granted, the idea of tying ethics to self-interest does not seem to be working
very well at the moment. The British Parliament’s recent decision to ban foxhunting notwithstanding,
we live in a canine-eat-canine world. We are pretty ruthlessly using animals for our own purposes. The fact that a
being is a member of a different species should not give us a right to disregard
that being’s suffering or pain, and animals do suffer when we raise them in
factory farms, where the animals are confined to stalls or cages or sheds their
whole lives. Those who are determined to eat meat could at least try to avoid factory-farm
products and buy only free-range meat and chicken. At least those animals lived
their lives outdoors, though, granted, they will have suffered when they were
taken to the slaughterhouse. I am not absolutely strict about being a vegan. When I eat out, I might be
just vegetarian rather than vegan. I have not worn leather shoes in 30 years. It
used to be hard to find hiking boots that were not made of leather, but these
days there are more options. Ethics will continue to take a backseat to efficiency. I am more optimistic that at least the practice of giving money to needy
people will become more widespread. It obviously is a reality in the sense that
there are some people who give very large amounts of money away. The question is
how many of them are there. We could reduce the numbers of people who are
starving or dying of AIDS or tuberculosis or malaria, so that instead of it
being a billion people, it is just small pockets of people. The world has the
resources to do that. And I am hopeful we will work up to doing that over the
next 20 to 30 years.
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