[hnburnsy]

This feels like the episode of the The Good Place where they figure out the point system to get to the good place doesn't work because today's world is complicated...

>Michael uses the example of someone buying roses. A man hundreds of years ago got a lot of Good Place points because he grew and picked his own roses to give to his grandmother. However, when another man got roses for his grandmother, he lost points. It’s because he ordered them through a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides, delivered from thousands of miles away creating a large carbon footprint and the money went to a greedy CEO that sexually harassed women.

[LifeIsBio]

Incidentally, this is also one of the main points of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari. His argument is that human’s morality is built for interacting with a small tribe of people. You know where your moccasins come from, because the person who made them sleeps at the fire next to yours.

[_bxg1]

The problem is that this argument is a spectrum. For a consumer, who is (mostly) powerless to change the system, it might be (mostly) valid. But on the other end of the spectrum, the CEOs who actually could make a difference use the same argument to wash their hands. "It's all just business, the world is complicated, it's impossible to be perfect."

[dls2016]

In other words, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption.

[homonculus1]

What is the point of this slogan? Are we all supposed to feel guilty for not reverting to disconnected hunter-gatherer tribes? It's not an insightful ethical standard, and I reject it.

[dls2016]

Like a sibling of my original comment, human morality is optimized for small tribes. In my opinion the point of the slogan is to instill some anarchy into the listener... some weariness of top-heavy hierarchies. In my experience, it seems that the existence of a top-heavy hierarchy is necessary for, and too often sufficient to ensure, widespread exploitation. It's relatively easy for one desperate person to rob their neighbor. But a hierarchy will allow you to convince normal people to participate in the robbing of everyone two towns over, or in protecting a powerful studio executive, or dehumanizing detainees, or...