“If they weren’t slaves they would die of hunger” is a wrong way to look at the situation. A better way to talk about it would be “hey they are mining minerals that rest of the world literally depends on, why are we not paying them enough so that they can uplift themselves from poverty?”
> why are we not paying them enough so that they can uplift themselves from poverty?
Short of credible threats of Western military intervention, I don’t see a solution.
We don’t employ those kids. Paying more just lines the pockets of middlemen and warlords. Absent a forced sociopolitical shift combined with a Marshall Plan-scale subsidy regime to elevate the country’s health, education and infrastructure, to make the change sustainable, those kids will be in a bad place.
Didn't that happen in industrialized countries? We made it illegal for kids to work in the mines, and we forced them all to go to school? Whatever happened to those kids?
> They only made it illegal after the point where most families didn't need it.
No, they made it illegal when workers rebelled against the most egregious form of exploitation. Wealthy factory or mine owners didn't grant worker's right out of good will, they were forced to do so because workers paid the price of blood to gain their rights.
I don't see what the employers have to do with it. Slavery was illegal before child labour, so the decision for children to work lay with their parents/guardians.
> I don't see what the employers have to do with it. Slavery was illegal before child labour, so the decision for children to work lay with their parents/guardians.
And shooting workers was also illegal yet "employers" did exactly that when workers started to strike.
They exploited their kids in other ways. My dad, for example, forced me by physical violence to carry bricks all summer building his house, while other kids were enjoying their summer break from school.
I haven't personally done any bad things to the children on Congo. Have you? I always make ethical purchase decisions within the limits of my budget (e.g. Fair Trade and other certifications). Short of literally devoting my entire life to charity, that's me fixing it.
Anything can be justified by extraordinary circumstances. Even cannibalism. You're on a small boat with 10 people, and everyone will die if you don't eat the weakest. If you eat the weakest, 9 out of 10 people survive. Your move.
Yes. But this situation is more like you’re on a boat with 10 people and everyone will die if you don’t get food. But there’s a bigger boat next to you who will give you food if you dive in the water and get pearls for them, which you do. But the bigger boat only gives you food for 3 people. So you still keep diving and getting the pearls while starving. But the big boat now says they’d only give you food for 2 in return because that’s how the market works. And the people on the big boat keep justifying this behavior because without their food the people on the smaller boat would die, so that’s better than nothing.
In this already strained analogy is it really correct? Would it be better to say the bigger boat is giving them enough food for 20 people, but 2 people on the boat are hoarding it and forcing the other 8 keep diving for scraps? So for the bigger boat to fix this situation, they need to go in and take out the 2 people hoarding and then run the smaller boat to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Perhaps, but the point I was trying to make was very limited in scope, and on a different level of abstraction. All I needed to argue was that extraordinary circumstances can affect the moral calculus in general, and not that it did so in any particular contemporary real-life example.
Are you going to feed them and build schools?
That's what the economy is doing, in exchange for cobalt.
How much money have you personally donated to the children of Congo?