Let people live their lives and you do you. People aren't a "provider mannequin" just because they like to make their partner happy.
there is also a great distinction between "Yeah I know another helping of chocolate syrup on my ice cream is a bad decision, but it'll make me feel good today.", and "You need to make a 10kUSD+ purchase on a totally arbitrary piece of jewelry that very well may have incited real human suffering and violence, even though I know that desire is irrational and poorly balanced."
I would assume -- maybe incorrectly, I admit -- that this form of irrationality would follow the individual and subsequently the entire relationship.
We all have different 'red flag dictionaries', so by all means people should live their lives; but I doubt I am alone in my assumptions.
That's a tricky topic to broach. Drop one zero from the price tag, and this definitely applies much more to your smartphone and computer than it does to gems. Drop one or two more zeroes, and this covers the clothes you wear just as much.
I'm not denying you have a point here. The suffering and violence are real. But my wife and I both went down the road of paying attention to that, and we've learned one has only so much attention to pay before you can hardly purchase anything at all. Nearly everyone has a cut-off point, past which they stop digging into those issues, otherwise it becomes debilitating.
Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.
Or, my point in short: cut people some slack.
> Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.
I don't think it's unsolved, it's just unsolved in a way that makes people feel ok. The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.
It's not the case here, because you're not buying gems for their practical value. If you were, then there would not be an issue - lab-grown diamonds for cutting things would be even cheaper than they are, and you wouldn't care about other gems unless you were playing with lasers or something.
As much a I hate it, the entire point of jewelry is that it's expensive and useless. It's the OG "proof of work" kind of thing - you prove your affection by burning significant resources on some piece of junk, and the recipient can use that piece of junk to prove their status to others ("look how much wealth I can burn on stupid shit", or "look how much wealth I can get someone else to burn on my behalf"). Layer a millennium of traditions and a century of De Beers marketing on top, and we get to where we are.
Being practical devalues jewelry; being cheap is opposite of its point; being alternative means being unauthentic, and makes the wearer a liar.
> The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.
That's the unsolved part. For any given thing enjoyed by me and a billion other people, with hardly anyone talking it's wrong, I suddenly have to take some stranger's accusations and/or guilt-tripping at face value. The math goes like this:
- Surely my responsibility can't be more than one-billionth of the whole thing;
- It's not like I can actually make a difference without upending my whole life. That doesn't feel commensurate with one billionth of whatever the bad thing is;
("Voting with your wallet" is bullshit; boycotts don't work; you can't really make a dent without a large movement here, and good luck creating one over random consumer decision - you're competing with efforts to start a movement over ever other such decision, and people's attention is finite.)
- You came out of nowhere and started guilt-tripping me, it's not just inconvenient and makes me feel bad, but it's also a technique used by scammers and cultists and politicians - so why should I trust your math in the first place?
With a little hand-waving, the solution to above inequality is "I'm not going to change, and I don't like you anymore".
I'm not saying this is good - just that it is. That's the bit that's unsolved in practice.
You'll get the value of the gold in the ring but not much for the gemstone.
They want them because they are pretty and because – like it or not – it’s what society has taught them to expect.
I've been tempted to try making them at home since about 2007, but for some reason all the different people I've lived with since then have objected to me running a lightly modified microwave oven continuously for a month at a time, with a few holes in the heating cavity so I can install an inverted pyrex bowl and pipes to connect it to a low-pressure methane supply system…
That's what we are doing here! But in this case most people seems to be sympathetic to the people that suffered to get you and your wife a diamond? I don't think rich people with frivolous desires need any more "empathy"
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[0] - It's always "some of them", "could be". The industry has blood on its hand. The particular rock you might buy your wife? Unclear. It's not like with e.g. tantalum capacitors which, at some point, AFAIK were all made out of tantalum sourced from child slavery mines in Africa. I honestly don't know if "some" diamonds are more like 50% or 5% or 0.5%.
Not unclear: as the not-blood diamond is more expensive, buying it is morally the same as buying the blood one. Now that is similar with many things that is produced and sold around the world, the problem with diamonds (and other luxury goods) is that we definitely could have a better society without it. It is not the same as giving up on iphones (which also shouldn't be produced by kids or starving people btw)
That's no excuse to continue.
In terms of living a more ethical life (on several different levels), this is a crude but generally effective way to go about it.
- Religion brings some people comfort and peace.
- Sports speak to our tribal nature evolved over millions of years.
- Sports cars are fun and exhilarating to drive and a status symbol or wealth and success, which help to attract mates.
I find making such comments very rational: They convince random observers not to support wars and child labor without any reason apart from following blind marketing.
> If you really believe that humans can or do operate "rationally" about any significant part of their lives
People can and do operate rationally from time to time: It's our main difference from the animals.
> Your definition of "rational" and the assumption that it could be universal is itself irrational.
If your definition of "rational" is supporting wars and child labor, then I indeed agree with you that you are irrational.
Yet for many other people, there is little to no practical difference in the value of those two choices. Are rich people some how less pragmatic/objective because 10k is effectively pocket change to them?
My point here is that there is no objective sense of rationality here - it's all relative to the point of the observer, and casting judgement on others from your own particular viewpoint is largely meaningless (and presumptuous).
However, I personally think the "rings must have a very expensive diamond" thing to be very silly. I know that it may be subjectively very important to the potential recipient, but that it seems to sometimes really be so inflexible feels murky in the "what normally tacit power dynamic in this relationship is this revealing?" sort of way. The only significant tangible difference between the diamond and moissanite is the mental totem: "It is a diamond, he bought a diamond for me. He wanted to buy something else but I wanted this and he got it". Which is a problem when it comes to that: that the recipient cannot budge on something so arbitrary. It feels more like the whispers of the DeBeers cultural brainwashing: "You don't deserve to have her if the sacrifice you made to purchase this wasn't big enough"
If a woman gets X amount of utility from a diamond ring over an alternative, how would it be invalid if I said I got -X utility from having to purchase it?
This is one of those hard to beat arguments where I know I'm not facing a purely rational point of view. I understand it, that's why I added the first paragraph of this response. It's one of those issues where I feel I'd need to have a Christopher Hitchens level of rhetorical skill to make any headway in my favor.
I know that a 33k Mazda3 and a 33k Honda Civic are "similar", but neither of them are exactly worth the same 33 thousand dollars. But who cares, really? Ultimately, even a 33k purchase is a "throw" away. You're not gonna compare control arm thickness to find the better value, and you're not gonna examine where the materials came from.