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Comment by anewhnaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

While this is almost definitely the case, in general supply chains are completely opaque to the consumer. Anything you buy could and probably has involved exploitative labor practices in some place. As for pollution, everything uses energy. Even using if something uses green energy in its production, it will cause someone else who otherwise would have used that green energy to use some polluting energy instead. There is no standardized labeling scheme and nobody can be trusted. I mean if the person selling stuff is telling me it's "ethical" -- okay so I'm just meant to take that a face value am I? Where's the proof? What's penalty if it turns out you've lied? What are the chances someone will even be able to investigate the whole supply chain after the fact and then they'll actually do it?

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You are responsible for your actions, but you act according to imperfect information, so your actions are never going to be perfectly virtuous. But then again, even with perfect information, that is rarely the case.

There's a pretty big difference between knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering and turning a blind eye to that, and inadvertently participating in something that turns out has unanticipated externalities. The two are not the same, and relying on the possibility of the latter scenario to justify the former is bad faith.

> knowing full well something comes at a huge cost of human suffering

Well over half the things I need in life fall into the category of "I know this came at the cost of human suffering". There's not a lot of options for me as a consumer.

Much of the food I buy in supermarkets are harvested and processed by people in misery. I can't afford a car and when I Uber/Lyft to the hospital, I know the drivers aren't making ends meet and the nursing assistants make paltry wages that cannot pay rent in my city. When I do eat in a restaurant, having worked in restaurants for quite a few years, I'm fully aware that many of the staff aren't making living wages. When I visit my family, I know that the rookie flight attendants on Southwest Airlines are making just $22,000/year[0]. The maintenance workers at my apartment complex aren't able to afford fixing their car to take their kids anywhere and have to eat the fast-food chicken at the gas station next door (only food within 3 miles) unless they splurge on UberEats that they can't afford. Their children are being supervised by substitute teachers making $12/hr with very limited and sporadic hours each week.

What can I do differently as someone barely treading water myself?

From the article:

> This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time.

Maybe this is the difference. I only have enough money to buy a tiny bit more than I need. I actually really need to make the money stretch.

0: https://www.reddit.com/r/SouthwestAirlines/comments/18dz7cl/...

When it comes to "fast fashion" that's all anyone can ask of you. The complaints are leveled at those who treat garments as literally disposable, worn just once or twice then tossed to make room for a new thing.

It's an entire ethos that fashion requires constant change. It's no longer seasonal, but weekly.

If that's not you, don't worry about it.

It's an interesting point. Where do my responsibilities end as a consumer? I suppose "inadvertently participating" is qualified by the degree to which you believe it is likely that buying a more expensive product also causes negative externalities. (I am assuming I am meant to use price as an indicator.) If I believe that this is also highly likely, by paying more, I am simply giving more money to the exploiter. Is it not worse to reward them more for their actions?

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