2018-03-08 at 4:51 PM UTC
Unless you're growing opium.
2018-03-08 at 5:14 PM UTC
You can't life in a semi civilized nation WITHOUT standing on the backs of others. It has always been this way, it will probably always be this way. You shouldn't feel guilty about it, just do what you can to reduce your impact.
Also those factory jobs in china helped bring up the middle class. It's still shit, but its better than farming, or doing nothing. And it's usually not children working there. For phones it's mostly just machines.
2018-03-08 at 7:25 PM UTC
Zanick
motherfucker
[my p.a. supernal goa]
I agree with your critique for the most part, but for the sake of argument, you may want to consider it from the perspective of a nation of beneficiaries. The murdering of 17 high school students is not useful at all, and so we call it despicable; while millions of Chinese adolescents working their little fingers to the bone to provide the West with technological instruments is very useful, and because we're clearly getting the better end of this so that we don't ever have to see them, we feel minimal obligation to pay attention to their working conditions.
If all those Chinese kids were to jump from their buildings at once, however, it would be a global catastrophe that would force us to reassess our dependency on foreign labor. But, since it's more of a suicide trickle we consider the occasional leap to be the cost of doing business. Likewise, 17 kids shot at once is a tragedy, whereas individual teenagers dying hardly makes the news in most cities.
So whether we're sad about the deaths of teenagers is determined by how useful they were to us and/or whether we're able to avoid acknowledging their sacrifices, and how sad it makes us depends largely on the size of the death cluster.
2018-03-08 at 7:31 PM UTC
We're all morally handicapped to some extent. Its to be expected when you give a kid a fucked up life.
2018-03-08 at 7:54 PM UTC
So if there were 150 shooters, they would of broke off into two families and what?
2018-03-08 at 10:25 PM UTC
To answer the OP, both cases are immoral but one is less immoral due too your ability to affect the situation. I have a similar argument for veganism.
Basically, if you got a Fairphone 2 (or ate a vegan meal) instead of whatever you're using (or meat), I don't think anything would really change (except for maybe Fairphone, which is a small company). At that point, I think you're doing something that it would be better not to do on a moral level, but choosing not to do it is really an inconsequential demonstration of your commitment to your ideology.
I don't know how familiar you are with Islamic theology but there are roughly related concepts called "savaab" and "gunaah". It's basically like some unit of currency that's a store of virtue/reward and sin/punishment, although these ideas are not well defined (ultimately it goes to the Egyptian idea that your sins will be weighed against your virtues). I view my morality in somewhat similar terms, like "points", and I think small direct virtues, such as giving money to Righty (my local homeless veteran who had his left limbs blown off in Korea), will more than clear my conscience.
