If slaves were legal, would you buy one?

If slaves were legal, would you buy one?

The $2 dress that makes you morally responsible

Image source: Shutterstock; asset ID 2351566609

I once watched a friend of mine dealing with a telemarketer. He said that he wasn’t interested in shaving 10% off his phone bill.

Telemarketer: But why? That’s crazy talk.

Friend: Because I don’t like telemarketing.

In other words, he didn’t like the whole system.

No one really wants to go to work. That’s part of the definition. If you wanted to go, then it wouldn’t be work — it’d be play with benefits. So I think basically everyone has asked themselves, at one point or another, “Why should I bother getting out of bed?”

Some people, like Bartleby the Scrivener, decide that there’s no good answer to that question, and so they just don’t. And I think that’s a perfectly reasonable response. Respect.

But the more common chain of reasoning is: “No work → no money → no food or house → I’m screwed.”

So, no one chose to be born — but everyone, more or less, chooses to work… right?

Some choices aren’t real choices. The rat in the maze can run left or right, but at the end of the day it’s still in a cage. A vending machine might offer 16 different snacks, but at the end of the day maybe they all taste the same.

The option of wage servitude or living on the streets isn’t illusory like the rat in the maze, but it’s a selection from an unpalatable menu. If you really had the choice, you’d dine at a different restaurant.

In Sophie’s Choice, the nice man in the Nazi uniform forces Sophie to either send her daughter or her son to the gas chambers; and if she doesn’t choose, both will go there.

Sometimes the problem is the whole system.

I lean radical in terms of consent and individual freedom. I think people should be allowed to undergo extreme cosmetic surgery and graft horns to their head if they really want. I think Armin Meiwes’ victim should have been allowed to be cannibalized, if he really wanted. But those “if” clauses are doing a lot of work there.

Something that original Sartrean existentialism didn’t get quite right is it emphasized individual freedom, but paid little attention to how choice is produced.

People normally talk about morality in terms of “right” and “wrong” action.

When we say that a situation or event is “good” or “bad”, that’s not a moral judgment as such. It’s just stuff that happens.

But sometimes we do say that a situation is right or wrong, as if we’re talking about what the universe itself should or shouldn’t do.

The more stark form of the Bartleby example is sweatshops — third-world country, long hours, low pay, bad conditions. But, if you asked the workers, not only would they tell you they chose to work there, but perhaps they’d want you to buy the fast fashion.

So, should you?

First up, it’s not obviously true that the best way to get rid of sweatshops is to pay the sweatshops. Capitalist investment in underdeveloped countries can help those countries — but it just depends, because maybe the money goes into some millionaire’s pocket, and the workers’ conditions never improve. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea are capitalist success stories; Nigeria and Congo are tragedies. The “maquiladoras” garment factories of Mexico have seen little improvement in conditions, despite decades of investment.

Secondly, even if it’s all consensual, all the way down the line, maybe the system itself is wrong — and not just “bad”, but “wrong” — and you should wash your hands of it rather than dirty your hands by engaging in it.

Maybe people shouldn’t work in those circumstances, even if they choose to, and maybe a happy slave is still a slave.

Maybe you should hang up on the telemarketer.