In the philosophical sitcom The Good Place, the main characters come to the realisation that no-one is gaining enough points to go to The Good Place (it’s a merit points-based system not a grace-based system like heaven). At first, they think the system has been rigged by the demons of The Bad Place, but then it dawns on them that because life has become so complex making morally informed choices is now all but impossible.

I started thinking about this moral complexity last week after reading this post from Alan Jacobs about why he would no longer be using Amazon. Then someone pointed out, what about all the other good reasons to not use Amazon? I have to confess to having been only dimly aware of some of these controversies but I also confess that I never bothered to take a closer look.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Taking a closer look at all the different Companies we use is complicated. And knowing the companies behind the companies we use is harder still. Being an Ethical Consumer is hard but it should be easier. So I’ve been wondering about a simple list of principles that I would want each company that gets money from me to be in agreement with.

1. Sell me a quality product. Don’t give me any cost-cutting crap. It makes suckers out of us all.
2. Don’t exploit people for a profit. I don’t want to buy something from sweatshops or that has been made by child labour. I don’t want stuff that has been shipped to me on the cheap because a business is just not paying their employees or suppliers a living wage or a fair price.
3. Don’t exploit the planet for a profit. This can be complicated but carbon-zero and sustainable practices abound. The climate emergency seems like a good enough reason not to make things worse by using companies with bad practices and polluting the supply-chain.
4. Pay your taxes to the country I’m in. If you’re benefitting from their roads, electricity (and other infrastructure), workers, education and a whole bunch of other things then you should pay your fair taxes to that country. I think that’s reasonable enough.
5. Own your principles. If Amazon doesn’t want to sell gender-critical books it should be brave enough to explain why and then delist them all. It should also explain why it is happy in the meantime to sell Mein Kampf or say why those books are more corrupting than say, Virtuous Daughter: A Family Harem Adventure and the like.
6. Own your politics. If you’re going to celebrate LGBTQ+ month and colour everything with a rainbow, explain why and why you’re not going to do the same for a thousand other more worthy causes. It’s OK to do it, you are free to do so but I’d like to know your political views if as a business you’re going to have some. Transparency is a good thing.
7. Respect my privacy. I’m increasingly wary of the vast amounts of data I’ve freely and willingly given Big Tech. This is one of those unintended consequences that seem to have created some things I like less and less.

Now here’s the challenge, every large company has something on their websites giving me their answers to some of these questions. Amazon, for example, tells me how good it is as an employer, how they respect my privacy, how they are sustainable and being environmentally friendly and so on. But I shouldn’t have to be a full-time investigative journalist to find out if this is true or not.

If anyone has experience of using websites such as Ethical Consumer and believes them to be reliable, I’d love to hear it of if there are better alternatives, let’s hear that too.

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