Much ado about ethics.

My sister and my girlfriend have recently blogged on the subject of ethics. Particularly regarding the fashion industries questionable ones, such as the use of sweat shop labour, or the over-sexualization of products.

I try to be aware of my choices in that I would like to avoid supporting sweatshop labour, I don't want to have slavery on my conscience. I'm also fairly disgusted by the blatant pornogrifying of products. We all know that sex sells, and I don't really care if an advertisement attempts to make a product sexy, but when the advertisement goes too far and ignores the product in favour of the sex we stop having an ad and start having sexism.

Everyone has a different views on ethics and morals. Most of the time those different views line up somewhat. Rape is bad, murder is bad, it's obvious right? Well it should be. If we ignore all of the "unlesses" (i.e. "unless God said to...", "unless my government tells me to...") ethics are fairly universal. They're an extension of our evolution as a species. What I find interesting is how those ethics seem to fade in importance the further away the affected person is. If there were a sweatshop in Edmonton it would be, on average, more disturbing to Albertans than it would be to people from Quebec. Human rights violations in Mexico seem to distub Canadians more than genocide in Darfur. Most of us think that we are above such things, but I think that if we are to be honest with ourselves we have to admit that we are more strongly affected by ethics violations the closer they are to home.

That makes a little bit of sense, if I were equally disturbed by all of the worlds evil, I would never leave my room. I would be in a constant state of despair. Life would be a horrible, terrible, depressing affliction. I would probably want to end it.

The fact that I can internally diminish the significance of something not close to me does not give me the right to externally devalue the bad things that happen in the world. That would be a violation of my moral code. I don't take personally the abuses that sweatshop workers endure, but I don't pretend that the workers don't either. I wont say that I don't own any sweatshop produced products, because honestly I don't know. I probably do. I will say that I do intentionally avoid products from companies that are known to employ unethical practices.