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Where would you draw the line? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 week ago by schmorpel@slrpnk.net to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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When buying stuff, consuming media and picking jobs - where do you draw the line of considering something too evil? Among my peers there's a lot of people who will actively avoid Nestle products, or who don't eat meat. But none of them bats an eye at using Facebook or X. Nobody cares about using products made in China under awful working conditions. I have worked as a freelancer translating greenwashing for a few doubtful megacorporations, others work as lawyers or programmers supporting them.

Especially when it comes to work I find myself between a rock and a hard place. I have tried doing blue collar jobs instead to avoid this. My body tells me very clearly that it's not a full time option for me and I have been running into the same problems of having to consider working for people who either get their money from evil megacorporations or and/or having to do stuff that actively causes some kind of harm, and being forever poor while doing so.

Where do you draw the line? How do you live your life in such a way that it doesn't support evil directly or indirectly while being able to bring food to the table and pay the rent?

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[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Nowadays I mostly, unexpectedly, draw the line at whether the product is good. I haven't really trained my mental ethics muscle because frankly most of the unethical stuff just isn't high quality.

Often I use ethics not as a "line" but as a proxy for the quality of something. In a world where we're bombarded with too many choices boycotting is more of an advantage than disadvantage.

In the rare instance when something is good and unethical, like meat, it becomes a case-by-case thing. In the case of meat I stay away from pork (because that's the most inhumane) and obviously I don't touch any American meat.

EDIT: The topic here was work. Which is a tough one because we're basically not given a choice on jobs. I would never do a job that actively makes the world a worse place, but I would work for a for-profit corporation ... except my quality argument still carries over here. For-profit corporations are horrible places to work.