Avoiding immorality in the workplace often “isn’t an issue of right and wrong so much as a question of distance,” as James Brusseau’s book The Business Ethics Workshop puts it. Even the most ethical companies may have ties to some unethical practices somewhere in their production workflow — at a certain point, dealing with ethical issues is a balancing game of not what you can mitigate, but what you can reasonably accept or turn a blind eye to. It, however, becomes increasingly difficult to measure that boundary — do we consider all companies to be “departments” of a larger unethical machine? Or the departments of a larger company to be their own separate orgs? How do we even know a company is more ethical than another, or do they merely have a better PR department?
A scene in the TV show The Good Place illustrates this well — in the afterlife, points are scored for each action a person does, and the sum of all points dictates where that person lives their afterlife. But in the complexity of the modern world, simply buying a tomato can cost thousands of negative points for labor exploitation, use of toxic pesticides and global warming contributions.
In the end, which tomato you choose or which job you choose is a personal matter of what ethics are important to you, and whether those ethics will outweigh the other needs you have for a job — pay, security, prestige, etc. I choose to draw my line at Facebook, knowing the irrevocable damage the site has done on mental health, democracy, and culture. It’s a personal demarcation, one that might as well fall under the need for meaningful work more than anything. But it’s also a privileged demarcation — most people don’t have the luxury to refuse a well-paying job. Locked into a capitalistic system, the ethical responsibility of tending to our own needs is all most of us have left.
-Nathan Sariowan
