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• herrcaptain@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Very good point about the car! Art is obviously more personal, but yeah, the fact is that anything that makes up our personal world has statistically benefited in some way by the acts of bad people.

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• DessertStorms@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Only the person who assembles your car doesn't have massive fame and fortune, which you contribute to by not only paying for their work, but not speaking out against whatever abhorrent thing they did you're choosing to overlook (while an assembly person isn't the one profiting from the sale of the car they built, nor do they have any power or reputation that lets them get away with whatever they want) to facilitate them continuing to abuse others.

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  • hedgehog@ttrpg.network ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There are a number of logical inconsistencies in your comment.

    First, “someone who had a hand in assembling my car” necessarily includes the corporation employing the people involved in assembly, not just the laborers themselves.

    You’ve probably heard the phrase “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” It’s relevant here. To make a profit, the companies involved in the R&D, production, marketing, distribution, and sale of any product, like a car, must pay the workers less than their labor is worth; this is inherently exploitative. If an “ethical” company tried to enter into this space and avoided doing that, it would be outcompeted by unethical companies that exploited their workers. Strategies to avoid this, like injecting capital from elsewhere, simply move where the exploitation occurs.

    Any art funded, produced, marketed, or distributed by a corporation cannot be ethically consumed. Art created by an independent artist can be ethically consumed, but only if all of their supplies were ethically sourced.

    As such, the point - that abandoning art because of something one artist involved did requires the use of a line of reasoning that would necessarily result in refusing to make almost all other purchases - holds.

    It’s especially relevant given that the original post regarded someone who has no fortune because he is dead. A dead person’s fame is irrelevant. Unless there is an estate or some other institute that is profiting from increased visibility into his work, their art can be consumed or criticized on its own merits. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for criticism or analysis of it with the additional context from the artist’s life, but if such criticism takes the form I’ve described above - if it boils down to “You shouldn’t consume X because of Y thing related to its creation” - it’s reasonable to dismiss it due to it relying upon the same fallacy.

    Listening to a CD you already purchased has no further impact on the band’s livelihood.

    Streaming their song on Spotify has a negligible impact, but it doesn’t “facilitate their abuse” any more than buying a loaf of bread does. In either case, the companies involved are enriched more than the laborer, and since the companies themselves are themselves a larger problem than just the few members of a band could possibly be, you have to choose between:

    • refusing to consume anything and starving
    • only refusing to consume a product arbitrarily - e.g., when the problems relating to its production resonate with you or when the problems are currently in the spotlight
    • only refusing to consume a product when the producer was the least ethical of its alternatives
    • only refusing to consume a product when the problems are particularly egregious (think Nestle levels here)
    • only consuming products that are the most ethical options for a given product class
    • adding the ethics of a product’s creation to the criteria you use to determine which product to consume, such that you more frequently consume more ethical products but will still sometimes consume the least ethical product of a given class
    • some combination of the above
    • consuming products without considering the ethics of their production

    Saying that someone should not consume Led Zeppelin but that buying a car is okay would fall firmly into the “refusing to consume a product arbitrarily” category.

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