Supporting mission personnel and humanitarian workers worldwide
We offer psychological services to people who have chosen to do work that is thought be good for the world. They have made altruistic choices which may also benefit them, but often involve personal sacrifice, suffering and loss. Many of them at times question whether their work has done or is doing good. We share many of their questions.
This is a personal reflection on stages in life choices about how to do the most good, largely adapted from the author's experience, but also touching on questions that others ask. It encompasses ethical consumerism and effective altruism. But much of the thinking developed independently of those movements, as the links here sometimes indicate, sometimes illustrate, and sometimes critique. The stages outlined owe something to Fowler's Stages of Faith. It's also dated by a historical progression from the late 1980s to 2017.
Inspired by ancient texts to "loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke", consider how to live a good life in a modern world.
Boycott Nestle. Even their Rowntree's acquisitions.
Close Barclays Bank account because of their apartheid investments.
Buy free range eggs, charity Christmas cards, recycled paper. Reuse paper obsessively, carry bottles to bottle banks.
Give money to homeless people on the street, or buy them food, get to know them. Give money to other charities. Give to everyone who asks, but as inconspicuously as you can. Begin following the countercultural community norm of giving away a least a tenth of your income.
Volunteer for charities. Discover how rewarding it is to help other people, and work towards choosing a career that will allow you to carry on doing that and make a difference. Avoid high-earning careers because they would make you too covetous and encourage you to line your own pocket and give less.
Orient your career choice so that you are helping people full time. Help people in your holidays too.
Transfer your high street bank account to the Coop Bank because it doesn't fund the arms trade.
Get fair trade coffee, bananas, tea, where available and affordable. Persuade your workplace and flatmates not to buy Nescafe, or buy it for them. Discover that supermarkets won't tell you where their produce is sourced from. Buy or repair clothes in developing countries when travelling there. Buy Ethical Consumer magazine subscription, giving it up when it makes every purchase look unethical. Live more thriftily, avoid spending unnecessarily.
Try to spend little and give more away. Make giving more planned and less showy. Buy normal Christmas cards and offset an equivalent donation to charity. Buy The Big Issue so frequently that its local seller gives you a Christmas card. Give to homeless charities instead of directly to homeless people. Be more selective about which charities to give to and set up regular donations amounting to a tithe. Distribute your giving amongst causes that matter to you or that seem neglected, unseen, or underfunded - rehabilitating released prisoners, for example. Perhaps choose charities on the basis of personal recommendation, because you've seen or benefited from their work, or you know someone who has benefited or is involved with them. Offset more to charity against other choices you've made with your money, such as getting married. Ask for charity presents for Christmas and birthdays.
Start saving with microfinance providers like Shared Interest and Triodos Bank. Seek ethical investments for retirement savings. Switch to an energy supplier which relies and produces 100% green electricity, only to switch back when your Bix Six provider persuades you that they're a much bigger producer of renewable electricity. Don't keep electrical equipment on standby.
Realise none of this is enough. Challenged by pyrotheology, which may not itself espouse ethical consumerism, recognise that you are still complicit in a great deal of exploitation, slavery, unfair trade etc. With the Beattitudes unfulfilled, surely we have been given a responsibility to bring about holistic justice for oppressed people everywhere and to show that powerful vested interests don't call all the shots?
Drop out of your career and work pro-bono or for reduced rates developing the resilience of workers who have made similar career choices, or care for elderly parents. Treat your choice to take lower wages as a form of giving. Give in other ways that are helpful but aren't so obviously giving and don't just make you feel good for giving. Even then, with a low income by western standards, you could be in the richest 5% of the world and have many slaves providing you goods and services. You don't know who they are nor how well they are paid or cared for. You may say you believe in the resurrected Christ, or that you are against slavery, injustice and cruelty, but your actions in supporting exploitation show that you are a hypocrite and a liar.
With new information, change your priorities. Research how to shop ethically. Avoid shopping at big supermarkets, using multinational companies and tax-dodgers. Look up ethicscores and take out and keep an Ethical Consumer subscription. With the most ethical brands unavailable or prohibitively expensive, settle on the best of the most available - easily as low as 8/20. Recognise that guiltless shopping is impossible as this is quite a low ethicscore really, and all ethical consumerism is flawed; just do your best anyway and know that it will not save you.
Instead of going for the cheapest products, buy from the Coop, Waitrose, M&S - or corner shops, even those owned by franchises such as McColls, with surprisingly high ethicscores. Support small, local businesses. Pay them with cash or debit cards so they avoid incurring charges, even when you stand to benefit by using a cashback credit card. Monitor your household expenses and discover that they don't increase. Be alert to new information about exploitation, and avoid companies indulging in it. Stop buying cheaply and pay something closer to the real cost of food. Consider the ingredients of your food purchases and their sourcing. Try to avoid unsustainable palm oil. Get clothes from charity shops. Get your technology refurbished second hand to avoid complicity in DRC mining and child labour. Spend days trying to work out the most ethical purchase of simple household items, months over a car. Learn from Next Green Car why to avoid diesels, before the government and public learns. Use alternatives to Amazon for books, music, and other purchases, discovering that some apparent alternatives are owned by Amazon and you need to be more careful. Boycott products sourced in the Occupied Territories, recognising the issue of misleading labels. If it can't be bought ethically, see if you can manage without it. Learn and keep checking what fish are sustainable (fished from where and how), and try not to buy if they're not. Stop haggling for (what for you are) pennies when shopping in developing countries. Spend more on buying more ethically made products that will last longer.
Being mindful of the failings of development, prefer trade to aid, particularly noting common problems with large scale aid and volunteerism. If you know of them, shift more giving to support small NGOs or individuals you trust to use the money well. Come across effective altruism and dismiss it as having discovered tithing 3000 years late, and for its naive apparent faith in aid.
Give up sending Christmas cards altogether, with all the extra paper and cost they use. But buy Royal Mail shares to support a dwindling postal service, discovering the postal workers' union is unresponsive to queries about how to vote at shareholder meetings - perhaps they're not allowed to tell you how to vote. Prefer going through a manned checkout rather than a self-service checkout to keep people in jobs. Live on bargains reduced for quick sale, or go freegan. Eat more beans and less meat. Feel sickened by your continued complicity in injustice, especially when you benefit from other people not making the same choices. For an extra challenge, discreetly avoid eating non fair-trade chocolate bought by other people.
Compost. Recycle as much as possible and aspire to minimise your household waste. Collect items which can't be recycled by the kerbside and take them periodically, without an extra car journey, to a recylcing centre, even in another county if you can get away with it. Look into how to recycle polystyrene and tyres. Find out how to recycle when you are away from home. Get your workplace, family, friends, clubs to recycle, and do what you can to recycle their waste, picking through bin bags if you have to.
Consider where alternative energy is best captured, and recognise the flaws in the argument for installing domestic solar panels in the UK under government subsidy; consider buying solar panels when they become economically viable without subsidy. Prefer supporting large wind farms to small wind turbines. Switch your electriticy to a green energy supplier and don't be persuaded back to the Big Six. As gas is not a sustainable energy, despite a small proportion of biofuels in the mix, switch your gas supplier to a co-operative.
Prioritise how to reduce your carbon footprint: don't have any (more) children, persuade your disabled parents to move to the city so carers have less far to travel, avoid unnecessary flying. Avoid unnecessary driving too: go by public transport, walk, or cycle.
Use microfinance more carefully and extend it to Kiva and Oikocredit. Prefer building societies over banks because of their investment choices. Recognise the challenge to the Co-op Bank's ethics after its failed merger with Britannia, and start using more ethical alternatives.
Recognise that negative-screening "ethical" investments retain many stocks of questionable ethics - Exxon, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc., and that any conventional socially responsible investing is a choice between different evils. Whilst paying careful attention to the general principles of intelligent investing, choose ethical investments as the lesser of the evils. Compare ethical criteria and choose which you prefer. Buy Legal & General Ethical tracker fund and email their corporate governance department to attempt proxy shareholder activism.
Disputing your financial adviser's statement that gilts aren't regarded as ethical (given defence lending), as so much of the UK budget goes on welfare, health & education, buy gilts. Avoid US treasury stocks because of concern about greater defence, lesser welfare spending. Avoid Russian and BRICs bonds for same reason. Avoid Vanguard tracker funds because based in Ireland to reduce tax, and other funds based in tax havens (not counting the UK), unless you think their philanthropic owners will do more good with their profits than the US government would do with their tax.
Diversify into higher-risk unconventional investments with a positive social impact available through the likes of Triodos, Ethex, Abundance, etc., being mindful of the risks of investing too much in any of them. Also consider conventionally traded investments with a positive social focus, offered by Greencoat, Threadneedle, Pictet, & Sarasin.
Avoid investments which trade in commodities like food, which increase mining with its associated impact on the poor (including gold), or which use allow the use of potentially unethical derivatives (commonly used in bond funds). Especially avoid ETFs. Try to buy insurance with higher ethical ratings
Read Doing Good Better and other effective altruism (EA) material, and recognise the value of its emphasis on an evidence base. Consider arguments that ethical shopping and ethical investing have at best a very minor beneficial impact, but probably make us feel good whilst distracting us from effective action to address the real problem.
Everything is more complicated. Carbon footprints are not intuitive. Obsessively switching off a phone charger is like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon. Rinsing items before recycling them risks uses more energy than is gained by recycling, perhaps depending how you rinse.
Ethical shopping easily misses its target. Fair trade or organic standards don't always give producers better prices or lift them out of poverty better than free trade. Food miles are not always proportional to carbon footprint, neither is carbon dioxide the worst greenhouse gas. Microfinance doesn't lift people out of poverty. Labour rights in countries including Russia, Kenya, Haiti, and Morocco are better than in the USA. Even where developing countries do have poorer labour standards, their exports are hamstrung by farm subsidies in developed countries, which prevent their benefiting from trade. Sweatshop jobs in developing countries are better than no jobs. The boycott of Soda Stream put Palestinians out of work.
Even when they do work, many of the choices involved in ethical consumerism may do such marginal good that it would be more effective to donate the money saved by not making those choices. Failing to donate money which could have saved lives does more harm than the small good (if any) done by ethical consumerism. Hard as Stage 3 may have been to negotiate, its individualist approach is less challenging than collective activism. In the words of the founding director of Nuevas Esperanzas, token efforts may ease our consciences while distracting us from the things that would really make a difference. Ethical consumerism is a waste of time and a misunderstanding. It's much simpler to buy cheaply and earn to give.
Conventional ethical investment relies on negative ethical screening, a form of divestment. Divestment campaigns may be effective in stigmatising a brand, but as an isolated action, divestment barely affects the market, and even if it does lower share prices, allows less scrupulous investors to buy at a lower price and profit more from stocks like tobacco than you will. "Most economists agree that it is virtually impossible for a socially motivated investor to increase the beneficial outputs of a publicly traded corporation by purchasing its stock. Especially if (as is generally the case) stock is purchased from existing shareholders, any benefit to the company is highly attenuated if it exists at all. Impact investing typically does not take place in large cap public markets, however, but rather in domains subject to market frictions." Ethical investing may keep my hands relatively clean, while letting other people use dirty money without any concern for ethics at all. Instead, ditch your ethical screening, invest in low-fee well-diversified tracker funds, reap the profits of stocks in and bonds issued by bad companies, and use them for good.
The main ethical principle behind consumer boycotts and negative ethical screening is avoiding harm; ethical altruists aruge that the consequences end up doing harm because they reduce the capacity to do good. Instead, aim to maximise profit and earnings, even choosing a high-earning career, live frugally, and maximise giving to effective charities. Give all you can to the most effective charities which save the most lives, rather than wasting it on less effective charities. Other actions, like giving up meat and dairy products, craftivism, and other forms of activism could do much more good than all these efforts to shop and invest ethically.
Effective charities, like (at time of writing) the Against Malaria Foundation, are constantly reviewed by the EA community, for their evidence-based effectiveness and the value of giving to them, as measured in average lives saved per dollar invested, or quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) gained. You can even allow others to allocate your giving according to the latest research.
If you want to challenge EA, start from its underlying philosophy. EA is a form of consequential utilitarianism, subject to all the standard criticisms of that moral philosophy. Do the ends justify the means? Is it more important to avoid doing harm or to maximise the net good done? Are QALYs and lives saved the most important yardsticks for effectiveness? When might other needs be worth funding too? Is utilitarianism more moral than deontological ethics, in which the ethics of actions are judged on their merits? Does a Christian God espouse the latter ethical system or the former? Is giving back to people or organisations who have given to you ethical? Or giving to charity associated with people who are close to you?
Even if ethical altruism does not make you abandon your stage 3 position entirely, it may make you less fundamentalist and fussy about what you do with your money, other than giving it to effective charities as much as possible.
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