Second, and more relevant here, is that the sort of choices we constantly make, consciously or not, are made in a field of relative ignorance. should and should not put on their food would be an object of intense debate. The information Good Life Supermarkets, Inc. First, which information we feel we need is a result of an ethical decision already made-another person might rather have the religion of company’s owners listed on these cards. (The other side of this is the idea that if people just knew what was happening, they would Do The Right Thing, an idea that with even a little reflection, we know to be troublesome at best.) The utopia here would be a store in which there’s a label attached to every product which, in addition to nutrition information, would give information about environmental and social justice impact: x pounds of CO2 per calorie y pounds of potentially carcinogenic pesticide released into groundwater per apple z percentage of the labor force involved in the harvesting of this product who are underage children or illegal immigrants or paid an unconscionable pittance. What this version of ethical decision-making takes for granted is that all we need is ever more information. However, I’m guessing that I shouldn’t always prefer food produced in New Zealand. This is the result of a complex economic analysis, one which I probably couldn’t fully understand myself, let alone perform. Apparently, lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped to England uses less non-renewable energy per calorie to go from bleating cuteness in the mountains of the Southern Island to tasty treat on a dinner table 12,000 miles away in London than lambs raised right there, not 100 miles from Britons’ kitchens. It turns out that in order to decide what to buy I need an Expert to perform an sustainability analysis on a case-by-case basis. Given that I am dedicated to eating as sustainably as possible, I must ask: Should I feel guilty about choosing the wild-caught tilapia from Equador Whole Foods has on offer over farm-raised tilapia from the United States available somewhere else? What about frighteningly cheap farm-raised tilapia from China at Trader Joe’s? So when I do set foot in Whole Foods, the options spread out in front are daunting: tropical and exotic fruit I don’t recognize, incomprehensibly pristine fresh greens of bewildering variety, meat from animals raised alternately conventionally, organically, grass-fed, and/or locally.
#Misplaced notion definition series
So let me accumulate some examples, recited from memory: a friend's worrying over which washing machine she should buy, trying to balance economic justice for workers, energy efficiency, and amount of water consumed per load a series of articles on obesity which want really badly to dissociate corpulence from willpower or other forms of conscious, intentional action the controversy around Bjorn Lomborg's newest book and the ethical calculus that goes into global warming a few discussions in moral psychology I found highly troubling which try to do away with anything like reflection on ethics in favor of descriptions of moral intuitions and the nearly paralyzing set of choices about food that I am called upon to make whenever I walk into the new Whole Foods next door to my house. But for the last several months, I have at once felt this sentence pressing in on me and experienced a growing yet vague dissatisfaction with the terms generally available in contemporary public discussions of the good life. The first sentence of its dedication reads as follows: "The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life."ĭon't worry, I'm not going to lecture you on Adorno. Before that, he published an incomparably beautiful and difficult book in 1951, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Theodor Adorno, midcentury German philosopher and oppressive pessimist extraordinaire, is perhaps best known for his notorious declaration that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.
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