Category Archives: Ethics

Off Season Boycott Club

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An online community spends 3 months discussing and eventually voting on which nasty corporation (or country?) is worthy of a boycott.

Members then, individually, by choice, pledge to not use their products or services for the 3 months of the next season of Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall. You go off them for a season 😉

If you cannot bear to be without them beyond the 3 months, that is sad, but OK.

The idea is to use the timeliness for publicity – who will be boycotted next? At scale.

To incentivise the boycott, direct competitors can be canvassed, seeing what they might offer to any member who switches allegiance. Such offers need to be above and beyond anything else they otherwise offer others.

Canvassing members first on whether they use particular brands is critical – it means the boycott can be meaningful and measurable.

Imagine the dread faced by corporations who are in the shortlist each quarter!

Purposefully Raceless Given Names

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The pop star YoungBoy has the real name of Kentrell DeSean Gaulden. That would make it harder to get equal opportunities in the US, because it is almost impossible that he could be white, asian or latino.

If we wanted to end this, it won’t happen from black people giving their kids white names, or vice versa. Few people care about equality to go that far.

But we could come up with totally new names – not so unusual these days anyway – that are deliberately not favoured by any race or social status.

DeSean is a good start, because white folk already have Shaun/Sean/Shawn with different spellings. So a new spelling could be adopted by all, equally. Shaurn. It can be used to name the kids of progressive types of all colors. As a statement that has fewer downsides. And once it got publicity – a name with purpose – watch it take off!

Alternatively, because of how many latinos are in the US, and they are kinda/sorta a less polarised (black and white) race, blacks and whites could start giving their kids latino names, like Rosa.

AKA ethnically ambiguous names

Obvious Fakes

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puma

I predict a backlash against major fashion brands…

The most famous brands have fake equivalents, buy them in Asia.

Apparently they are made in the same factory, after hours, with inferior materials.

When you come back with designer goods. from Asia, everyone knows it is a fake, and you will admit as much.

So why not make it a blanket statement?

The fakers deliberately misspell the brand name, or incorporate the word “fake” into the design.

The consumers deliberately use those goods, that are clearly fake, A statement.

We can own brands by belittling them.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/hilariously-bad-chinese-knock-offs-of-famous-american-and-european-brands-2012-8

Ending Fast Fashion

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Single use plastic bags are now a thing of the past in many countries.

Next is plastic straws.

Fast fashion is incredibly wasteful, and unnecessary, and bad for the environment (landfills).

Clothing that is made to last could promote their point of difference by doing one simple thing – writing the year of manufacture visibly on the garment.

 

Personhood Beyond the Human

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As the general public become better read (or better Youtubed…), and religion declines, you can expect a greater number of people to start accepting that humans do not have any divine rights over non-humans. In the last 50 years we have, as a species, learned to love nonhumans more and more – some examples:

  • free range chickens
  • save the whale
  • save old-growth forests
  • concern over extinctions
  • dogs migrating from the kennel to the bedroom
  • paganism
  • assigning “love” to devices like iPhones and corporate branding

There’s a definite trend – and it will become quite interesting when nonhumans become more prolific, because we will need to decide just how much we care about their well-being and the their “rights”.

So this December Yale will be hosting a conference – Personhood Beyond the Human.

The conference will be co-sponsored by the Nonhuman Rights Project and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in collaboration with the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

Looking at the list of speakers, it seems most of the focus will be on animal rights (regular welfare and intelligent animals gaining extra rights), but also there will be discussions regarding the rights of androids and other forms of artificial intelligence – plus transhumans.

Now would be a good time to get started on legal definitions and ethical treatment. If a person in a permanent vegetative state has rights, what about the mouse that is injected in the brain with human stem cells?