Ethical Choices

Food industry and public health representatives are often in conflict, particularly over food labelling policies and regulation. Food corporations are suspicious of regulated labels and perceive them as a threat to free market enterprise, opting instead for voluntary labels. Public health and consumer groups, in contrast, argue that regulated and easy-to-read labels are essential for consumers to exercise autonomy and make healthy choices in the face of food industry marketing. Although public health and food industry have distinct interests and objectives, I argue that both contribute to the creation of the food label as a governmental strategy that depends on free-market logics to secure individual and population health. While criticism of ‘Big Food’ has become a growth industry in academic publishing and research, wider critique is needed that also includes the activities of public health. Such a critique needs to address the normalizing effect of neoliberal governmentality within which both the food industry and public health operate to reinforce individuals as ‘healthy consumers’. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, I examine the food label through the lens of governmentality. I argue that the rationale operating through the food label combines nutrition science and free-market logics to normalize subjects as responsible for their own health and reinforces the idea of consumption as a means to secure population health from diet-related chronic diseases.

Excerpt: While buying a cup of coffee at a local café one morning, I was transported to an exotic far-off land. Immersed in the aroma of coffee brewing and surrounded by pictures of farmers picking coffee and their children smiling, I could imagine who had grown the coffee in my mug. Marketing materials littered the countertop, thanking me for buying fair trade certified coffee and telling me that I was making a difference and that fair trade works. My single cup of coffee was said to help poor farmers. One of the posters declared, “every purchase matters,” and another said I was helping end poverty “one cup at a time.” The promotional materials explained that my purchase brought me into a direct and intimate relationship with farmers as if the handle of my coffee mug was a farmer’s hand I was shaking to congratulate him or her on a job well done.
          Fair trade marketing and advocacy rely on the idea that fair trade increases connectedness between Global South producers and Global North consumers. While fair trade does reduce the number of intermediaries in the supply chain as compared to the free trade system for most commodities (Raynolds 2002; Nicholls and Opal 2005; Adams and Raisborough 2008, 1169), it also serves to reinforce racist and colonial distinctions between the poor Global South farmer and the benevolent Global North consumer. Fair trade may channel slightly more income into agricultural communities, but it fails to address the colonial and capitalist structures that produce the impoverishment of farmers on an ongoing basis.

"Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy: A Participatory Public Policy Process

Highlights and Key Findings:

• This chapter is an analytic narrative of how Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy was written. This empirically grounded policy story offers a practical example for others to follow.
• A municipal Ethical Purchasing Policy is one way local communities can contribute to ethical trade efforts aimed at avoiding tragedies like the 24 April 2013 garment factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, that killed 1,129 workers.
• Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy was written by a city task force comprising two city councilors, two city managers, and representatives of several businesses, unions, and civil society organizations with expertise on international labour standards, Fair Trade certification, and ethical purchasing of global commodities.
• Participation by city managers was key because policies solely crafted by city council might not take into account the practicalities of implementing a new policy while still following existing policies. Including city managers led to successful implementation and ensured the policy saved the city money.
• Participation by community members lent legitimacy to the city’s policy and helped ensure that the policy met international ethical trade norms for union-made garments and Fair Trade certified agricultural commodities including coffee, tea, and chocolate.

On 17 February 2005, Vancouver became the first Canadian municipality to adopt an Ethical Purchasing Policy (EPP) pertaining to union-made garments and Fair Trade certified coffee, tea, and chocolate. The EPP was crafted with a high level of participation by businesses, unions, and civil society organizations. The policy’s social justice ethos stands out in an ongoing era of neoliberal retrenchment of progressive public policies. Other Canadian cities, such as Calgary, Alberta, have since followed Vancouver’s lead in ethical purchasing. Vancouver’s EPP was written by a city task force that included two city councilors, two city managers, and representatives of several businesses, unions, and civil society organizations with expertise on international labour standards, Fair Trade certification, and ethical procurement through global commodity chains. This chapter is an institutional ethnography that focuses on the policy writing process and the standardized processes that comprise public participation, public decision-making, and public administration.

The chapter is empirically grounded in seven semi-structured interviews of 30 to 150 minutes in length with the two city councilors that chaired the policy writing process, two city managers (interviewed a second time together) that oversaw the implementation of the process, one of which participated in writing the policy, and a Fair Trade activist and a union organizer that participated in the writing process. These interviews were complemented with participant observation and textual analysis. Participant observation was conducted both in real-time in activist meetings and in city council meetings and reflexively from my experience as a Canadian Fair Trade activist-researcher. The interviews and observational work helped identify key texts for analysis, including the EPP and the connected Supplier Code of Conduct (SCC), council meeting minutes, minutes of standing committees of council, reports to council by city managers, and a critical analysis of the policy written by the Maquila Solidarity Network, a Toronto-based anti-sweatshop advocacy group. The research took place from January 2006 to August 2007 as part of a larger study in which I was involved alongside sociologist Dorothy E. Smith for a community-university research alliance called "Rural Women Making Change."

It is a critical time in the history of our broken, greedy and selfish world and leaders, continuously bombarded with competing situational pressures, need to reflect wisely on their personal- and corporate choices, as their choices and ensuing actions have wide-ranging consequences and effects, intended and unintended. Leader arrogance, narcissism and unwillingness to change have been identified in research as reasons why leaders make bad decisions for the credibility and sustainability of their organisations. Additionally, besides the usual, but now heightened, business and political challenges, leaders also have to help overcome institutional anger, community hostility, employee unease, apathy and feelings of marginalisation, as well as cynicism from stakeholders.

This paper is a bridge between my interest in the notion of philosophical nonsense and my interest in problems concerning ethics and action.  Geach sees an analogy between philosophical error and moral error, more specifically between the problem of understanding the state of mind of someone who is duped by philosophical nonsense and that of someone who ‘sins’.  In neither case does being confused oneself help one understand the confusion of others.  I argue that Geach gives us no good reason to believe that there is such a thing as philosophical nonsense and that, even if there is, there will be no real analogy between the states of mind in question.  For one thing, there is no obvious reason why there could not be ‘clear-headed sin’.  For another, one who ‘sins’ and one who does not often have the same sorts of difficulty understanding each other, whereas, if there is such a thing as philosophical nonsense, it is hard to see how there could be any such symmetry between one who is taken in by it and one who is not.

This article puts forward an argument in favor of small farmer fair trade based on an analysis of the differences between small farmer fair trade and plantation fair trade with examples drawn from the coffee and tea sectors. The article also scrutinizes the Fair Trade USA split from Fairtrade International and the proliferation of Fair Trade labels.

Ungrounded ground, the chair standing by a person that may arrive.

For those in any capacity, inadequate. Repulsive, for some.

https://medium.com/@CarlosFredericoPdSG/anchors-to-anxiety-33ed50bb08f
https://www.wattpad.com/495846206-anchors-to-anxiety

Abstract: Enjoying interactional capabilities and capacities regarding possibility of the user's contribution of game procedure, computer games have turned to an effective medium culturalization and promotion of the users' attitude by playing computer games. This capacity provides this possibility for the user in virtual environment of the computer games so that without paying attention to the consequences of his decisions, he can freely select moral or immoral options appropriate with religious teachings and the culture of the user's society. The paper aims at investigating the way of preparing the required background for selecting the ethical option in a computer game; accordingly, by collecting data with library method and analyzing the data by an analytico-descriptive approach, the paper proposes this hypothesis that by having interactional capacities, computer games provide conditions so that without paying attention to consequences of their choices they can voluntarily make decisions in different conditions and situations. This article is written in Persian.