Quong (and Geras) could also add the fact that part of their pay is presumably derived from Manchester University’s stock portfolio, over a million pounds of which is invested in arms companies.

It seems fair to say that since Manchester University co-operates as a provider of capital in the manufacture of advanced weapons which facilitate the large-scale violation of human rights, it is involved in human rights violations in Quong’s sense.

Will Quong, in accordance with the ‘stringent duty of justice’ he must feel he is under not to ‘participate in, or benefit from’ Manchester University’s involvement in these human rights violations be refusing to do so, presumably by quitting his job? Will he ensure that Norman Geras does the same, by coercive means if necessary?

Strategically, this might be a useful consumer policy, it might not be. It certainly wouldn’t be a particularly difficult one.

In fact Fair Trade is a response to precisely these ethical concerns.

If the kinds of systemic and systematic injustice caused by the most seemingly innocent of shopping trips could be avoided simply by shopping Fair Trade, shouldn’t we shop Fair Trade? (Of course, it is far from certain that simply shopping Fair Trade would achieve this end.)

Ah, so if I refrain from buying IPods or a new pair of trainers, those young women will acquire PhDs, and flash marketing jobs in which they earn $100,000 a year in air-conditioned offices and will start living in houses where they have so much space they need a piece of string to find their way back to the door?

I’ve never understood this argument. Some people have crappy lives because they had the bad luck to be born into poor countries. How are they meant to have less crappy lives if I don’t buy the goods their factories produce? If buying goods from factories creates crappiness, why aren’t North Korea or Cuba struggling to prevent floods of refugees entering their territories? Why was China so poor and the lives of uneducated rural women so terrible before it opened up to the West?

To the extent I can make a judgment about the outcomes of me not buying Ipods and trainers, it’s that those rural Chinese women will have crappier lives if demand for their labour goes down, so anything that increases demand for their labour is good.

If you tune into the Olympics this summer, you know, or should know, that this event will be a huge PR coup for a police state that displays a blatant disregard for freedom of speech, religion, assembly, movement, rule of law, independent judiciary and that has specifically violated a number of human rights in preparation for this event. Furthermore, western sponsors and media partners will also make a huge profit from this event.

Actually I probably won’t tune into the Olympics. I didn’t tune into the Athens Olympics, I didn’t tune into the Sydney Olympics. I don’t like watching sports.

I personally have my doubt about “massive PR coup” too. According to this logic, everyone should be falling over in admiration for the USA, as it has hosted several Olympic games. Instead anti-Americanism seems quite strong still.

And I don’t know why you relate me knowing, or should knowing, to me tuning into the Olympics. How does the matter of pressing a few buttons on my remote control create any knowledge in me about the PR impact of the Olympics? If I don’t ever tune into the Beijing Olympics, am I therefore released from any obligation to think about the PR impact? Surely, to the extent that I have an obligation as a citizen to support human rights in China, that obligation is independent of whether I happen to watch the Olympics or not?

I do wonder why you focus so exclusively on what I do or don’t do. Why talk about women working in terrible conditions to create iPods or trainers that I may buy, and not mention women working in terrible conditions to, say, mine coal for the Chinese market? Why do you imply that if I don’t tune into the Beijing Olympics it’s okay for me to be ignorant of it?

The South Africa disvestment campaign was, we would all agree, quite different from the calls by many 19th centruy American unions to boycott Chinese-made goods. But in the Quong framework they are indistinguishable.

Novakant, suppose you were able to ask one of these young women if she would prefer that you purchase the Ipod or shoes, or that you not. What do you think she would say?

If you buy an Ipod or a new pair of trainers, you know, or should know, that it is being produced by mainly young, uneducated women from rural areas working 10-16 hour days for $50 a month, who mostly live in company owned dormitories behind barbed wire with up to a 100 people to a room, for which they have to pay rent, which combined with the other money they spend at the company store, eats up around 50% of their already meager wages.

If you tune into the Olympics this summer, you know, or should know, that this event will be a huge PR coup for a police state that displays a blatant disregard for freedom of speech, religion, assembly, movement, rule of law, independent judiciary and that has specifically violated a number of human rights in preparation for this event. Furthermore, western sponsors and media partners will also make a huge profit from this event.

Now you can say:

a.) nobody’s prefect, others abuse human rights too
b.) our economy is so intertwined with the Chinese economy that criticizing them is hypocritical
c.) there’s nothing we can do
d.) I don’t care

to which I would answer

a.) Yes, but I’ll criticize human rights violations wherever I come across them, just as HRW or AI do; “others do it too” is a bad excuse in moral arguments and your grandma should have told you that.

b.) True, but that only applies to the status quo and due to our economical involvement we can apply soft power to change things, as our involvement also gives us leverage.

c.) 30 years ago nobody gave a damn about the animal abuse, ecological sins, labour exploitation involved in the production of the goods we consume, but nowadays both corporations and consumers have gotten more sensitive to such issues. This change has come about due to a process of gradually increasing ethical awareness and while we’re obviously not there yet, we can achieve a more just and less cruel world by continuing in this direction.

d.) Well, in this case there’s not much I can say or do to convince someone, since it’s not irrational or inhuman to not care about your fellow man. The thing with ethical discussions is, that if the participants don’t share a basic set of attitudes and intuitions, they are futile, as there is now way of proving somebody wrong within the language game of ethics.

I think that if, when it came to voting, I only cared about how the NZ government would respond to a major terrorist attack on NZ soil, Chris Bertram would present a line of arguments that I should care about more than that.

Of course if something isn’t too difficult to calculate then the argument is different. For example, Sri Lankan citizens have a lot more evidence about how their politicians cope with major terrorist attacks on Sri Lankan soil, so as far as I know the argument that they should take such considerations into account is far stronger than it is for NZ citizens.

Isn’t the whole idea to vote for someone who will respond in a superior way to those incalculable eventualities? Isn’t that what we want in an elected official, someone to handle the weird and unexpected when it eventually comes?

Well yes, that is at least part of the idea of voting. Where I have the problem with is working out who to vote for on that basis. I have a history of failures at predicting the decisions of the NZ Cabinet even when dealing with the normal and thoroughly expected issues. And “major terrorist attack on NZ soil” is something I would expect to provoke a different response in NZ politicians compared to most weird and unexpected events I can think of, but I have no idea how to work out which NZ political party would cope the best with that particular weird and unexpected event.

The good guys often do identical things – or, for that matter, much, much worse – but they, of course, do it out of the goodness of their hearts and the purity of their souls (not to mention their duty of justice) – and that makes all the difference in the world. Those are not “rights violation”; those are ‘defending themselves’, or ‘fighting the insurgency’, or ‘eliminating criminal gangs of thugs’, or killing suspected terrorists or those who incite terror or those who happen to live close to those who incite terror. It’s all for the best.

Sometimes it’s a little difficult for us, non-academics, to figure out who we must hate out there. That’s why I’m so grateful to Mr. Quong for setting me straight in respect to China.

Just to be on the safe side, I would like to have a full list of people and entities I must not cooperate with, though. If possible.

But lecturing about the ‘duties’ of citizenship seems to be very much part of the UK government’s response to the perceived failure of multiculturalism. There’s not enough grumbling, I don’t think, let alone screaming the roof down.

What if it’s not too difficult to calculate and it’s the only issue you care about? Is it then your duty to vote the way?

Okay, how about we do? Or at least the best I can do. Firstly, some evaluation has to be done in order to determine if consequences are simple or complex, and connected or disconnected to our acts. So I can’t argue that “we have no duty to evaluate our actions if the consequences are sufficiently complex and disconnected”. But assuming that we have done enough evaluation to decide that a consequence is sufficiently complex and/or disconnected from our acts, then said consequences should be ignored.

Firstly, if a consequence is totally disconnected from our acts then by definition it is not a consequence. Therefore it can be ignored in anyone’s analysis. Taking events that may follow but are rather disconnected from our acts, then an argument can be made that such consequences should be ignored. For example, imagine you know that a local child is showing a lot of dangerous signs of aggression, such as torturing small animals. You see said child drowning, and it is safe for you to rescue them. Should you decide not to do so on the basis that the child may grow up to be a serial killer and kill two or more people? I say no – that consequence is too disconnected from your act. A lot of things could happen to stop any serial killing from happening.

Secondly, if a consequence is too complex to calcuate, it basically has to be ignored. For example, when I vote in the next NZ national elections, on whatever basis I cast my vote, it will not include a calculation of how I expect the eventually-elected Government to respond to a major terorist attack on NZ soil. I find that too difficult to calculate, as it depends on the interplay of personalities within the Government of the day, and it’s not like NZ politicians have much experience with terrorist attacks in NZ so I can’t draw on their past peformance. So I ignore it. To take a more chaotic example, it may be that that butterfly flapping its wings at the bottom of your garden is causing a massive storm two years down the track, but there’s no way you can figure that out, so don’t worry about it.

This is the basic argument against strict utilitarianism. We need not even worry our heads about people in far away countries to make this argument, there are plenty of cases close to home where consequences are sufficiently complex and/or disconnected to make the argument that we have no duty to evaluate them.

But the wages they’re earning aren’t enough to live on, not even for a single worker with no social life whose economic needs have been stripped down to the barest of bare minimums.

Tragically this happened in China in the 1950s under Communism. About 30 to 40 million people died of hunger. Without anyone holding any Olympic games there. We have learnt that mass famine is the expectable misfortune of being at the bottom of a Communist government’s totem pole.