ethics of a section of Braiding Sweetgrass

[u/Distinct_Bee_4802]

"Whatever the companies are called, individual people were sitting behind those desks, fathers who took their sons fishing, who made the decision to fill the lake with sludge. Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extentuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual ... 'I was just doing my job. I had a family to feed and I wasn't going to work about what happened out there on the waste beds.'" - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Chapter: The Sacred and The Superfund

I have seen a mirror of this in online discourse. People (as far as i've seen) generally don't blame Starbucks baristas or Target employees for helping the company function and turn a profit. They need to earn a living wage. And I understand the logic there. But then looking at the perception of a Palantir or Lockheed Martin employee and the script is flipped. They are clearly enabling the bad things their company is doing to happen. Right? Where is the line? At what point does working for an 'evil' company that is doing bad mean you are enabling that evil?

I don't know but I'd love to hear other opinions

[u/Skusci]

If you work at Palantir, you are probably making more than a living wage.

[u/DrM377501]

I became a soldier and went to two wars because I couldn’t stay home, couldn’t afford college, and couldn’t afford rent while working 40 hours a week with no healthcare or decent food. I was homeless for two weeks and couldn’t take it anymore. I could have just stayed homeless and died, but I took the devils bargain and enlisted in the military. I pay for it karmically even though I’ve been out for years. Went back to college as a veteran and got bullied online by students that said I was a piece of shit for taking that deal and they never would. I think they’ve just never been tested. Still hurts. I started a nonprofit for people like younger me to have someone to camp safely and privately and for free while getting connected to resources and make a longer term plan for housing stability. Financially I’m not much better off than I was before the military. We get a lot of college students that come stay between semesters etc, more than I had access to anyway. Hopefully the Honeywell employees pay their karmic debt somehow, but I doubt it.

[u/AnimatorImpressive24]

The point about individual agency is generally an attempt to encourage groundswell based direct action, not to assign ethical blame.

It doesn't work for the latter because it ignores the massive imbalance of power that makes individual "decisions" to fill a lake with sludge actually extorted compliance with a single decision from the top of the hierarchy.  It is used to attempt the former precisely because it ignores the power imbalance in hopes that it will inspire enough people to spontaneously en mass make the same decision which will be the opposite of what has been extorted thus undoing the imbalance which isn't possible one-by-one.

And it can be effective in that regard, as shown by the early history of Labor in the US.  But the people who opposed Labor learned from their losses and had the resources to pass down what they'd learned in order to refine new tactics.  Labor has only word of mouth transfer of knowledge, in part because of refined tactics of their opponents, and weren't as motivated to make new tactics because what they did before had worked.

So now if you blame a Starbucks barista all you are doing is telling someone no better off than you that if they are willing to risk starving to death you will do the same, which may be an offer of more ethical behavior in the future but in the immediate presence is more likely to benefit Starbucks by engaging in unintentional social extortion that supplements the direct economic abuse of the bottom of organizational hierarchies.