Philosophical Vegan Forum

Let's say I decide that a certain company (or other type of organization) is unethical. Perhaps for example that might include factory farm companies, logging companies that destroy rainforest in areas deemed of ecological importance with species under threat, companies doing fracking or companies that are known to use child labour and treat the children badly.

Let's say I then make an ethical judgement that I will not buy stock in this company, nor BUY its products. IF that judgement is correct, does it logically follow that I should not SELL to that company either, or is it perfectly plausible to be immoral to BUY from a company, but perfectly fine to SELL to it? Does buying their products generally benefit a company, but selling things to them not as much?

There has to be some cases that selling is immoral. For example if a dictatorial government decided to carry out genocide against its people, and tried to buy from my company a metal industrial chamber that was normally used for industrial production with processes of a thousand degrees, but I knew that they were going to use it to carry out genocide, it would surely be immoral to sell them the chambers. Therefore with an extreme example, we can see it cannot be always OK to sell. But what if someone in that government placed an order with me for 100 pencils? Should I refuse that? I think yes, but what if the logging company orders 100 pencils?

I would never buy anything directly from Exxon Mobil because they deliberately caused climate change and lied about it. But what if they contacted me and asked me to do a consultancy project for them? To give ME money and take from them? Should I accept? I think no. They presumably engage me to do the consultancy project only if they think it will improve their profitability, and thus if they are right, the company will benefit. But what if the consultancy project is to assess whether a rapid transition to green energy is a good idea for Exxon. Does that make it OK? Or what if Exxon sets up a solar panel division - can I deal with only that division, or should I avoid the whole company?

I suppose fundamentally you could argue that buying and selling and both just forms of trading one thing for another, and are therefore equivalent. Money does not fundamentally have more value than a product or a service. It just feels that way. Buying and selling transactions are presumably beneficial to both parties in the majority of cases (otherwise one company has made a mistake in carrying out the transaction). It may be as likely for a company to lose money on a sale, as to make make money by buying. So, my suspicion is, after some thought, that if we are morally bound not to buy a company's products, we should not accept its money either.

What about charitable donations? That might be an exception. I think I would refuse a donation to my charity from the genocidal government. If Exxon Mobil offered a charitable donation, or a grant for me to study at University with no strings attached, I think I would accept it. Even that is still dubious however since Exxon Mobil could benefit image wise from giving to charities with little impact to their bottom line. However I think accepting the money, and then if Exxon made the donation public or publicised that they give x amount to charities, I would publically call for them to rapidly transition and criticise their past.

I thought about this a bit more - and I wondering it might be acceptable to carry out a transaction with a company if I am very confident that it will not be beneficial to the organization to carry out the transaction.

Examples (not intended to be at all realistic, but just trying to illustrate the above point). Which of these transactions are morally justifiable?

1. I am at a conference where I meet a person who says that he is going to go up to the Exxon Mobil person at the conference and offer them $200 million to buy ALL the oil they are selling at the conference. I quickly get ahead, and I have inside information that Exxon Mobil will accept $100 million for the same oil, which I also know will be a disastrous mistake for Exxon and lose them money. So I go and buy the oil for $100 million. Now I've taken $100 million away from the company and made them less profitable. Assume I still sell the oil and it still gets burned. Assume I MUST do this for some reason, that there is a law that the oil MUST be used and I can't store it.

2. Same situation, but I pay $100 million to buy a certain amount of animals (say pigs) to stop someone else buying them for $200 million and this will cause the factory farm to make a loss on the deal. I will sell the pigs on for meat and they will be killed anyway because I have no facility to safely look after the animals and if I try to do anything other than sell them for meat I will be thrown in jail and they will be sold for meat anyway.

3. I know that a company is going to sell the metal cages for genocide at a certain price, and I am able to get ahead and convince the evil government to buy mine at twice the price, thus reducing the amount of money they have for other evil activities. Perhaps I deliberately build major structural weaknesses into the cages so people may have a change to get out and run away, which would not be the case with the other organization which is a known supporter of genocide. Let's assume I have no power to stop the genocide.

3 doesn't feel right and I wouldn't do it, 1 and 2 feels grey area, and overall these examples seem to run into the classic dilemna about most harm and whether utalitarian philosophy makes sense, which always feels like a dead end to me that can't be adequately resolved one way or the other and it just feels subjective.

I don't think I would carry out transactions 1 or 2, but I don't feel I could condemn others that did. I think I would condemn the person that did no 3, even though it is only different from 1 and 2 in its severity rather than logically different.

I think I would carry out an equivalent non-beneficial transaction for a lesser moral issue, say some equivalent situation to do with cutting down trees or plastic rubbish that might get thrown in a forest. In that case I think I would go with whatever was more profitable for me and it would sit more easily with me to justify it based on the greater good.

I think my moral code ultimately comes down to doing what's right until it is a very small amount of moral bad for a big personal gain, in which case I take the selfish option. In fact it may be argued that >99% of people do the same to a greater or lesser extent.

If you're confident that you're ripping that immoral company off and they're not getting a good value (or they'd get a better value elsewhere if you refused and they kept shopping) it could be ethically sound.

The trouble is that you're biased in favor of making a profit yourself.
Consider #3 in your second post, plus you donate ALL of the profit you made from the transaction to charity; that eliminates your self interest bias and ensures your judgement is as sound as possible.
The trick is ensuring you aren't motivated to convince yourself falsely that you're ripping the evil company off when in fact you're still facilitating business more or less as well as it would have otherwise been carried out.

True enough. I think in practice just not getting involved would be the right call in most more realistic scenarios.