So, according to moral guidance column in The Times, fair trade for coffee is roughly equivalent to a soccer club sending flowers to its players’ wives.
\nUm.
\nI don’t really have anything to say to that.
\n(I’d link to the article but it’ll be removed from view in a week and I can’t figure out a direct link anyway, so the full text is behind the cut.)<\/i><\/p>\n
As long as the commodity you are buying – whether it be coffee, tea, a shirt, singing lessons for Britney Spears – is not the product of any criminal activity, you are under no ethical obligation to prefer fairly traded tea and coffee over any other tea or coffee (just as you are under no ethical obligation to buy a wobbly table from a bad carpenter merely because he is, say, a volunteer lifeboatman); though it may well make you feel more virtuous to do so.<\/p>\n A coffee trader’s duty, in return for your custom, is to provide coffee that may have many worthy attributes – such as being strong, finely-ground, foil-packed for freshness, and so on – but these need not include being virtuously produced; just as when you watch Chelsea play football, the team’s chief duty to the spectators is to serve them skilful entertainment.<\/p>\n If a soccer club pays its players well, or regularly sends their wives flowers, that needn’t make a spectator feel any more virtuous for supporting the team. The reward for the soccer club, as for the coffee trader, is seeing its paternalistic care translated into better football, or better coffee. Packs of fair-trade tea and coffee woo buyers by pointing out how, in return for being paid generously, growers provide them with the finest, tastiest leaves and beans from their crops.<\/p>\n So while your purchase of such tea and coffee might appear to have an indirect moral bonus, it is economics – not ethics – that orchestrates such an outcome. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, according to moral guidance column in The Times, fair trade for coffee is roughly equivalent to a soccer club sending flowers to its players’ wives. Um. I don’t really have anything to say to that. (I’d link to the article but it’ll be removed from view in a week and I can’t figure out … Continue reading “Modern Morals” per The Times<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-3z","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6047,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/6047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nModern Morals column, The Times, March 22 2005, by Joe Joseph<\/i>
\nNOW THAT fairly traded tea and coffee are widely available to buy as well as to drink in cafes is it ever ethical to purchase these commodities from a source lacking fair trade accreditation?<\/strong><\/p>\n