The Left's Worst Phrase: "No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism"

This phrase SUCKS guys. I also complain about leftists in this one (I wasn't on substack when that was hot), but mostly this specific phrase, because man is it really not good.

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If you assume all companies are evil because some are, then there’s absolutely no incentive for any companies to become good, ever. If you assume everyone who uses AI is horrible without any examination, you lump together normal people doing their jobs in the most efficient way with scammers doing deepfake fraud. And worst of all, if you gaze into the horror of the world, see all the evil and suffering and tragedy and blood that surrounds us, and your reaction is “Welp, guess I don’t even have to try to do good then,” then I stand against you.

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"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is a mess of a phrase that’s commonly used to absolve the individual from having to try to make good decisions, implying an abstract “revolution” is the only way. I think this attitude is bad, and doing good things is good. The phrase also has no less than four completely different potential meanings, that seem to encourage the exact opposite actions. That is also bad, and it’s unhelpful.

Look, snazzy opener, I know, but this isn’t going to be a condemnation of the entire left, just a common interpretation of this specific phrase and the phenomenon of slacker activism, and man, I hate this phrase (some of the left hates this phrase too!). But to clarify: whatever you think about the majority of leftists who go to protests very often, they’re trying to change the world. I have a leftist friend who’s donating a year of her time volunteering across the US to help the environment; that is dedication to the cause, and this post is certainly not about her or her ilk either. I can grumble about efficiency and effectiveness (and I will), but some people are trying.

Nor is this post against the trivial truth of the phrase, in a banal, never-actually-utilized-that-way interpretation. When I levy my criticism, I’m talking about the way it’s actually used in conversation and on the internet. Duh! But yes, when you do something, anything, in a system that is complicated (like society), it might cause some bad somewhere. That is the result of doing things. If a puppy shelter who does lots of research to only buy locally sourced products from reputable businesses accidentally has those products delivered in a trucking company that just so happens to have stock in a company that supports child labor in China or something, then yes, they have caused the tiniest, itty-bittiest amount of evil while doing a ton of good for lots of people and puppies. Doing good actions requires thinking about tradeoffs.

No, this post is condemning a specific type of person online who refuses to take personal accountability, refuses to see the world through any lens other than except their morally pure side and everyone else, the type of person who will not, even for a second, assume that they could be doing more good.

This phrase, with how it’s used most commonly in online discourse and in person, communicates a couple of things. It mainly implies that even if a consumer wishes to make ethical choices, they can’t, because any choice they make would be bad. Any choice they want to make would be “participating in systems that exploit workers, degrade the environment, and perpetuate inequality.” It’s pointing at capitalism itself as the big bad, and the lowly consumer as a simple cog in the machine, doomed to make the world worse by living in our tragedy of a society, so causing a revolution is the only way to make good decisions. But this is so clearly a terrible argument for not trying that I barely have to make a defense —

Of course there’s more ethical and less ethical consumption under capitalism. Some companies directly benefit from child labor mines and others… don’t! They can do lots of things, like helping puppies indeed, because there’s a stupid amount of companies! This phrase tries to frame this trivial fact that when you do something in a system that is complicated, a small amount of bad can occur with a large amount of good, in such a way to absolve the consumer from any wrongdoing or moral fault. It gestures implicitly at a revolution or complete upheaval being the only way to do “true good” by telling you to not care if you’re causing harm now. “Man, no ethical consumption under capitalism man, might as well just buy Nestlé chocolate and JBS poultry and not think about it, man. Radical revolution’s the only way that things will ever get better.”

Now, some may claim I haven’t been fair thus far in my article: What’s intended is not the trivial definition, which basically amounts to “doing good things may do a tiny bit of bad because of complicated systems” nor “the consumer is not at fault for anything they do” but instead, it’s a diagnosis of capitalism’s built-in incentives, and how there’s a race to the bottom that will inevitably result in the most abusive companies rising to the top. A Marxist might say “consumption choices alone can’t fix the exploitative relations of production.” This explanation, which I’ve seen online, seems like it’s straight out of a Scott Alexander article, and companies hiding the moral costs of their actions and the inevitability of that if the consumer doesn’t care is something I have an article on complaining about.

The only thing I can say to this is that words mean things, and this is not what those words mean. It might even be fine that those words don’t mean that if people used those words that way in every situation, but it’s clearly mixed. But if I accept that some people use it to mean this, to organize leftist meetups, then we’re good here, right? It’s a fine phrase? No. Here’s the worst part by far, the reason it should be banned from the internet and sent to, uh, Mars or something: the actual phrase seems to go directly against the implications of this interpretation. Like, surely if you accept companies are pulled to the bottom of ethics as a result of consumer indifference, you’d want to resist and support the good companies, right? But no, the common interpretation is “screw it.”

So the best interpretation of the phrase is an interpretation that implies the exact opposite action from the most common interpretation of the phrase. That seems bad. There’s actually even a fourth use that’s similar to this, where this phrase is trying to assuage the consumer that you don’t have to be perfectly ethical all the time, so don’t use that as an excuse to NOT try. This use is also the exact opposite of the other ways it gets used. Now that seems very bad. Can we please stop using this phrase then?

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There are two claims I’m making in this article about why the most common interpretation of this phrase is bad. One, more general, that you’ll find elsewhere in leftist discourse: it’s bad to throw people who are doing very good things in with people doing very bad things, just because they fall under the same category. Two is more specific to this phrase: if you want to be a moral person, you should probably do moral things, and not only whine about how everyone else is evil.

Firstly, this phrase throws all companies in the same lot. This seems like a bad thing, because in our society, companies are generally the entities that do stuff in America. Some are good, some are bad, some are worse.

This criticism should be viscerally and instinctively understood as the worst part of the left. I mean, come on, can’t you imagine the type of person who will throw me in with Nazis for criticizing just this subsection of the left? Who won’t care that I’ve only voted blue my whole life, and I hate Trump (does anyone like the Big Beautiful Bill?) and Musk (canceling PEPFAR accidentally is a hilariously evil thing for a politician to do, it’s like cartoon villain). Instead they’ll cast me out to Naziville in the name of “ideological purity”, blaming me and my ilk for the Trump phenomenon despite themselves making it a principle to not even attempt to appeal to the median voter in America; because of course ideological purity must be maintained, and concessions to try to win elections and make this country better for everyone are for cowards.

Here are a few examples of groups where you may want to praise people doing good vs the worst members, to incentivize being good instead of bad, but some in the left carve over the nuance to demonize the whole lot: companies, billionaires, police, people who use AI (isn’t this one, like, a billion people?), landlords, religious organizations, tech workers, moderate liberals.

Secondly, this phrase is anti-trying! I happen to believe that more people should try to do the moral thing. I believe more people should try to examine the implications of their actions, and buy things more ethically. The way I see this phrase used is, when you realize that you’re supporting something bad indirectly, your friend tells you “no ethical consumption under capitalism” and then you’re good to buy it, because is making one bad decision really that bad when the whole system is bad? Yes! You could’ve avoiding making that one bad decision! Buying something does actually have effects you don’t see! I even made a whole post about how people should stop supporting businesses just because they hide the terrible moral actions they take. You can weigh the effects of how much good buying Tony’s instead of Nestlé causes, and compare that to something like retweeting a political slogan on Instagram, and see which is more effective. You should try to donate to causes you care about, and start up charities for causes that there’s no good charity out there for. But you should definitely not try to minimize the total amount of effort you put into the world, stunlocked by evil everywhere you look, shirking away to never interact with such a horrible system as capitalism, because you should be trying to do good!

You have to try to do good. You were born into the system, same as the rest of us, time to play the game.

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I genuinely don’t mean this as a condemnation of the entire left, only the holier-than-thou, firebomb-a-walmart-instead-of-doing-good-then-not-firebomb-a-walmart, doesn’t consider the actual good they’re doing types. I praise the leftists who try to do good things for their beliefs here, to try not to mirror the flattening of nuance and combining of groups that I talked about as a mistake earlier in this article. The left as a whole doesn’t come out too bad on the whole “doing things” front, although sometimes when they do things they’re misguided or unstrategic (anyone remember when Starbucks was boycotted for Palestine when the official Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment wanted them to boycott other companies?). And I want everyone to remember the central creed, the one I have a whole post about: just because they’re annoying doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I mean, this phrase is definitely wrong to use for any reasonable purpose. But that’s because of the substance and arguments.

I believe it’s important to examine the outcomes of your actions, even if they’re right in front of you, and that you should not let this phrase and a general feeling of helplessness that there’s “no good options” stop you from examining the harm you’re causing. I also believe that using a phrase with multiple, confusing, conflicting definitions is bad. I just want to do good.

It’s a bad phrase, guys.

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