Distant production removes moral incentives to examine consumption’s true costs

Evidence

The necessities of life are produced by faceless proxy workers in far-off places. As long as consumers’ daily needs are met, they have little incentive to examine the humaneness of the working conditions, the level of pollution caused by production processes, or the costs exacted on the environment to produce, ship, and market the profusion of goods and the disposal of wastes. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2528

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Positions moral disengagement as a structural consequence of supply-chain geography: the physical distance between consumer and producer is itself a moral disengagement mechanism, not just an economic feature.
• XREF: Directly parallel to the diamond bourse’s reputation-based extralegal regime in ‘Opting out of the Legal System’ — both hinge on who can and cannot inspect conditions. — connects to: Guilt over consuming under globalization is diffused by unmappable causal chains — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 620; Directly producing one’s own subsistence reveals dependencies that commerce hides — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 27; Free markets shift environmental costs onto communities whoever produces — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1051