What's your most important ethical concern and why?

[harrisey]

Green? Fairtrade? Pollution? Animal Welfare? Organic? Food Miles? Poverty and exploitation? etc etc etc? All of the above?

Just interested in why ethicl living is important to you, and what motivates you the most, and why?

For me, its sustaining a lifestyle which keeps others down. Other human beings suffering so I can have a nice life is something I feel I can no longer comfortably live with. Its moving to organic cotton, upping the amount of fairtrade I buy, protecting the environment so that people everywhere wont suffer, campaigning for justice (eg Amnesty). I'm a one woman walking polemic at the moment, having had a bit of a lightbulb moment about how unfair the world is.

Other things are important too, but thats where it started for me. How about you?

Yes harrisey, I've been thinking the same things as you.

I suppose it all boils down to treating everyone else the way you would like to be treated - that means everyone in the world, all the people you don't know as well as those you do. Impossible really, but something to aim at, something to help you make decisions.

I try to buy as much fair-trade as I can. I wish that I could afford more ethical clothing, and feel bad that I don't/can't

Food miles is a constant one for us too.

Have also got work recycling (though I have to take the plastic bottles to the bank)

So the most important, for me, is other people.

Then the environment, though that is for other people too

It's hard to choose, thinking "ethics" I thought immediately of horrible things some humans do to others, but that's not really what this topic is about. Within this topic context, I guess I just hate excess & waste in principle, as the starting point.

Trying to express it more broadly, I would say "Sustainability", by which I mean leaving the planet in a fit state for future generations, and not destroying other species now, either (especially not indirectly by destroying habitats). This is only planet we have to live on, and we ruin it, we're screwed and so are many other species. We have no right to do that to future humans or to other species. Life is one of the big miracles of the universe, what idiots we are every time we squander it.

Am NOT an animal rightist, btw, I even meat. It's species/ecosystems I care about, not so bothered about captive animal welfare (although sometimes that's appalling, too).

I always (well, since I found it a couple of weeks back!! Despitebeing on MN for 5 years!!) thought that the horrible things people do to other people IS part of ethical living?

I mean, so many of the really bad things are things like high infant mortality due to unethical marketing of formula, child labour to pay for Western kids cheap plastic toys, people suffering pesticide poisoning in order to provide us with the £1 t-shirt and the £3 jeans in Tesco or equivalent, the people who cannot earn a living wage in sweatshops from Guatemala to Bangladesh.

These things affect so many more people than individual acts of violence, and I no longer wish to be associated with them. I want to stand up and say 'not in my name!', but its not too easy to do that. But I have to do what I can - I can't live with myself is I don't. I don't want my kids growing up comfortable at the expense of someone elses kids having no education, or dying before they are 5.

I might be a hopeless idealogue, but I feel like I have to do SOMETHING! Do as you would be done by, as my Gran used to say. My Christianity is part of why I feel this way, but only part. I hope I would feel the same if I didnt believe.

Getting the smallest carbon footprint I can -mostly by stopping doing stuff I dont really want to do anyway (excess washing, foreign hols, out of season food etc etc).

And hoping and praying for a country where things can start to be small scale again - working for a small company, shopping locally, generating our own power etc

anyone else?

My key ethical concern is good parenting (or lack thereof).