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That is a reasonable enough desire, but why make others do mandatory labeling to meet your requirements? The law should be the minimum requirement for health a

That is a reasonable enough desire, but why make others do mandatory labeling to meet your requirements? The law should be the minimum requirement for health and environmental concerns, and if there's value in consumer choice on ethical grounds (such as that you want to avoid GM food, or want to have halal meat) that labeling can be left to the discretion of the manufacturer/provider/seller. Personally, I often try to avoid food labeled as "organic" (that being responsible for the most lethal food disaster in recent years, 50 people dead in Germany). Still, I don't want that it would be mandatory to label organic food as such.

barrkel 10y ago
The single biggest moral problem with capitalism is that it relies too much on price to transmit information. If your decision to buy something comes down to evaluating its value to you, comparing that with the price, and purchasing it if it is both more valuable to you than the price and relatively better than the alternatives, then you're not acting morally. Inputs to products, like slavery, child labour, undemocratic governments right through to irresponsible use of antibiotics, are all obscured under this basis. In order to get pricing to have an impact on how products are made and inputs are chosen, the consumer needs to be informed. But the need for the consumer to be informed is in direct opposition to the interests of the producer: the producer wants to remove reasons for the consumer to reject the product. And this runs right along the supply chain to raw materials. If the consumer doesn't have information on how something is produced, and no alternatives are available with more information, how can they make their purchasing decision affect the whole supply chain? And let's not forget how pleasant it is to be unknowingly complicit in illegal or immoral actions that benefit you by price; what you don't know doesn't make you feel guilty. You got the product cheaply, do you really want to know why it was so cheap? Consumer psychology is part of the problem too: relying solely on pricing for information lets people get away with murder, indirectly. Thus I think mandatory labelling throughout the supply chain is absolutely vital for moral capitalism. People need to know to what extent their purchasing decisions are indirectly funding oppression and harm elsewhere.
mkesper 10y ago
Can you please provide a link to that claim?
- germanier 10y ago
  I assume they referred to this outbreak but I'm not sure how non-organic food could have prevented that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...

barrkel 10y ago

The single biggest moral problem with capitalism is that it relies too much on price to transmit information. If your decision to buy something comes down to evaluating its value to you, comparing that with the price, and purchasing it if it is both more valuable to you than the price and relatively better than the alternatives, then you're not acting morally. Inputs to products, like slavery, child labour, undemocratic governments right through to irresponsible use of antibiotics, are all obscured under this basis. In order to get pricing to have an impact on how products are made and inputs are chosen, the consumer needs to be informed. But the need for the consumer to be informed is in direct opposition to the interests of the producer: the producer wants to remove reasons for the consumer to reject the product. And this runs right along the supply chain to raw materials. If the consumer doesn't have information on how something is produced, and no alternatives are available with more information, how can they make their purchasing decision affect the whole supply chain? And let's not forget how pleasant it is to be unknowingly complicit in illegal or immoral actions that benefit you by price; what you don't know doesn't make you feel guilty. You got the product cheaply, do you really want to know why it was so cheap? Consumer psychology is part of the problem too: relying solely on pricing for information lets people get away with murder, indirectly. Thus I think mandatory labelling throughout the supply chain is absolutely vital for moral capitalism. People need to know to what extent their purchasing decisions are indirectly funding oppression and harm elsewhere.

mkesper 10y ago

Can you please provide a link to that claim?

germanier 10y ago
I assume they referred to this outbreak but I'm not sure how non-organic food could have prevented that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...