Ethics (2/4): labor, environment, freedom

In the previous post for this series on ethics I looked generally at how activism is typically triggered by ethical failures, and then examined professional duty of care as an area of ethical responsibility and the types of activism it typically generates. Here I’ll look at some of the ethical issues associated with the production of products and architecture. In these cases the artifacts don’t fail in terms of safety or function, but they raise other ethical concerns. In this post I’ll briefly cover labor, the environment and consumer freedom. what is ethical treatment of workers? (image courtesy of The North South Project ) Labor, ethics and products In the first area, labor, many of us may have heard about cases where expensive, designer or “name brand� items are produced in sweatshops or other unsavory conditions. Clothing and sports shoes probably come to mind. In addition, child labor has been implicated in production of rugs and cotton as illustra...