$5 Shirt, $500 Moral Crisis
This industry produces up to 10% of global carbon emissions—more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
What is the fast fashion industry?
According to Peter Singer, if you can stop something bad from happening without giving up anything equally important, this is exactly what you’re supposed to do!
What is we ought to?
Buying clothes from fast fashion brands without thinking about the conditions they were made under is failing to use this properly.
What is reason?
In Rawls’ thought experiment, this “blindfold” prevents us from knowing if we will be rich consumers or low-wage garment workers.
What is the veil of ignorance?
The equivalent of one garbage truck of clothing is dumped or burned at this shocking rate.
What is every second?
Singer would argue that buying unnecessary fast fashion instead of helping those in need is morally similar to doing this.
What is allowing preventable suffering to continue?
If everyone followed the rule “It’s okay to buy clothes made through worker exploitation as long as it’s cheap,” Kant would say this test shows the rule cannot be morally accepted.
What is the Universality?
If you didn’t know whether you’d end up as a fast fashion factory worker working long hours in dark, packed conditions for little pay or a consumer who mindless scrolls shopping for the next best trend, Rawls says you would choose this principle about rights.
What is equal basic liberties for everyone?
Garment workers in some countries earn as little as this per day—often less than the cost of a single item they produce.
What is $3-$5 a day?
The point reached when the expenses to buy sustainable clothing inflict an equal amount of suffering to the good brought by avoiding the fast fashion industry.
What is marginal utility?
Even if fast fashion is affordable, purchasing it becomes morally wrong if motivation is only this rather than respect for moral duty.
What is personal desire/covenience.
You are designing global fashion rules behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing if you will be a CEO, a consumer, or a garment worker in a low-wage factory. You would make a system that protects the rights of which group the most.
What is the least advantaged?
Making a single cotton t-shirt can require this many liters of water—enough for one person to drink for years.
What is 2,700 liters of water?
The fact that fast fashion workers in places like Bangladesh or Cambodia are far away from consumers does not change our moral duty to help them.
What is distance has no moral relevance?
Fast fashion would reject a system that depends on exploiting workers because it violates this fundamental requirement of moral law that applies to all rational beings.
What is the Principle of Respect?
Rawls' would reject a fashion system where prices are raised, generating more profits for the sellers, without actually addressing the conditions of the workers.
What is the the difference principle?
This 2013 factory disaster in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 workers, exposing the dangers of unsafe garment production.
What is the Rana Plaza collapse.
You’re about to check out on a fast fashion website with $60 worth of trendy clothes you don’t need. According to Singer, the more ethical choice would be to do this instead.
What is use the money to reduce suffering?
You know a fast fashion brand likely relies on low wages and unsafe factories, but you buy from it anyway because it’s cheap and convenient. According to Immanuel Kant, this choice is morally flawed because it follows personal preference instead of this.
What is duty?
Rawls gives an alternative conception of justice in which what is ___ takes priority over what individual citizens take to be their good.
What is right?