After learning about how chicken farmers are treated and forced to compete against one another to increase their earnings, I decided to take the plunge and only buy locally raised meat through a delivery service. We now eat vegetarian 3-4 nights a week as a result. I never considered myself a big animal rights person, but the more I learned, the more outraged (and tbh totally grossed out) I became.
I think most attempts to avoid personal material cooperation with evil, in a society fraught with inequality, injustice and the degradation of our world and our relationships, lead us to actually avoid taking the steps necessary to make amends or reparations. The goal should be to stop the evil in the first place, and to do so collectively with a shared and clearly defined outcome and benchmarks to measure progress.
It's hard work, for instance, to volunteer for a local organization committed to an outcome of drastically decreasing CO2 emissions. First, your goal may be eliminating a local coal plant that causes asthma, which you work on for years. Then you might set your organization's sights on stopping an oil pipeline, which you work on for years. Then you work together to help pass legislation to subsidize electric vehicles (all while working on other projects along the way). That's much harder work in many ways than buying an electric vehicle or attempting to monitor and pay back your individual CO2 output. But it's also less maddening, more impactful and more rewarding! Plus, it's done in community - which is its own good.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't choose good where we can. It's easy for me to eat mostly organic or avoid Driscolls berries or stop eating fish (seaspiracy documentary shoutout!). But I try to consciously spend less time & energy interrogating personal choices than working collectively for change.
One last thought: dwelling on personal material cooperation can actually separate us from the world in profound and hurtful ways. When we value purity over pursuit of justice, we can separate ourselves from communities who could be part of the change we want to see, or separate ourselves from collective work that is already happening.
I really struggle with this when it comes to my use of plastics. On one hand, I think the amount of plastic we use is outrageous. I have basically stopped crocheting with acrylic yarn for that reason and now rely mostly on cotton and wool. I frequently refuse to buy clothes that I like the look of because they are made of a high percentage of non-biodegradable fibers. But there are some kinds of clothing that aren't generally made with natural fibers, and I usually have to cave and get the non-biodegradable versions. And it's that way for so many other things--butter substitutes, toothpaste, hair brushes--I know that some of these things could easily be packaged without plastic but just aren't. It's outside my control. I have basically had to decide that I'll avoid plastics as much as I can, but my finances are very limited, and I've got to be content with doing what I think is my best, given the circumstances.
I wonder to some extent if the kind of choice one makes between vaccine/ no vaccine on these grounds is in some ways a "losing choice". All of the main companies making these vaccines are unlikely to be headed by people with the same ethical systems that Catholics have, and it is their system, not ours, which holds this power. We aren't influential enough to begin with, and haven't been for decades, for whatever reason.
The answer to cooperation to me thus depends on the extent to which one is involved. Would I take the vaccine? Sure (once I give birth since I'm currently pregnant), especially since there are not available alternatives in the market right now, but would I use the cell lines if I were a research scientist? I probably wouldn't.
After learning about how chicken farmers are treated and forced to compete against one another to increase their earnings, I decided to take the plunge and only buy locally raised meat through a delivery service. We now eat vegetarian 3-4 nights a week as a result. I never considered myself a big animal rights person, but the more I learned, the more outraged (and tbh totally grossed out) I became.
I think most attempts to avoid personal material cooperation with evil, in a society fraught with inequality, injustice and the degradation of our world and our relationships, lead us to actually avoid taking the steps necessary to make amends or reparations. The goal should be to stop the evil in the first place, and to do so collectively with a shared and clearly defined outcome and benchmarks to measure progress.
It's hard work, for instance, to volunteer for a local organization committed to an outcome of drastically decreasing CO2 emissions. First, your goal may be eliminating a local coal plant that causes asthma, which you work on for years. Then you might set your organization's sights on stopping an oil pipeline, which you work on for years. Then you work together to help pass legislation to subsidize electric vehicles (all while working on other projects along the way). That's much harder work in many ways than buying an electric vehicle or attempting to monitor and pay back your individual CO2 output. But it's also less maddening, more impactful and more rewarding! Plus, it's done in community - which is its own good.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't choose good where we can. It's easy for me to eat mostly organic or avoid Driscolls berries or stop eating fish (seaspiracy documentary shoutout!). But I try to consciously spend less time & energy interrogating personal choices than working collectively for change.
One last thought: dwelling on personal material cooperation can actually separate us from the world in profound and hurtful ways. When we value purity over pursuit of justice, we can separate ourselves from communities who could be part of the change we want to see, or separate ourselves from collective work that is already happening.
I really struggle with this when it comes to my use of plastics. On one hand, I think the amount of plastic we use is outrageous. I have basically stopped crocheting with acrylic yarn for that reason and now rely mostly on cotton and wool. I frequently refuse to buy clothes that I like the look of because they are made of a high percentage of non-biodegradable fibers. But there are some kinds of clothing that aren't generally made with natural fibers, and I usually have to cave and get the non-biodegradable versions. And it's that way for so many other things--butter substitutes, toothpaste, hair brushes--I know that some of these things could easily be packaged without plastic but just aren't. It's outside my control. I have basically had to decide that I'll avoid plastics as much as I can, but my finances are very limited, and I've got to be content with doing what I think is my best, given the circumstances.
I wonder to some extent if the kind of choice one makes between vaccine/ no vaccine on these grounds is in some ways a "losing choice". All of the main companies making these vaccines are unlikely to be headed by people with the same ethical systems that Catholics have, and it is their system, not ours, which holds this power. We aren't influential enough to begin with, and haven't been for decades, for whatever reason.
The answer to cooperation to me thus depends on the extent to which one is involved. Would I take the vaccine? Sure (once I give birth since I'm currently pregnant), especially since there are not available alternatives in the market right now, but would I use the cell lines if I were a research scientist? I probably wouldn't.