1. Living alone and eating out for five meals a week, I cannot eat a head of lettuce before it goes bad. Is it more ethical to buy salad in a bag, thus increasing my ecological footprint and creating demand for imported and packaged produce, or to buy lettuce in heads and end up throwing away food on a regular basis?
2. In the summer, I close my curtains so that the sunlight doesn't warm my apartment. However, sometimes I need light to see what I'm doing. Is it better to open my curtains, thus causing my apartment to heat up and creating more work for the air conditioner, or to turn on a light, thus using electricity by having a light on in the middle of the day?
3. Sometimes I can't finish a library book by the due date, and the overdue fine amounts are painless to me. Does the fact that I am giving money to the library - a very worthy cause! - compensate sufficiently for the inconvenience I am causing to my fellow citizens by keeping books too long? Is there a threshold number of days/amount of money at which this changes?
4. I have distributed computing software on my computer that is working to cure cancer. Does this justify the increased environmental footprint of leaving the computer on when I'm not using it? Is there a threshold in the balance between electricity demand and computing power where this changes?
5. I've injured my foot slightly. It's basically the minimum injury that would cause me to take care of it and attend to it - any less injury and I would be blithely ignoring it. However, the injury hasn't done much damage to my pace - I'm still passing the majority of the able-bodied people I'm sharing the sidewalk with. The only visible manifestations of my injury are a slight limp and the fact that I'm wearing runners instead of heels. However, I do need to take care of my foot so it doesn't get worse. Does this make me more entitled to a seat on the subway than the average able-bodied person?
2 comments:
I don't know about the other dilemmas, but I can solve the curtains vs lights one for you. Keeping the curtains closed and the lights on uses less energy, unless you have incredibly powerful lights. The rule of thumb is that lights use less energy unless they're so powerful that they noticeably heat up the room.
I think for #4 that the chance of finding a cure for cancer, however remote, and the benefit that would provide to society far outweighs the relatively tiny electrical demand of your computer and/or its effect on the environment.
And for #5, I think it does make you more entitled to the seat. Better to take the seat for a day or two and get your foot back to 100 percent than to injure it further and occupy the seat for a longer time, in my opinion.
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