This has been touched upon, in many ancillary ways, by the many thoughtful responses already up on this topic of the moral dilemma of Mr. Benavides’s wood, but I would like to reiterate the bewildering thicket of assumptions underlying the original question. (I’ll mention as a side note that the assumptions get to the heart of what seems to me to be the inherent misanthropy of a large portion of the modern environmental movement.)
As I said, many of these questions have been raised in various ways, but I’ll jump into the fray for fun. First, how are we to know that said offensive teak was the result of irresponsible Indonesian deforesting rather than a more legitimate process of sustainable resource stewardship? (I assume here, of course—with Locke—that most of nature is essentially worthless without human cultivation; I also assert that, as a matter of natural right, we have very little to say about the right of local Indonesians to exploit the land upon which they were born and improve their lot.)
And I suppose I would like to reiterate the chain (or lack thereof) of moral cause and effect here—the ordering that would lead to true (i.e., legitimate) guilt on the part of the purchaser of teak seems to assume all sorts of things. To list a few: that the eventual suffering and species destruction caused by possible future exacerbated global warming outweighs the benefits to the local Indonesians gained by their logging of teak—and in this same vein, that maximizing humanity’s comfort and minimizing its physical or bodily harm outweighs all other considerations; that teak, in a rainforest halfway across the world, somehow has an inherent worth (or is it that the rainforest as a whole has an inherent worth? or that the preservation of said rainforest will prevent the ultimate destruction of the planetary ecosystem and thus result in less human misery and death in the distant future?).
In other words, I’m trying to get at the question of morality, as such, in the original post. Why is there anything inherently immoral about forest destruction? Does this earth of ours really have any moral worth, by itself, were the only moral (i.e., rational) species on it to disappear? In other words, what does it mean to speak of morality absent humanity? The blood diamond example might be easier, insofar as we can identify the killing of other rational creatures for DeBeers’ monetary gain as a bad thing (or is the real problem the fact that diamond mining takes place disproportionately in societies that have, as of yet, been unable to order themselves non-barbarically in a political sense? Would we have a problem of blood diamonds if most of the world’s stock was located in Utah?)
Finally, I’ll circle back around to the first paragraph of Mr. Benavides’s post. Is unintentional evil truly evil? Isn’t the very notion of evil caught up in intention and purposeful action? This recalls some of our questions from the panhandling bum discussion. It also recalls all of our need to revisit Plato, as he and Aristotle raised (and debated) this question of whether virtue is knowledge or wisdom in very sophisticated and smart ways a very long time ago.
Oh, and for a discussion of the transferability of the “taint of corruption,” we should all re-read Fletcher v. Peck, no? Ronald Coase might clarify some of the legal-economic problems present in many of the above posts as well.