I s anyone intentionally immoral? At the very least, we justify ourselves before taking that next step into moral decay. But much of the time evil is accidental. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less evil.
I entered the Asian antique store on a whim. No sooner had the bell hanging over the door signalled my entrance than three large wooden busts of the famously hideous Buddhist saint Bodhidarma caught my eye. The craftsmanship evoking the misshapen features of this holy sage from within the natural curves and sinews of the tree trunks intrigued me. The asking price: less than twenty dollars a head, a ridiculously low sum for art made of Indonesian teak.
After lugging two of these precious noggins back to my apartment and displaying my savvy buy to an acquaintance well-versed in forest science, I was met with an awkward silence. Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, I was informed, a whopping eighty-five percent of which comes from the harvesting of rainforests for lumber and other forest products, such as my two sylvan skulls.
I realized that though I had bought these items third or fourth hand, I was now a part of a morally reprehensible consumer-driven cycle of forest destruction in South East Asia whose aura will forever linger about these objects. Had I known, I wouldn’t have bought them.
Now whether or not you believe that the disappearance of South East Asian rain forests is a problem, you have most likely accidentally consumed an object which is the output of a process you would normally oppose on moral grounds: the bride-to-be receiving an engagement ring set with blood diamonds, the vegetarian who realizes mid-mold that gelatin is made of ground-up bones. Although I didn’t participate in the morally reprehensible action, the property is morally tainted by virtue of its provenance. It is on similar grounds, that leather made from many endangered species is banned from importation.
The solution is not to exploit what could be a moral loophole (“I didn’t cut these trees down, so let me look for more of these cheap wooden heads”) as I have heard some vegetarian Buddhists do with fish that suffocate “by themselves” in nets. Nor would it be to destroy the property – that wouldn’t erase my purchase act or help the Indonesian rainforest.
Having entered into a stage of an immoral process, I really have the moral imperative – the opportunity – to atone for this action. In this case, an appropriate “offset” would be a contribution to a rainforest NGO and an explanation of the questionable provenance of the heads when I give them as a gift. This will lighten the smudge of immoral consumerism on my character and at the very least, leave my conscience clean to sin again.