I am not perfect, no one is, but it is worse to blindly accept or ignore these problems. It's not about trying to take a moral high ground, it's the acknowledgement of reality. Does an iPhone need/absolutely require slavery or child labor? Does anything?
100% agree. And I apologize for insinuating that you were trying to grab the high ground. That was probably a cheap shot.
The larger point is that it's easy to judge the past and make sweeping condemnations. I see that in wanting to condemn the West due to it's past. But surely people will condemn us as well for things we know are wrong, but we do anyway. At least I keep doing them. I like my iPhone. I like cheap electronics. I like affordable clothing. And behind all of that is some pretty egregious stuff. Where does that leave me in history?
Let them condemn us, they will likely be absolutely right. Not condemning actions of now or of the past, because we don't want to also be judged for our actions/inaction is basically averting your eyes to try to escape your own responsibility.
You would probably fit in as "feckless cog" within consumerist capitalist machine, a machine that rarely really care about human rights. Relying on the individual consumer to police giant national/multi-national corporations is an unfair and unrealistic burden. Conditioning consumers to believe that iPhones, cheap electronics and cheap clothing require exploitative practices is another shady tactic to maintain an inequitable/unfair wealth/class structure. The $1200 smartphone is built next to the $200 smartphone, the $50 shirt is sewn next to the $5 shirt, chip manufacturing is highly automated, and if cutthroat pricing wasn't "required" and there was teeth behind anti-exploitative regulations, companies might care about auditing their supply chains.
