Misc Thoughts on Information, Action, and Moral Intention

One thing that I think is incredibly vital before criticizing something is to have a clear understanding of it.  On the other hand, we generally need to have opinions on things we won't have the opportunity to fully investigate.  There simply isn't enough time or, I suspect, even the ability, for one person to learn everything they need to know to have fully informed opinions on everything important in the world.  So the most any single individual can do is to try to balance the effort to listen and understand and the effort to speak and act as well as they can. 

I've often had the problem where I spend so much time trying to investigate things that I don't act, but I've still had instances where I act hastily without sufficient thought on whether I'm making a good choice.  Of course, to evaluate an action as good or evil requires a moral judgment, which cannot be based entirely on information of any kind but instead must take into account goals as well.  Information can only tell us whether an act might help us reach a particular goal, not whether the goal itself is a worthwhile one.  So two people who believe identical information to be true may still act on it differently because they have different end goals.  When we consider this fact, we can see that differences in beliefs are not necessarily due to differences in information, even if they can be.  This is one (though certainly not the only) reason that persuasion can be so difficult.  There's often an assumption of shared end goals and while that may often be true in general, there are a lot of specifics that matter to most of us that get overlooked in such an analysis.  And of course, it's still the case that some people may have wildly divergent end goals in mind.

Anyway, just some freeform thoughts I had.  They're not...super well-organized or detailed, but I thought I'd write them down regardless.

Chocolate and Fairtrade Musings

One of the things I collect is dark chocolate bars, which I keep in a large ziploc bag for whenever I am craving chocolate.  These things mostly seem to last quite a while.  A chocolate bar that I just finished said it was best by Oct 2017, but still tasted excellent.  Given how much chocolate I've collected and how infrequently I eat chocolate due to its caffeine content, I don't think I'm in any danger of running out for a while. 

Anyway, I was looking at the various packages with their assortment of labels, and was wondering what the different fairtrade labels meant.  I found a site that talks about a number of them here:

https://www.fairtradewinds.net/guide-fair-trade-labels/

This appears to be just a company that specializes in selling fairtrade items, so I'd like to find a more neutral sources that talk about the differences between these labels, but I do think it's a good starting point to gather info for additional searches.

One thing I was wondering was what sort of criticisms have been levelled at fairtrade organizations and what are some responses to them:  Here's a site that mentions and responds to some of the criticisms of fairtrade:

https://www.lowimpact.org/fair-trade-criticism/

I think there's some valid points made here, though I wouldn't say I agree with all the article's points.  Specifically, I would argue that there's a fundamental difference regarding ownership (public vs private) between what happened with enclosure and what's happened with bigger farms buying up the land of smaller farms, but I don't believe the end result of either has been in a positive direction overall, so I can see why such a comparison might be made even if I feel it misses an important distinction.