Hi @Joyce, welcome to the community.
As you suggest there is a lot of complexity. The prior discussion reflects various concerns. I wonder if to go forward it’s important to understand which ethical considerations have the greatest interest?
The community is a great place to share ideas and observations.
It would be impossible to get much agreement on which set of ethics to use. The Choice Community and subscribers are by no means homogenous. For example, on environmental issues some would say ignoring environmental consequences is unethical and others not - or that the problem is illusory so there is no question of ethics.
Also it would be impossible to measure which would leave making qualitative judgements. These would be based on limited evidence that could be disputed. As Choice could hardly travel the world inspecting factories (or gathering other data first hand) if some other party supplying data got it wrong or if a vendor felt particularly aggrieved there could be court cases.
Does Choice cover all aspects of products all members would like? Disability accessibility? Safety? All products of that type? No. But we appreciate what is covered.
Choice’s other assessments have evolved. Ethical assess should be no different.
Start somewhere. Consider ethical issues relevant to each product. Build an approach from there.
E.g. Brushcutter - fuel efficiency and air pollution; electric kettle - can it be repaired (I got twice the life out of my last one); toaster air pollution (yes, this is an issue!).
Reuse, up cycling, recycling, down cycling incorporated?
Refer to other sources of information with a weblink - e.g.company sustainability record.
Choice from Matt’s intro to rating laundry detergents.
Is defining what is ethical open for discussion?
I noted that the ‘Shop Ethical’ App asks users to select what issues or concerns they have for certain product groups. The App offers to direct consumers to suppliers or products that most satisfy the concerns each user has selected.
From that it is apparent ‘Shop Ethical’ recognises not all ethically motivated consumers share similar needs or views.
It is also evident that the issues or concerns ‘Shop Ethical’ users can select from are limited to those ‘Shop Ethical’ has nominated.
What if there are ethical considerations that are important that are not included?
What if there are ethical considerations that conflict with your individual or group needs?
It may be difficult to reliably score all products in a comparative review. Hopefully Choice will act cautiously to ensure that consumers understand why particular products receive different assessments.
It’s hard to avoid. There is also the question of the mechanism of assessing the product.
In the Choice laundry detergent report that started this thread the process was puzzling to me.
Shop Ethical doesn’t rate products individually only the company that makes them. So all the laundry products from (say) Aldi are rated the same based on the company record not its products. If you look at the details for Aldi they are rated on animal welfare, ethical fashions and other categories. Some might actually be connected to laundry products (such as animal testing) but no such connection is made. Some clearly have nothing to do with laundry.
If you intend to boycott companies for bad behaviour then I can see how you might skip Aldi detergent if they use sweatshop labour for making garments. If you intend to avoid unethical products specifically then how does this rating inform you?
However the cleaning products segment of Shop Ethical says you (ie the buyer) ought to pay attention to the ingredients which tell you about the hazard of that product. Hazard seems to be multifaceted, so we have personal and environmental hazards lumped together. They do not rate or list the ingredients for each product and go on to say that often the ingredients are not available. So what you should do is not what they do. They don’t say whether the hazard ought to be part of your ethical rating or the two are quite separate, it appears that it is not part of theirs.
If you consider selling hazardous products to be unethical what do you make of this?
This is just a quick peek into one organisation that generates ethical ratings. I suspect there are a slew of other conceptual and practical problems with this quest.
As @mark_m points out (how do I I quote in replies?!) I think you can categorise broad types of concerns, like you can economic concerns or product quality preferences. This reflects the reality of ethical interests varying among people - my friend may be more interested in human rights abuses in the supply chain while I may place more priority on sustainability. Then you can begin to make statements about products within those categories based on what information is available. The difficulty comes when you try to aggregate these because you are weighting in a way that some people may not agree with.
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I have found that to be device dependent. It works so simply on PC browsers but much less so on phones…
One needs to take care using such information as it is worth noting…
Note: Ratings are based on company record, including parent companies. They are not a comment on the product itself.
The milk product itself could be ethically produced, but the company is assessed by Shop Ethical as being unethical due to its activities somewhere in the world.
More information on the rating and assessment limitations can be found here…
Um-mmm, the choice to purchase an ethically produced product from an unethical supplier. 
P.S.
What might be of some interest.
If not a gold standard look to any other business and consider their history including share holder interests.
An example is a multinational takes over a highly ethical local co-op which continues to produces ethical products after the acquisition. The product and subsidiary is still ethical, even though an ethical rating website thinks something in the parent company isn’t (including another subsidiary under the umbrella company somewhere in the world).
The ratings and assessment are also only based on information publically available through the company or others, rather than independent auditing of each product/company. This is a major limitation of such ratings and may give false negatives and false positives.
The milk product itself could be ethically produced, but the company is assessed by Shop Ethical as being unethical due to its activities somewhere in the world.
Actually, the Shop Ethical ratings for products always take the behaviour and ethics of the parent company, and it’s parent company, and it’s parent company… into account. When you use the website or app, this becomes evident.
Edit - I realize on re-reading your comment, that you’re implying the same, but that this may be a bad thing in the sense that if the product is ethically produced, it will get downgraded due an unethical parent company. But given that the parent company is ultimately where your consumer dollars will end up, I would say this is the correct outcome.
The ratings and assessment are also only based on information publically available through the company or others, rather than independent auditing of each product/company. This is a major limitation of such ratings and may give false negatives and false positives.
True. But it’s more information than we had before the Shop Ethical database was created.
I recently contacted them to ask about some additional companies that they did not have ratings for. They declined to rate them on account of them being smaller, private, foreign companies whose information was not available - a good response.
So they’re trying to do the right thing. And it’s a lot more informative to have what details we know, collated on a website like this, than if we had to research every company ourselves. On aggregate, this is clearly a win for the consumer… caveats aside.
That the ratings may not be reliable is worth considering.
Milk is a great example, because there are so many different options.
Buying a product produced ethically by the subsidiary of a not so ethical parent company?
No need to judge. It’s a choice for each consumer including any decision accepting the recommendations and advice of the RSPCA, the UN, Shop Ethical or of an Ethical Super Fund.
Perhaps buying ethical is not currently assured? In the interim consumers need to start somewhere, any guidance is welcome.
P.S.
My personal view is all commercial arrangements and pricing should be transparent. From farm gate to register. Ethically traceable and openly competitive at every step in the supply chain. No secret deals. Of course that might take government to a different place too!
Yes, I’m a little off topic if we need to move the latest (5) points of discussion.
No necessarily. These rating organisations favour small independent private companies who do not do any public reporting over the larger corporate public companies which are required to do annual reporting. This assumes that the smaller independent companies are potentially more ethical than larger conglomerates. This is unlikely to be the case and this is supported by historical evidence where many smaller companies will take greater commercial risks to compete in the market place. These risks include accepting higher social, environmental or financial risks through the carrying out of their activities.
It is wrong that rating organisations favour favour small independent private companies, well it depends where one fits within the market place. If one owns a favour small independent private companies, then they will be appreciative of this bias. Larger conglomerates it possibly won’t concern as their have dominant positions within the marketplace and the ratings won’t impact significantly on their businesses. Having some information is better than none, but one shouldn’t necessarily hand their hat on the information when comparing between companies.
I moved the discussion on ethical companies to this existing ethical topic.
How so? It assumes nothing, so those companies are not addressed. That seems reasonable and fair to all.
Since the rating companies do not have information and thus publish none, how is that favouritism? Would you suggest the only ‘level playing field’ would be deleting the report if all were not included, and all under the same T&C requirements for assessments?
Information is power in these days. I for one will take all I can get, and I for one will determine what it means or doesn’t mean (to me), aided by such organisations as Choice, and ethical ‘rating’ companies, and some others, as imperfect as it might be.
It is possibly both a bias and/or favouritism. Favouritism because they actively support buy local campaigns…which favours local, independent and private businesses.
Many of the rating websites are biased towards those business which do not have to publicly report information about their practices. This creates a indirect favouritism away from large conglomerates to independent privately made products.
They also don’t report all the ethical information about a particular product. An example with milk is bobby calves. If such practices which are seen as unethical by some were included, it is possible that all dairy (and many other products) would fall into the category of being unethical as there could potentially be a farmer supplying milk to every milk producer which carries out ‘unethical’ practices.
Shop ethical acknowledges their rating system is simple and doesn’t cover all known aspects associated with a product being ethical. For dairy and ‘bobbie calves’, their suggestion is to avoid dairy and only buy non-dairy alternatives. If one follow’s this advice, it would cripple the Australian dairy industry and also punish those limited number of dairy producers which do the right thing.
Although probably not intentional bias, and the bias would be from omission. Favouritism? We may disagree since I think not.
What then would be your approach to supporting the most ethical companies and products, if not using the information available while also accepting it is flawed in some ways?
Any information is as good as the original source. While ethical ratings are interesting, along with social or environmental ratings, one must consider them whilst also understanding the limitations of the data used.
I am not saying that the ratings are valueless, just one has to understand the context which they were derived and they may be an overly simplistic approach to determining a particular value for a business.
If one looks at say ethical investments, their analysts spend considerable time interrogating publicly available information as well as information directly sourced from individual businesses before making any decision. Their system isn’t fail safe, but better than simplistic rating systems. If one wants to shop ethically, it may not be possible to do so with a high level of confidence. It is likely that many purchase products based on a product rating system or where a company hasn’t being rated thinking they are doing the right thing. This may give greater confidence in a product which is unfounded.
I don’t use rating systems but purchase Australian where I can. I have the confidence that products produced in Australia are governed by our laws and codes and based on this, it is unlikely that products are at the ‘unethical end’ (or with high environmental or social impacts) of the spectrum.
